I read Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca before Christmas and was going to review that, but I can’t do it justice until I first talk about its spiritual predecessor, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. So let’s do that. This post will be devoted to Jane Eyre, and the next post to Rebecca.

I read Jane Eyre maybe twenty years ago, but didn’t remember enough to really compare it to Rebecca, so I bought a cheap kindle copy after Christmas and read it again. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it well, here are the major plot points. Spoiler alert:

Jane Eyre is an orphan living with relatives who really don’t like her and treat her pretty badly. Eventually she blows up and tells her awful guardian what she really thinks of her, and shortly after the guardian sends her off to boarding school. At boarding school she suffers terribly at first, but over time gains an education and mentors who teach her patience and refinement and how to squeeze her large spirit into the confining role society has assigned her. She longs to see the world, but the best she can manage is a governess job at a country estate called Thornfield. As all estates do in gothic novels, Thornfield contains a rich and brooding master and a dark mystery. Jane and the master, Edward Rochester, fall in deep soulmate love and eventually agree to marry, but on their very wedding day the deep dark mystery is revealed. Rochester is already married–his first wife Bertha is a mad woman and he keeps her in a secret attic room. Jane’s clear duty is to leave–her good Christian morals and deep self respect won’t allow her to become a mere mistress. She leaves in the dead of night and eventually finds charity with a kind family many miles away, making fast friends with the two sisters and their brother, St. John, makes her the head of his parish’s school for girls. In an amazingly gothic turn of events, Jane inherits a large sum of money from an uncle and at the same time finds out that St. John and his lovely sisters are her cousins. Family and fortune at last, and without compromising her principles. But all is not peaceful yet. St. John has determined to be a missionary to foreign lands, and has decided that Jane, with her self-discipline and fortitude, would make the perfect missionary’s wife. They don’t love each other, but perhaps they can serve the Lord together. Jane is horrified at this prospect of a loveless marriage and convinced the hardships of missionary work would ruin her health, but she hardly knows how to resist such a righteous and determined man. At the crucial moment, when she is about to submit to St. John’s will, she hears a cry of the heart from her beloved Rochester and determines she must find out what has become of him. She finds that his large estate has burned down and Rochester has been maimed and blinded rescuing his servants and trying to rescue his mad wife from the fire. Rochester, now humbled and free to marry, joins with Jane as his equal and rescuer and they live happily ever after as husband and wife.

Jane is the main character of the story, obviously, but she’s also the narrator. This is her autobiography. This is Jane looking back on her life, reflecting on how it all came together and what it all means. She chooses these events in this way because the main theme of her life is something like “where is the balance between passion and self-discipline, between nature and society?” Jane never advocates total wildness or self-indulgence–she believes that’s what led to Bertha’s madness–but Jane eventually sees that total sacrifice, even for God, is equally terrible. St. John becomes positively inhuman and cruel in his pursuit of Christian perfection and is much more terrifying than Rochester at his passionate worst. Every good change in Jane’s life comes from breaking society’s mold, but just a little bit. Telling her guardian the truth is rewarded with education and a little independence, recklessly advertising her governess services gets her a new home, leaving that home and begging at doorsteps eventually leads to family and fortune, and running away from St. John’s holy plans brings Jane love and happiness.

This business with St. John is the real climax of the novel. In the most basic sense, Jane is choosing between romantic rivals, but the question is much bigger than that. St. John, in many ways, is all of society asking her to stop squawking about love and excitement and work ’til she drops. You know, like God wants. Rochester, then, is nature and grace, loving Jane for who God made her to be. Choosing Rochester, Jane is really choosing to be her natural self. She accepts marriage and motherhood, but only with a man she can lead and reason with, a man who now accepts and leans on her strength instead of forcing it to his own will. It’s a powerful choice she makes, even for a woman today but especially for a woman of her time.

Rebecca, which I’ll get to in the next post, has an entirely different heroine with an entirely different set of choices. I hear that back when it was published, some critics saw Rebecca as a second rate copy of Jane Eyre, but I think it’s a deep and tragic variation on the theme. But I’ll end there. Until next time . . .

Jane Eyre is truly a classic of Western literature, a wonderful book to read and an important one for understanding many other classic books. Its portrayal of Bertha is not kind toward mental illness and is a little bit racist, which can disturb sensitive readers, but it’s not worse than a lot of older literature. I give it 4 out of 5 Haunts for deep, fascinating characters and themes, beautiful setting, but slightly-too-convenient coincidences holding the plot together.