Six. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
1847, Everyman’s Library, 596 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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I must thank Lindsay Lohan for the introduction to Everyman’s Library. Bear with me.
Some years ago, I was watching a TV movie about the relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (Lindsay Lohan played Elizabeth Taylor. Now that part is settled.) At some point in the movie, they have decided to purchase, and live on, a large yacht, in order to avoid publicity. In order that he doesn’t start Welshly brooding on the ship, Taylor bought Burton a trunk full of books. These are all of the Everyman’s Library books, she said. Everyman’s Library? I said, and immediately shut off the movie, and went to inquire what this Everyman’s Library was.
And like all good things that come in a trunk, this was a treasure. Everyman’s Library is an edition of books, now published by Penguin/Random House, which have been deemed, I’m sure, by a battery of editors and scholars, to have been exceptional, classic, or important, in the world of literature and thought. The list has been changing over the years, and the books are still obtainable, if not still in print, so the full list comes to hundreds of books, but I have focused on what they refer to as the 100 Essentials. The structure of an Everyman’s Library book is consistent and useful — it begins with an introduction by a scholar, which sheds more light on the book you are about to read, and provides a different angle to look at it from. The introduction is followed by a timeline, that pits the author’s life against historical milestones and important works of art. This is followed by some additional bibliography regarding the author, book, or both. And following is the book itself. I am not averse in the craft of printing and publishing books, so I do not have the relevant technical terms to convey what the book looks and feels like, but the paper has a certain tint and weight, the ink has a certain tint, and the typography chosen is just so, that the book is much more pleasant to read than other books. It is also provided with a bookmark sewn into the spine, which should be a requirement in any book.
Considering how these lists are usually constructed, this was probably not the work of one person. A committee of people, all learned, decisive and strong of opinion, have probably spent many days on deciding which books should go into the 100 Essentials list, and primarily, which books should be left out. There may have been favorites, and subjective decisions, and petty quibbles, or there may have been strict, objective and scholarly decisions — but the fact of the matter is, while their contemporary Jane Austen has two books in the list, all three Brontë sisters get only one book — that is, only one of the sisters, Charlotte, gets a book in. As far as I’m concerned, this was a good decision — Jane Eyre is, in my opinion, by far the best of the output of all three sisters. And the useful introduction helps to frame just how much better it is, and by which standards.
Now, there are novels which have exceeded their status as novels by now. Jane Eyre is more than a novel at this point, in the same sense that a circle is much more than a work of art. I believe that everybody who loves books knows the plot of Jane Eyre, or at least the main idea, or at least a scene or two from the book — Mr. Rochester riding back home and slipping on a sheet of ice, and Jane Eyre helping him back on his horse when his ankle is sprained, would probably be the most famous scene there. It has been the basis of numerous plot constructions in future books, and other books have even been written based on the world that Jane Eyre occupies — one of them, “The Wide Sargasso Sea”, provides for a sort of a prequel, told from the point of view of Rochester’s first mad wife; another, “The Eyre Affair”, throws a parallel universe detective, literally, into the narrative. Now that there have been numerous film and TV adaptations of this book, I believe everybody has their own favorite Mr. Rochester to picture while reading the book (the correct answer here is William Hurt). And all of this makes it difficult to approach Jane Eyre as a work of fiction, a novel that is meant, primarily, to be entertained by. And re-reading it highlights some of its flaws —for example, there are some aspects of the book which reveal its age, some tropes that were probably demanded by the readers, such as Jane Eyre’s soliloquies or the men’s prolonged, prose-full, exclamations of love. For example, there is a deux ex machina plot twist close to the end — the machina has actually been lying there, in an unlit corner of the room, since the beginning of the book.
On the other hand, approaching this novel as a mere form of entertainment misses a lot of why it is important. Jane Eyre, the character, is a strong and resolute woman in an era in which the main trajectory of a female character in a novel was to find a suitable husband, quickly. She does not seek to be redeemed by marriage, although most of the other characters try very hard to stir her in that way. Religion is criticised as much as it is used as a redeeming concept in the characters’ lives, and some of the more difficult characters to sympathise with, happen to be men of the cloth. But Jane Eyre’s and Edward Rochester’s witty flirting is worth all of the flaws, and the way the book is constructed, with almost no dull parts, causes it to feel both entertaining and important throughout — and that is, in my opinion, what each of the 100 Essentials should feel like.
