Coming back to Charlotte Bronte’s life changing, life-affirming 1847 masterpiece for at least the twelfth time is like listening to a Beethoven symphony or gazing at van Gogh’s sunflowers. Every word, note or brushstroke is warmly familiar and yet there are always things to marvel at that you’ve never noticed before.

At one level it’s a rags-to-riches story. Jane, orphaned and unloved is sent away to boarding school and then goes to work as a governess in a rich man’s house. She falls in love with her boss and he with her but there are many complications before they finally find their happy ending. And I think that’s about the baldest, tritest summary I have ever written!

The narrating, eponymous Jane is a prototype feminist. She has no family (or believes she doesn’t) so knows she must take full responsibility for her own life and welfare. Advertising herself for a governess post is, for instance, a pretty radical action for a young woman who has hitherto led a very sheltered life. She comments:

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings, knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.”

Yes, that really was written 176 years ago. And it’s extraordinary to think that in some circles and some parts of the world, not much has changed. Moreover, this is the certainly the sort of thing my grammar school headmistress would have said (and did) in the 1950s and 60s. Look, incidentally, at all those semi-colons – how punctuation habits have changed.

So what sort of people are Jane and Mr Rochester? Well, for a start, neither of them is physically attractive. Jane is plain and very small at a time when statuesque women like Blanche Ingram or even Bertha Mason were admired. Her horrible cousin John Reed describes her as a toad. No one ever calls her pretty and she knows she isn’t. Mr Rochester has a huge head and a jutting brow, as Jane repeatedly tells us. It is their personalities and the chemistry between them, along with mutual respect which drives their burgeoning love – along with their being able to have long, adult intelligent conversations on a completely equal level.

Of course there have been dozens (and dozens) of screen and stage adaptations. For me, the first was the 1956 serialisation on BBC TV (with Stanley Baker and Daphne Slater) when I was still at primary school and it was that which first led me to read an abridged version. But I’ve never seen a dramatisation which does the novel justice. Susannah Yorke and Edward C Scott in the 1970 film were both far too attractive, for example, and the 1983  BBC  version with Timothy Dalton as Mr Rochester was a travesty. I’ve never, to be honest, been overly impressed by Dalton as an actor, good looking as he is, and he was certainly miscast for this role.

For me the power (and I still find Jane Eyre a page-turner) is in the words. Volume 2, chapter 8 is pivotal. It’s a hot summer night at dusk. There is tension in the air because of a forthcoming storm. Jane and Mr Rochester are in the garden pretending not to see each other and the way Charlotte Bronte ratchets up the eroticism is masterly.

It is easy to see Mr Rochester as a wicked man (and I think I probably did in youth) who tries to commit bigamy but actually he’s anything but. He could have put his wife, Bertha – who has, in modern terms, a hereditary form of intermittent psychosis which triggers pyromania, nymphomania and violence – into some appalling asylum. Instead he has her cared for at home as decently as he can. She’s locked in but not restrained as she would be in an asylum. Then when the building is on fire he seriously injures himself in trying to rescue her. That said, I always find the way he leads Blanche Ingram on pretty distasteful. She is not a likeable woman but she doesn’t deserve to be deliberately toyed with and used.

Later in the novel Jane is rescued from self-imposed destitution (I’m always irritated with her for leaving her bag on the coach) by the Rivers family. Eventually St John Rivers and his sisters turn out, through one of those glorious Victorian novel coincidences, to be Jane’s cousins: thus she exchanges the broken Reeds for the Rivers of life. Did Bronte actually mean that? Probably – she had to choose names for them after all.

St John Rivers, a clergyman, is in some ways far more of a “monster” than Mr Rochester. And unlike Mr R, he is classically good looking: tall, blonde and personable. He wants to marry Jane, for entirely practical reasons. He wants her to assist him in his overseas missionary work. He has no love for her (in fact he’s in love with someone else and refusing to follow his heart). He is cold and controlling with no respect whatever for Jane’s independence. It’s a fascinating contrast – like so many things in Jane Eyre.

Another thought on rereading this novel now. We’ve just come through a pandemic. I’m struck, as never before, by the casual, habitual bed sharing at Lowood School.  Based on the author’s own experiences at Cowan Bridge School where two of her sisters died, the institution is decimated by an epidemic. No one knew about bacteriology until the big break through by Louis Pasteur in 1850.  Jane Eyre is a novel of its time.

It’s also very much a novel for now. If you haven’t read it lately then I urge you to do so.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I often think about Laurie Lee’s Cock Pheasant “gilded with leaf-thick paint” swaggering across “the cidrous banks of autumn”. We used to see a lot of pheasants when I lived in Kent and I’ve never read a more apt description.

