I should mention up front that I never finished my previous re-read. I just wasn't in the headspace, so I set it aside and started again in February... so... here we are:
Jane Eyre (Annotated): With a Critical Afterword on Fire, Silence, and the Woman in the Attic by Charlotte Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've read Jane Eyre before, but I've never actually written a review for it. This reread, specifically through the lens of the madwoman, made me love it even more, which feels impossible and yet is absolutely true.
This time, I was far less enthralled by the romance and far more captivated by the autonomy of the women.
Jane's voice struck me differently. I was angry for her at almost every turn... at the cruelty of her childhood, the constant diminishment, the repeated attempts to confine her physically and morally. The edition I read included a brilliant afterword, and one line felt like it articulated exactly what I was thinking:
That's it. That's the revolution.
From the very beginning, Jane tells us she will not be silent. She will not be small. She will not accept the version of herself that others insist upon. Even when she is powerless, she narrates. Even when she is dismissed, she insists on her interiority. The rebellion isn't dramatic; it's sustained. Five hundred pages of refusal.
And then there is Bertha.
Another devastating observation from the afterword:
Jane Eyre (Annotated): With a Critical Afterword on Fire, Silence, and the Woman in the Attic by Charlotte BrontëMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've read Jane Eyre before, but I've never actually written a review for it. This reread, specifically through the lens of the madwoman, made me love it even more, which feels impossible and yet is absolutely true.
This time, I was far less enthralled by the romance and far more captivated by the autonomy of the women.
Jane's voice struck me differently. I was angry for her at almost every turn... at the cruelty of her childhood, the constant diminishment, the repeated attempts to confine her physically and morally. The edition I read included a brilliant afterword, and one line felt like it articulated exactly what I was thinking:
The radicalism is the voice itself — a voice that was locked in a red room at the age of ten and told it was nothing, and that refuses, for five hundred pages, to be silent.
From the very beginning, Jane tells us she will not be silent. She will not be small. She will not accept the version of herself that others insist upon. Even when she is powerless, she narrates. Even when she is dismissed, she insists on her interiority. The rebellion isn't dramatic; it's sustained. Five hundred pages of refusal.
And then there is Bertha.
Another devastating observation from the afterword:
In a novel of nearly one hundred and ninety thousand words, the woman who drives the plot — who prevents the marriage, who sets the fires, who tears the wedding veil, who destroys the house — is named seven times.
Seven.
She is the engine of the story. She is the crisis. She is the rupture that forces Jane into independence. And yet she is stripped of personhood, reduced to diagnosis, described through the language of monstrosity and madness rather than identity. The more I sit with that, the more emotional it makes me.
Bertha's existence is the catalyst that builds Jane's worth and alters her future, but it does so at the expense of another woman. A woman locked away. A woman renamed by others. A woman rendered useful only as an obstacle.
Is she a madwoman? Or is she a convenient scapegoat?
That tension feels even sharper now than it did on my first read. Especially knowing how later texts will reframe her. Especially reading this novel in conversation with what it leaves unsaid.
And yet, I still love this book.
Not for the romance, not even primarily for Rochester (who, frankly, feels far less romantic and far more controlling on this read), but for the audacity of Jane's voice. For the insistence on female interiority. For the way confinement, architectural, social, and medical, becomes something that can be named and resisted.
It's a novel I will return to again and again, and each time I suspect I'll find something new in the attic.
View all my reviews
She is the engine of the story. She is the crisis. She is the rupture that forces Jane into independence. And yet she is stripped of personhood, reduced to diagnosis, described through the language of monstrosity and madness rather than identity. The more I sit with that, the more emotional it makes me.
Bertha's existence is the catalyst that builds Jane's worth and alters her future, but it does so at the expense of another woman. A woman locked away. A woman renamed by others. A woman rendered useful only as an obstacle.
Is she a madwoman? Or is she a convenient scapegoat?
That tension feels even sharper now than it did on my first read. Especially knowing how later texts will reframe her. Especially reading this novel in conversation with what it leaves unsaid.
And yet, I still love this book.
Not for the romance, not even primarily for Rochester (who, frankly, feels far less romantic and far more controlling on this read), but for the audacity of Jane's voice. For the insistence on female interiority. For the way confinement, architectural, social, and medical, becomes something that can be named and resisted.
It's a novel I will return to again and again, and each time I suspect I'll find something new in the attic.
View all my reviews
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
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