I read about a third of the book yesterday, and realized that my initial first impression from the first few pages was totally wrong. A lot happens in a very short period of time to poor Jane Eyre, an orphaned child living with an aunt who never wanted her, taunted and bullied by all the children around her, and punished by the adults every time she tries to fight back. If you hated the Dursleys, then these people will make your blood boil. They lock her in rooms where dead men were once laid to rest, flog her for the most trivial of offenses, and generally make her life hell. Jane finally sees a glimmer of hope when her aunt decides to send her off to a boarding school, but this hope is immediately dashed when she informs the headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst, that Jane is a disobedient liar. The man is a devout Christian, and immediately assumes that Jane is a child influenced by demonic forces, destined for hell. I’m not sure things could get much worse for Jane.

Oh but they do. She arrives at Lowood School, and things are actually looking up for a while. The winter is bitterly cold, and the food is terrible and scarce, but at least she’s making friends. Mr. Brocklehurst’s declaration that Jane is a demonic influence and shouldn’t be consorted with by any of the other girls or teachers is shut down by the wonderful superintendent, Miss Temple, the first adult to treat Jane with true kindness. She meets a good friend, Helen Burns, an old soul with great insight into life and the world. Spring comes and the bitter cold no longer thrashes them. But a long winter with little food has left them all vulnerable. A wave of typhoid crashes through the school and leaves most of the children bedridden and kills off her best friend of only a few months. It really feels like this was just a setup to leave poor Jane even worse off than before. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more miserable character.

Jane does have an admirable strength to her though. She’s always standing up to the bullies in her life. She stands up to the boy who teases her and hits her, and is punished by her aunt. Then she gives her aunt a piece of her mind, calling her a liar for deceiving Mr. Brocklehurst. Then she’s able to stand against those accusations at school with the help of Helen and Ms. Temple. Life is constantly kicking Jane down, and though it leaves her bitter, and revenge oriented, it never really takes her spirit away completely. I’m hoping Jane gets to turn her luck around at some point and live a good life.

Charlotte Bronte’s style is pretty weird though. I mean even compared to other classics, this book is strange. She’s really, really fond of colons and semicolons. Sometimes she’ll string together sentences as follows: she’ll have a giant string of connected clauses that lead from one statement to the next, to the next, sometimes covering several lines, linking them all together like so: Statement, colon, statement, colon, statement, colon, etc. It gets really confusing to follow sometimes. She also likes to directly address the reader every once in a while, which modern authors almost never do. The idea nowadays is to let the story do the talking for you, and to let the reader figure it out themselves, but Bronte doesn’t seem to agree with that. It’ll come between chapters, acts, or sometimes even just randomly.

“Do these passages please you, dear reader? Should you like the story to end on this warmest of moments for poor Jane Eyre? Well since you are more than likely a common reader, and therefore very poorly and stupid, I shall not give you the benefit of the doubt and tell you now that everything will only get worse!”

I’m just kidding of course, but that’s kinda how it feels to me whenever it happens. Besides that, great book so far. I just want everything to turn out okay for Jane Eyre, but somehow I doubt it.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley