Jane Eyre

"My next one is Jane Eyre . She was orphaned and sent to a very rich aunt, who had her own very selfish children. Jane Eyre was not the perfect child and she was sent to live in a girls’ school. She made one friend, but unfortunately the little girl died, so she had to toughen up. She grew up there and learned everything she needed to know about teaching. She was a very good artist, she played a little piano, she learned French. When she got older she became the governess for a little French girl who was the ward of a man who lived in a manor. They fell in love, but it turned out that he had a wife, who was insane and lived in the attic. So Jane Eyre ran away and found out she had an uncle who had left her a great deal of money. But she couldn’t get the man out of her mind, so she went back. She found out that after she left, the man’s wife had set the place on fire. The wife had died in the fire, and it had blinded him. They were still very much in love and they married. And they lived happily ever after. Jane Eyre came out of a very bad situation, but she was a very strong child because she had to be. They put her through a lot; they treated her very badly. She just kept looking forward. She had the idea that there must be something better. My older brother passed away when he was 21. A bunch of them had been swimming in the James River. You’re not supposed to go swimming there, and one of the girls got caught in a whirlpool. My brother was a lifeguard so he jumped in and got her out. But he got caught and pulled under and drowned. I had just turned 13. He said to me once, “There is no such thing as ‘why’. You can ask why till the cows come home, and you’ll never get an answer. You just have to wait for the ‘because’…” I danced as a career until the JRA got so bad it was the end. I remember thinking, “OK. Where is the ‘because’?” When I got very sick, I had a four-year-old. I had to move back near my mom so she could help out. One day I took my son to the park, and we were on a little choo-choo train. The train stopped because there was an animal sitting on the track that wouldn’t get off. I went to look, and it was a mother raccoon with her baby. You can figure out the rest… it’s called The Kissing Hand [Audrey’s first New York Times bestseller]. Yes, she took the little baby’s hand, and rubbed her nose in it, and he put his hand on his face. They do it so that he has his mother’s scent, so if she has to walk away, he can smell his mom and not be scared. If I had been dancing I wouldn’t have seen it. And millions of kids have been helped by it, so I guess I wasn’t supposed to dance. That was the “because”…"

"Of course, Charlotte Bronte loathed Jane Austen and thought she was far too genteel. This book was revolutionary because it insisted that not only could a heroine be small and poor and plain, but she could actually be worthy of respect because she had a mind, an intelligence that had been trained – and, unlike Austen’s heroines, she could do a job. I remember finding that quite electrifying when I read it because even in my generation (people who are now in their early 50s or late 40s), it was still not automatic that a woman would have a job and a career. Jane’s boldness, her self-confidence and her resilience remain deeply inspirational. Jane Eyre was also revolutionary in insisting that she be respected and that her moral values be accepted by someone of a higher social class. When he is exposed as a would-be bigamist, Mr Rochester offers her a life in Italy as his mistress. Although she is passionately in love with him, Jane rejects that because she feels it to be wrong and she wants to keep her flinty sense of what is right. Being the kind of fairy-tale it is, she finally wins. The very aunt who persecuted her for her stubbornness as a child leaves her a fortune. The novel is all about learning to see things for what they truly are: again, this is one of the things great novels insist we do. You fall in love with Jane long before Mr Rochester does!"

"Jane Eyre is not true Gothic, I don’t think. But it has elements of the Gothic in it. Brontë has a mad woman in the attic and hysterical laughing, and a servant drinking her bottle of port and saying, ‘You don’t need to worry about it,’ and the bed being set on fire, and all this terrible stuff that quite easily fits into the Gothic. But there’s more. The scene early on where Jane as a child is locked into the Red Room is proto-Freudian. She’s returned to the womb, and is born again when she’s released, but she’s born into a slightly different state of being. Her mind has been altered by visions of the ghost of her dead uncle. That scene shows impulses operating on the child’s brain in the same way that reading Gothic fiction would operate on someone. It plays with your perception and changes the way you see the world. It births Jane into this space where she’s able to think the unthinkable, and say the unsayable. She’s able to be brave. There’s another amazing scene towards the end, after her abortive marriage, after she’s found out who the mad woman in the attic is, after she has run away. She hears Rochester calling. It wasn’t until my third reading of the book that I realised Brontë had slipped the supernatural into Jane Eyre . It’s called the ‘mysterious summons’. She’s walking out in the rain and she hears him. He’s miles and miles away and she cannot have heard him, yet she does, and it’s the beginning of her returning to him. I think the book exemplifies the fact that you can write what is effectively a piece of realist fiction, but at the same time include enough of the Gothic feeling to turn it into something richer and stranger. I find that really exciting. You don’t have to go all out to write a Gothic novel. There’s elements of the Gothic feeling that can be used to enrich and to make slightly more strange and more seductive whatever you’re writing."

