Jane Eyre

Some years ago I was talking to another mom, a smart woman and a reader, who said to me she just couldn't read Charlotte Brontë because her child characters are so unbelievable. I gave her an Elizabeth Gaskell novel to read, tacitly agreeing with her.

But I've just finished reading Jane Eyre again. And, first of all, it holds up under repeated re-reading. I have to drop it off my syllabus every few years because I stop reading all the words when I'm preparing for class, but then I miss it and put it back. And this time I read all the words. And they are so remarkable, I kept stopping to say, "this book is just so good!" (Luckily, my husband is used to this sort of outburst.)

This time I really focused on the child characters, on Jane herself and the beatific Helen Burns (memorably played by a child Elizabeth Taylor in the 40s film version) and little Adèle, Mr. Rochester's ward. And I found them utterly believable.

My favorite moment--or one of them, anyway--is when Jane is being grilled by Mr. Brocklehurst, the hypocritical evangelical head of Lowood School. He asks her if she knows what hell is, and who goes there. Of course she does, and then he asks her how she can avoid hell. She answers, "I must stay well and not die."

There's child logic for you. I can imagine Nick saying that. If you go to hell when you die--if there's even a chance of it--then the best thing is not to die. I remember telling my father I'd give up birthdays so I could live forever, figuring that if growing older eventually meant dying, then I'd just stop growing older. I realized I was giving up a lifetime of presents, but it seemed a small price to pay for eternal life. It's the same sort of logic, or it seems so to me.

Helen, true, is a little unbelievable. She's too perfect. But then again, she dies. Jane has about two conversations with her before that. So I give Brontë a pass on her.

And Adèle, well, she's the best. The spoiled brat daughter of an opera dancer and a misanthropic near-bigamist (maybe), she seems pitch-perfect to me. She gets all the ladies oohing and aahing over how delightful she is, she sings naughty songs and gets all the gestures right, she begs for gifts whenever Rochester returns from wherever he's been. She gets in between the lovebirds and demands all the attention for herself.

Charlotte Brontë died of complications of pregnancy. She was 39 years old. She never got to raise children of her own, to measure her recollections of her own childhood against her own growing children. She never got to nurse an infant, or teach a toddler that stoves are hot, or hear her daughter speak to her. And maybe those things wouldn't have meant much to her--childhood was different in those days, after all. But she wrote some fascinating child characters nonetheless. And Jane Eyre is still a terrific read.