Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I have so many things to say about this book. Someone must have recommended it to me, or it must have been references in something I read that made it sound interesting, because when I picked up the book and read the blurb on the back cover, I thought: why would anyone read that!

This is what the back cover said: Jane Eyre is the story if its title character, a poor orphaned girl who comes to live with her aunt where she endures poor treatment from her aunt and cousins. Jane subsequently ships off to Lowood, a Christian boarding school where she endures more horrible conditions. After some time, life becomes more bearable at Lowood for Jane and she eventually finishes her coursework and spends a period of time as a teacher at the school. After leaving Lowood she comes into the employment of Mr. Rochester as a governess at Thornfield Hall. Jane Eyre is the story of one woman's struggle to overcome adversity and a classic love story.

It sounds depressing and boring, right? But it wasn't that bad. It was rather melodramatic. It was also hard for me to be sympathetic to this female character who just sort of accepts things the way they are, and almost revels in knowing that her station in life is rather low and who has no expectation or desire, really, to rise above it.

For those of you living in the dark (haha, good pun), we in San Diego had a massive power outage on Thursday. I figured I'd try reading by candlelight. People did it for a few hundred years, right? What a pain in the neck that is! Candlelight goes up, but you need the light to come down. It was a rather ridiculous balancing act between finding the right angle of the candle to light the page and the right angle of the page to not create a glare. And then there was the whole bit with the hot wax. I'm not sure how Shakespeare got any writing at all done if this is what he had to work with!

And one other thing: Why didn't Charlotte Bronte ever write the full name of the town/city/whatever?  Why was everything in ----shire?  Like we don't know this is a work of fiction!

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