Virginia Woolf in Brontë country: picking apart the genius in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a challenge to the imagination – even the great modernist didn’t find it easy. It’s fascinating to read about the difficulties and delights she encountered

Last week, I wrote about the imaginative stretch required of readers tackling Jane Eyre two centuries on from its publication. Since then – last week, that is – I’ve been comparing notes with Virginia Woolf. It turns out that she – about a century nearer to Charlotte Brontë than we are – was not feeling readily intimate with this fictional world either.

Writing in the Common Reader in 1916, Woolf also wrote of the mental knots we have to twist ourselves in in order to understand Charlotte Brontë:

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