Fifteen in Fifteen: Charlotte Bronte

8. Charlotte Bronte 

A classic, according to Mark Twain, is something everyone wants to have read but that nobody wants to read. I have a certain degree of sympathy with this view. There is very little “classic literature” dating from the 18^th century onwards which counts as an “easy read” – Hardy is depressing, Austen upper-class and subtle, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald deeply alien. Even the authors I appreciate – Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gaskell – can all be a bit of a slog. Foreign classics are scarcely better – if it’s Russian, it’s long; if it’s French, it’s longer (unless it’s Maupassant, in which case the least said the better); and if it’s Spanish it’s very very weird. “Modern” classics are, if possible, even worse – I have not come across a single person who has enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. That’s not to say that some tough classics aren’t worth reading, but it does go some way towards explaining why, when my brother presented me with a copy of Jane Eyre whilst we were on holiday in Austria, I was less than thrilled. He told me it was “a damn good read” – I thought it was more likely to be “a damn good cure for insomnia”. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Guys, bear with me. Jane Eyre is one of those rare books which appears to have a universal appeal to women, matched only in its extent by Dirty Dancing. Part of its appeal may lie in the fact that it is a typical rags-to-riches narrative, and a rags-to-riches story twice over, as Jane goes from orphan to governess to runaway to heiress. Part of it could be to do with the fact that it is such an unusual love story. Unlike Gaskell or Austen, which end with the perfect relationship established between Margaret and Mr Thornton, Lizzie and Mr Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley, the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester is never entirely equal. From the outset it needs to be worked at and managed – just like a real relationship. For me, however, the appeal of the story is mostly to do with the character of Jane herself. Most heroines are beautiful, intelligent and outspoken. Jane is poor, plain, modest, somewhat unusual, and yet indomitable. Her first person narrative lets us in to all of her flaws and failings. Most of us, most of the time, do not feel as intellectually-superior as Elizabeth Bennett or as charitable as Margaret Hale. We don’t think of ourselves as particularly attractive or as having anything all that much going for us, and most of us are acutely aware that we might be considered a little bit weird. Which of us cannot sympathise with Jane when she decides that as a poor, plain governess, Mr Rochester cannot possibly love her in preference to the beautiful, wealthy Blanche Ingram? And which of us cannot celebrate the fact that, poor, plain and unusual as she is, he does – and more, that these are the very qualities he loves her for?

Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, wrote the nineteenth-century love story par excellence. Elizabeth Gaskell, in North and South (the TV adaptation of which also appears to be oddly popular with us girls), gave it teeth and social unrest. Jane Eyre follows a similar pattern, but manages to be a very different story, with quite a remarkable protagonist. Following that holiday in Austria, where I read Jane Eyre with more avidity than I had ever read a classic novel with before, I have read good classics, bad classics and indifferent classics. I made the mistake of thinking all Brontes were the same – a mistake which was only rectified by a tough few weeks with Wuthering Heights. I could not get on terms with Austen’s Emma, but completely fell for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was thoroughly enjoyable, whereas I’ve never got beyond the first chapter of The Three Musketeers; and Victor Hugo… well, he’s a story all of his own. But Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Eyre, stand to me as a reader as proof of two essential points. Firstly, a novel written before the twentieth century can still be enjoyed by a reader today - a belief which has sustained me through thin (A Christmas Carol) and thick (Les Mis). And secondly, whatever Mark Twain might say, some “classics” can be a damn good read.