What Book to Read?

My book group decided, after some discussion, to read – or more accurately for most to re-read – Jane Eyre. We were uncertain whether there is anything interesting we could say about a book that nearly everyone has read, about which so much has been written and which has been adapted so often for film and TV.

I first read Jane Eyre when I was about ten, and was caught up in her unhappy childhood and struggles at the detestable Lowood School. I now know Bronte was working out her anger and frustration at her own family’s experience at Cowan Bridge School for clergymen’s daughters, where her elder sisters Maria and Eliza both died of consumption. Helen Burns, in Jane Eyre, was based on Maria. ‘She was real enough’, wrote Charlotte later. ‘I have exaggerated nothing there’.  I enjoyed the happy ending – ‘Reader, I married him’ – but didn’t think much about the nature of the relationship between Jane and Rochester.

Later I read about the ‘romance formula’ for stories, whereby a woman and man meet, are attracted to each other, but have to overcome obstacles to a successful relationship. I realised that it was not so much that Bronte’s book fitted the formula – it was crucial in creating it. What better obstacle than a mad wife in the attic? Subsequent romance writers acknowledge their debt to Bronte. Georgette Heyer, for example, who herself inspired many other romance writers, admired Mr Rochester.  ‘Charlotte knew, perhaps instinctively, how to create a hero who would appeal to women throughout the ages, and to her must all succeeding romantic novelists acknowledge their indebtedness,’ she wrote.  ‘For Mr Rochester was the first, and the Nonpareil, of his type.  He is the rugged and dominant male, who can yet be handled by quite an ordinary female: as it might be, ‘oneself’.’  The formula, at its best, also requires the man and the woman to achieve a degree of equality. ‘It is my spirit that addresses your spirit … just as if we stood at God’s feet, equal, – as we are!’ cries Jane.  Much of the story of Jane Eyre is about how this equality is achieved.

It took me even longer to realise that this is also a story about sexual passion. There is no direct statement about anything sexual in the book, but it is there all the same.  Why does Rochester court Jane? Because he fancies her. While they are engaged, Jane has to find ways of keeping Rochester at a physical distance.  And once it is revealed that he has a wife still living, Jane finds it physically difficult to reject his plea that she become his mistress: ‘physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace’, though of course she does resist.  Rochester clearly thinks of forcing the issue, but realises he would lose her if he did. ‘Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself the possessor of its clay dwelling place’.  Jane runs away as much because she fears she can’t resist him as because she has been compromised by him.

This is a novel I have grown up with, and to me it is endlessly interesting, as I find something new and different every time I read it. I think we should have a good discussion.

Some of the group have also elected to read Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of Rochester’s ‘mad wife’, Bertha Mason in Bronte’s book, Antoinette Cosway, renamed Bertha by Rochester (who is never himself named) in Rhys’s. This book turns Bertha from a menacing obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s romance into a real person with a tragic history. More scope for discussion.

There is a wealth of information about Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre; you could start here. I’ve elaborated some of my ideas about romance fiction in an earlier post. And you can find out more about Jean Rhys – whose own life was pretty tragic – here.