Jane Eyre originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is a novel
by English writer Charlotte Bront. It was published in 1847, under the pen
name “Currer Bell”.
Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and
experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood and her
love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In
its internalisation of the action—the focus is on the gradual unfolding of
Jane''s moral and spiritual sensibility, and all the events are coloured by a
heightened intensity that was previously the domain of poetry—Jane Eyre revolutionised
the art of fiction. Charlotte Bront has been called the “first historian of
the private consciousness” and the literary ancestor of writers, like Joyce and
Proust. The novel contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of
morality at its core, but is nonetheless a novel many consider ahead of its
time given the individualistic character of Jane and the novel''s exploration of
classism, sexuality, religion, and proto-feminism.
Jane Eyre may not be the first feminist novel, but it is certainly one of
the most enduring. There have been at least 20 movie and television versions of
Charlotte Bront’s gothic love story, even more than of Emma or Pride and
Prejudice.
There was no possibility of
taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless
shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner Mrs. Reed, when there was
no company, dined early the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre,
and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the
question.
I was glad of it: I never
liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the
coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart
saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness
of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and
Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined
on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her for the time
neither quarrelling nor crying looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed
from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of
keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could
discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to
acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and
sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she
really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy,
little children.”
“What does Bessie say I have
done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers
or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking
up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak
pleasantly, remain silent.”
A breakfast-room adjoined the
drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed
myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I
mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat crosslegged, like a
Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in
double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut
in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass,
protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals,
while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter
afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet
lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a
long and lamentable blast. I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British
Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and
yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not
pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl;
of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast
of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or
Naze, to the North Cape—
“Where
the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils
round the naked, melancholy isles
Of
farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours
in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Nor could I pass unnoticed the
suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla,
Iceland, Greenland, with “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn
regions of dreary space, —that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields
of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights
above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of
extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy,
like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s
brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages
connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to
the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat
stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through
bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
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