Jane Eyre
“Life appears to me to be too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.” – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte.
I have that quote hanging on my wall, if that gives you any indicator as to the amount of love that I have for this book.
It was my favourite book as a teenager. As great as the other books I’ve written about are, I read them as a child. I read this while I was feeling all the struggles of being a teenage girl.
I read this while on a wet and cold camping holiday. My mum suggested I buy a couple of new books to read. I moaned and sighed at her like we all do before realising that our mothers actually speak a fair amount of sense. So off I toddled into York city centre to make my purchases.
Jane Eyre for 99p? Please and thank you, The Works!
I sat myself down on my pathetically deflated air mattress and began to read.
And I know it sounds cliché, but I just fell in love. Jane is sensible and practical, unattractive and very aware of it, yet the love that she and Mr Rochester share is so meaningful and deep that it doesn’t even matter.
She’s a shy eighteen year old who leaves her post teaching at a school for ‘badly – behaved little girls’ (where she grew up after her physically abusive Aunt and cousins threw her out), to become a governess to a little French girl on Mr Rochester’s estate. The man himself is brooding and grumpy, with a dark past and a terrible secret (ain’t that always the way?) but Jane manages too steal his heart and the two become engaged. Until the deranged woman from the attic decides to make an appearance…
It most definitely deserves the title ‘classic’ and I know the different style of writing and language used may put some people off, but if you’re looking to expand your personal reading library and try something that everyone’s heard of, but lots of people haven’t read, then this book is definitely the one for you.