Book #23
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane’s natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves?
This book has just surpassed Wuthering Heights in the My Favourite Book list of my mind. It's beautiful throughout, and deserves every single piece of praise it's received over the years. I almost think that by writing a review of the novel would be somehow belittling Brontë's obvious masterpiece, so I'll try my best to make this a fitting tribute.
It's certainly not an easy book to read, but it is one which will make you feel somewhat enlightened when reflecting upon it. This surprised me as I hold a general sort of contempt for romance novels and love stories, but this has to be one of the truest love stories ever written. There is so much more to it than just love and romance, though. Jane is the type of person who will continually do the right thing, rather than the thing she'd most like to do. You find yourself wondering why she enables herself to suffer so terribly, but soon realise that all of it had a purpose, which was to shape her into the person she was in the end.
Mr. Rochester was a favourite here too. He gave the novel a kind of Beauty and the Beast feel to it, with Jane being the innocent, loving, plain and ordinary girl, and Rochester being the dark, scarred, insanely flawed fiend.
I find a lot of classic novels to be quite linear, but this had so many twists, and I loved each of them! The mysteries within these pages were elegant and exciting.
I feel like I'm not reviewing this as properly as I could, I can't seem to get all of my thoughts and feelings about the book into proper sentences, but it is now definitely in my top five, and Jane now has the place of favourite heroine in my mind's eye.