Yet, all the online information, including obituaries, asserts that Lee (1914-1997) struggled to achieve recognition as a poet.  Yes of course I read his prose works especially Cider with Rosie which was heavily promoted at my teacher training college because it was, they said, a fine presentation of a child growing up. It was certainly evocative as were its sequels As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. For a long time Cider With Rosie was standard fare on secondary school syllabuses too but I think it’s a bit too English, white and dated to tick the boxes in 2023.

We shouldn’t underestimate him as a poet, in my view.  I first stared to explore his poems when an anthology called Poets of Our Time was set for the O Level classes I was teaching – yes, it was a while ago now. Poets of Our Time was edited by Chris Woodhead,  fondly (or not) remembered by teachers as HM Inspector of Schools from 1994-2000. He was an English teacher long before he achieved fame –  or notoriety, depending on your point of view.

I’ve recently started to dip into Lee’s poems again. “Sunken Evening”, for instance, is a stunning depiction of dusk in central London in the 1950s. It’s based on a sustained metaphor comparing the withdrawal of workers from town at the end of the day with the tide going out. Thus “crusted lobster-buses crawl/ Among the fountain’s silver weed” and “There, like a wreck, with mast and bell, /The torn church settles by the bow, / while phosphorescent starlings stow / Their mussel shells along the hull”.

What a wordsmith!

Lee’s poem “Christmas Landscape” is quite something too. Biting cold becomes “the wind gnaws with teeth of glass” – and yet there is warmth and life as “in a nest of ruins the blessed babe is laid” although there’s a “cry of anguish” as “the cold earth is suckled”.

Or what about “My Many-Coated Man” in which Lee gives us four contrasting animal pictures from the “padded spicy tiger” to the “rank red fox” and the “mottled moth”. I like the vulnerability of the “the turtle on the naked sand” who “peels to air his pewter snout” best. Then in the final stanza he compares these with the complexity of man “hooded by a smile”.

Lee is a good poet. And like all good poets he is master of form as well as message. He’s well worth reading and I’d like to see a revival of interest in his work. Have I started the ball rolling?

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in 2003 when it won the Pullitzer prize and was fascinated by the glittering originality of the style  as well as by the subject matter: Greek immigration into the USA and the experience of “daughter” who is genetically male. Even the title is a stroke of genius. So I read it again during one of those interminable lockdowns and was just as riveted 20 years on. That led me to an urge to explore (reading is a lifelong journey of discovery, after all) anything else that Eugenides has written – and thus to The Virgin Suicides, his debut novel which was published in 1993.

It’s set in Grosse Point, Michigan, not far from where Eugenides was born in Detroit (1960).  It’s a small, insular, lakeside community. According to Wikipedia it still had only just over 5000 inhabitants in real life in 2010. The unnamed  narrator is one of a group of teenage boys looking back investigatively two decades later on the time when they watched the Lisbon house obsessively back in the 1970s. They still have numbered items of evidence salvaged from the house and they have obsessively conducted interviews with people who remember what happened.

And the reader knows the outline of what happened almost from page one  and the title is a giveaway, obviously.  All five Lisbon daughters commit suicide. For Cecilia, who dies a year before her sisters, and  for Mary it takes two attempts. Bonnie, Therese and Lux manage it first time each using a different method.  No one – in that claustrophobic environment –  really understands why although it appears to be some sort of pact.

What  Eugenides does so beautifully is to build up the tension as we learn – very gradually – how events unfolded and there’s a faint stylistic whiff of To Kill Mockingbird as he tantalisingly shifts back and forth in time.  I love the idea of five girls – shades of Pride and Prejudice – all immaculately differentiated. One is promiscuous and  finds a way of secretly allowing a whole succession of boys to get to her on the roof of her family home. Another habitually wears a tattered wedding dress.  A third lights candles. There’s a lot of mystery and weirdness.  They are rarely allowed out although the boys see them at school where their wan, troubled father teaches maths until he’s dismissed. There is one memorable date night when all five are taken to a school dance by five boys and one tightly chaperoned party at the Lisbon house but otherwise it’s the unanswered questions surrounding the girls which makes them so alluring to the boys of the town. Their mother is misguided, confused and strictly dictatorial which is maybe why her daughters, eventually, do the only thing they can control.

As, in Middlesex, the writing style fizzes and dances freshly and, partly a study of adolescence, it’s often gently lyrical  No wonder The Virgin Suicides has been translated into 34 languages and was adapted into an acclaimed film (1999) by Sofia Coppola. As for me, I shall now investigate the rest of Eugenides’s back list, including some short stories

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  Laurie Lee Selected Poems