English 300: "Jane Eyre"

Welcome to a little mini-series that I'm starting! It will only go on for this semester, and there will only be ten or so entries into this series. This series will be about each book that we had to read this semester. Just a few short thoughts on the story and whatnot.

What better way to start off this series about books than with Jane Eyre? 

I actually got this book for Christmas last year (2012), but I had never been able to read more than ten pages into it. I have to be in the right mood for "old" books, and I was never able to get in the mood to read about Jane. Now that I had to, though, I was able to finish it in just a few days (I would've finished it sooner if I'd had no other homework).

Jane Eyre was...iffy. It was a good story, don't get me wrong, but it just read like a really, really long morality tale. You know the type, from Victorian England: poor humble girl is so pious and righteous that she ends up winning big.

So, (spoiler alert?) that's how it was with Eyre. I predicted what would happen before it actually happened, and I wasn't disappointed. I knew she'd end up with Rochester, but something bad would have to happen first. There were too many suspicious things happening around Rochester's estate for anything to go smoothly for them.

I don't know if I'd read the book again, but I did enjoy it the first time through. It just seemed so long-winded. I really prefer Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to Charlotte's Jane Eyre. The villain is more pronounced, and I love the relationships between the Catherines and Heathcliff. (Also, is there not a better name than Heathcliff? So Britain-y.) 

Long story short, if you like romantic Victorian novels, you'll probably enjoy Jane Eyre. Although I'm not quite sure if it was billed as a romance, but there was way too much of the lovey stuff and the doubting in there for me to see it as any other sort of novel.