"I only read Jane Eyre for the first time a couple of years ago. I’m in my 50s now, at the stage where I’m thinking that I’d better get to reading all those books I told myself I’d get to ‘someday,’ before it’s too late. Jane Eyre was one of those books. I expected to enjoy it, but not to love it as much as I do. It isn’t really horror, but so what? It’s certainly Gothic. It’s full of darkness, and it does have some moments of real, striking horror. It’s about Jane Eyre, of course, a woman who comes of age into a world in which really the only way of maintaining any kind of independence is becoming a tutor for some rich person’s kid. So this is the path that she takes, and that’s how she meets Mr. Rochester – a rich, imposing man, apparently a widower, with a child he needs looked after. Jane is ferociously independent; she’s self-aware and sure of herself, and she can be pugilistic and stubborn. These are the very qualities she has been led to believe will make her unappealing to any potential marriage partners, which at the time was a much more serious consideration. But it turns out that Mr. Rochester finds this stuff intoxicating. He loves it. He is a typical Gothic romance hero: dark, brooding, mysterious. He goes off on secret trips, people are afraid of him, he’s particular about how he likes things done. Now this woman comes into his life who doesn’t care, who pushes back and challenges him, and he loves it. When she’s been living in this house for a while, she starts hearing weird sounds – wailing, shouting, sometimes someone walking around the hallways at night – spooky, ghostly sorts of sounds. Once, when she was a child, she was punished for her insolence by being locked in what was known as the Red Room. She was quite convinced that an entity haunted the room and that something horrible was going to happen to her. Now that she’s older and encountering a similar fear, the reader sees the echo across the years. [Spoiler alert] Finally, the reader learns what’s making the sounds: the mad woman in the attic. And I should say here, parenthetically, Jean Rhys wrote a great book called The Wide Sargasso Sea that tells the story of the imprisoned woman, highlighting the way the politics of race and money dictate where and to whom our sympathies tend to go. So it’s revealed that Rochester was married to this woman, but she went mad and now he’s forced to live in lonely isolation, prevented from continuing on with a normal life as long as she remains alive. It’s a strange thing, as a modern reader, to discover his predicament and realize the narrative expects you to sympathise with him. Jane Eyre certainly does. I can read the novel and understand the cultural mores of the times and of the social class that produced it, and I can accept it on that level. That’s something we have to do as readers engaging with literature across centuries and cultures. But it’s worth pointing out. Interestingly, this is yet another example of the return of the repressed. The woman in the attic is part of his past that he can’t shake off. So he locks her up, and has someone look after her and feed her, and every once in a while she’ll escape and try to set him on fire in the middle of the night. It’s so exciting. It’s occasionally funny, it’s occasionally horrifying. There’s a bizarre scene in the middle of the book where Rochester apparently leaves, and a fortune-teller from a local Romani camp comes in and is reading the fortunes of the people who live or work in the house. Jane doesn’t want to go see her, she’s not interested, but the woman insists. And you realise it’s Rochester in drag trying to get her to talk about him, woman to woman – what are you really thinking? My jaw dropped when I read that. It was so ridiculous and yet so delightful. It’s maybe my favourite part of the whole book. I love that Gothic fiction addresses psychological horror with a candy-coating set dressing that makes it so much fun to read. The form can address mental illness, childhood trauma, generational sin, all the things we’re trying to deny about ourselves and our own history and our own personalities. But at the same time, you get to put in so many fun things: castles and bats and spiders, setting people on fire in the night, and monsters slithering out of the river and devouring people. For me, it’s the best of both worlds. It’s everything that I love about horror all packaged up nicely. And when you go back to the original Gothic novels, those things are crazy : Vathek , The Castle of Otranto , The Monk … just bonkers. Gothic literature is so much fun, and it’s got meat on it, it’s got teeth. It’s got a lot to say about both society and our internal lives. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect expression of horror fiction."

