Life Lessons

"No novel ever shared a point of view more effectively than Jane Eyre. From the minute the child Jane is unfairly locked in the Red Room by her vicious aunt, Charlotte Brontë gets us on her side. We see what she sees; we fall in love with ugly, rude Mr Rochester as she does. The voice of “Jane Eyre” has no distance. It is raw, persuasive, exhilarating, just as it was in 1847.
     Brontë had a short, hard life, dying at 38 of sickness in pregnancy, having already lost all five of her siblings, including the writers Anne and Emily. Her life was ruled by her father Patrick, vicar of Haworth. Her biographer, Mrs Gaskell, said he had a 'strong, passionate, Irish nature...compressed down with resolute stoicism.' The same could be said of his daughter’s writing. The substance of Jane Eyre is a gothic fairy tale: an orphan, a powerful man, his mad wife, all laced with reversals of fortune. Yet the tone is flattened with Yorkshire terseness. 'I have no wish,' Jane tells Rochester, 'to talk nonsense.'"
— Bee Wilson, Intellgent Life
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