Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Illustrated)

"This is one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s about a young orphaned girl who is very unhappy because she lives with cousins who are mistreating her. It’s really interested in the intensity of her perspective, we’re always with her. Its subtitle in the original Victorian version states that it’s an autobiography, and a lot of Victorians thought that the only way that this could have been written is that it was actually a memoir. They thought that a young woman had actually been an orphan and then actually gone to live in an orphanage and then actually become a governess. I think that speaks to how real the story feels. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The family sends her to a terrible school, where she’s really unhappy. She grows up there and goes off to be a governess for a Mr. Rochester. They have this really beautiful, really strange, really unexpected romance that plays a lot with power and who’s in charge—by the end of the book, it’s Jane. It’s a real feminist awakening. It’s really great. I think the Brontës had no patience for a Jane Austen plot that’s simply ‘meet a nice man and marry a nice man.’ Mr. Rochester is not a nice man. Not to spoil it too much, but she only ends up with him because he’s been burnt in a horrible attack by his first wife, and Jane comes back to take care of him. By the time the novel ends, he can’t see. Jane’s going to be his eyes and is clearly going to be in charge of everything. It also feels radical to take one woman’s perspective so seriously. Jane’s assertions of independence and her sense of self make this book irresistible. It’s a great gift for a twelve-year-old. Growing up, it felt really relevant for that. This one is amazing. It was illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, a German Jewish artist. He drew anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler cartoons, so he had to flee Germany with his family in the 1930s and start over again in New York. There wasn’t the same tradition of political satire here. His work was much more Expressionist, much harsher, and it just didn’t fit. It took him a really long time to settle in. In 1942, he was commissioned to illustrate Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights . He had never been to England, and he had never read the Brontës before, but he completely occupied Jane’s perspective. He took this young person’s feelings every bit as seriously as Brontë did. There’s a famous scene early on in the novel where Jane is locked in this red room. Eichenberg did this illustration where the whole room is shaped around her face, and her face is twisting towards the front of the room in a way that doesn’t anatomically make sense. It all feels like that. I love how in love he was with her and how seriously he took her."