"One of the rather sexist tags that’s been put on contemporary suspense fiction—much of it written by women and much of it read by women, though not all of it—is ‘domestic noir.’ That suggests it’s all about what happens in the home, or in a marriage. Jane Eyre is about a deep love that develops between two people who have very complicated backstories. There’s also this dark woman in the attic—the mad woman—and the threat that she poses to the home; the knowledge that that home is going to explode, and that nothing is straightforward, and that there are secrets, and there are lies. All of those things are components of this genre that some people today call ‘domestic noir’. Jane Eyre in some respects—not in every respect but in some respects—is the original domestic noir. I love the fact that it does all of those things and it unsettles and there’s a sense of building threat and building crisis in the book. But I also love the social commentary and the feminism. It’s my favourite book of all time. I’ve read it numerous times, but there’s one scene in it, which is sort of supernatural. Jane is considering marrying someone else and she hears Rochester’s voice calling her name. He’s in crisis, miles and miles away. She goes and finds him and there’s been this awful event. That scene, every time I read it or hear it, gives me goosebumps. I get goosebumps even just talking about it. There’s something about it, it is so profound and so powerful—perhaps because it’s a supernatural moment in an otherwise very grounded book. I just love that scene so much. For me, it’s the most powerful scene in the whole of English literature. It’s Victorian literature and would have originally been published in three volumes. So there are passages that are very discursive and there is quite a lot of long, slow dialogue where they debate things. Those elements might seem to detract from labelling it a page-turner. But it is one. It has all the ingredients that make a brilliant suspense book. You are deeply invested in this woman’s life and in how she’s going to get from A to B without being crushed or killed or just having a devastatingly bad time. Her spirit triumphs and you’re deeply involved in that process. And there’s this mysterious threat coming from inside the house, which is just genius: the mad woman bellowing in the attic. All the symbolism of that, I find really compelling: behind the buttoned up small Victorian woman who has to behave in a submissive way, there’s this subversive big, hairy, dark-skinned madwoman cooped up in the attic ready to burst out and set it all on fire. I love that. I read it out loud to my daughter when she was about 15 and it’s just an incredible book. I think Charlotte Brontë’s most accomplished book is Villette . It’s probably a better book, it’s tighter and more sophisticated in some ways. But there’s something about Jane Eyre that is just deeply emotionally compelling for me."

"I couldn’t resist this. Rochester proposes to Jane there, and then the next night it’s split in half by lightning. It’s a heavy-handed symbol but it’s still incredibly satisfying. It’s not even that the tree is struck down and killed, it’s split in half. The idea of marriage is that two people are going to become one, but here you know—because of the mad woman in the attic—that it’s one thing about to be split in two. Yes, because trees often do do that. A tree seems dead and then something grows out of it. It works very well in this instance."

"There has been a very interesting debate about Jane Eyre which comes through in the latest movie and also in the less-shown earlier movies. It is an idea which was hatched by post-1960s feminism , namely that the real heroine of Jane Eyre is not the plain little governess but the mad woman in the attic, Bertha Mason. No one ever calls her Bertha Rochester, even though she is married to the bad Edward Rochester. If you read the book that way, you can see the mad woman in the attic – who attacked Rochester and burns down his house, who is destructive and angry – to some extent as the other half of Jane Eyre, who is submissive, punishes herself and is obedient to the demands of her lords and masters. Bertha is the locked-up woman inside Miss Eyre. One of the reasons why I think this idea is so popular is because it ties in neatly with ideas about the id which are current at the moment. The new film makes Bertha Mason, who is described as a purple monster in the book, really very sexy and attractive. “One of the things about great fiction is that we never finish explaining it.” No, but she is there. When her brother comes back to interrupt the wedding between Jane Eyre and Rochester, and says that Rochester is still married to Bertha, then she becomes instrumental in changing the course of the novel. Rochester asks Jane to stay and be his mistress, and she runs away. This is the least likely part of the novel. She runs away across the moors, across virtually all of England, only to end up fainting on the doorstep of someone who turns out to be her cousin. The Brontës were never frightened of coincidence in their novels."

"Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte — they all left me with lasting memories. I thought the authors were talking about beings who had existed."

"Just after rereading "Jane Eyre," I was in England and visited the extraordinary Brontë parsonage"

"I owe my career, and a lot else besides, to Jane Eyre and Villette."

"I hadn't read "Jane Eyre" either, until she made me, and I'm glad I did, so I'll get to "Emma" eventually."

"Favorite character was Jane Eyre after I saw the first movie and before I read the book."

""Jane Eyre," last week. I hadn't read it in 45 years. If then. (I suspect CliffsNotes were involved.) I didn't even remember who was locked in the attic. I told my wife she had to read it."