| Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Jane Austen wrote the romantic stories. Dickens did the rags-to-riches heartwarmers. Mary Shelley added the supernatural, haunting yet human Frankenstein. Bronte's Jane Eyre pulls elements from all of these works and ends up... something entirely, refreshingly different. What's really great about this book is that it is so rich. The plot moves and moves well, making it an enjoyable and propelling read. While it is mostly romantic-love interest based, it is not as sappy or predictable as, say, Pride and Prejudice. Jane's journey to marital bliss is a bit more pock-marked -- and even drawn into question -- than in most romantic comedies. I enjoyed the fact that, indeed, she questions whether she even wants to marry or should marry -- and refuses to marry, not once but twice, because doing so would compromise who she is. Which brings me to the real reason I like this book and consider it a cut above most. Jane herself is so interesting. She is a very complex character, and the author has clearly taken much time and energy to draw in fine detail the map of her psychosis. This book is re-readable because there is so much to contemplate and reflect on within this finely drawn character. Is she afraid of happiness? Tied to duty? Was it right, or misguided, to leave Mr. Rochester? If it was right, were here intentions right? Was it right to return to him? What changes that allows her to refuse St. John, and return to Rochester? I think Ms. Bronte did us a great favor with this book. She took familiar ground and tweaked it -- taking the romantic comedy formula, so mastered by Austen and Thackeray, in which the tension entirely surrounds marriage, the meeting and mating of two people, and the point of the novel is resolved when the marriage(s) occur. Working within that framework, Bronte brings us a character novel -- in which the tension is only resolved once the character has found a way to be fully who she is, and thus happy and fulfilled. Surely this work broke ground for some of my very favorite works, in which plot becomes a somewhat secondary consideration and the eccentricities of character, the stuff of humans, becomes the focus and point of the novel. |