Does Jane Eyre work for you?

" ... the whole structure of our Johnsonian English breaking up from its foundations ... ", Carlyle

The following is a long (some will find it too long) piece of literary criticism. But Jane Eyre has for so long been thought by so many people a classic of our literature that it seems to me worth supplying a ‘proof’ — the literary-critical equivalent of one — that it is nothing of the sort, that it is, actually, just a piece of venerable (and venerated) tosh. And that seemed to call for something thorough, and that seemed to call for something long. (Not that it couldn’t have been longer still.)

Page references are to the Penguin Classics edition, ed. Q. D. Leavis.

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Washing machines might, or might not, work perfectly; no one expects a work of art to. Art survives all sorts of flaws, great as well as small. (Bleak House survives Esther Summerson, Daniel Deronda, Daniel Deronda, Women in Love, Birkin.) But what no book can  survive is readers who know better than its author. And who can read Jane Eyre, with an open mind, without thinking he knows better than Charlotte Brontë what to make of its narrator-heroine, the two men who want to marry her and the difference between living and dead English. The book may be a classic, what it’s a classic of is soap opera.

Mainly on style

Conflict between characters in any novel or play worth the name (Wuthering Heights, say) is, as much as anything, a conflict between styles. But there’s nothing of that in Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë has her one wooden style, left over from the eighteenth century, and that has to do for everyone and everything. Mrs Leavis said her writing had a “thrilling suggestiveness” and a “magical quality”; it hasn’t, it is unfailingly pompous and pedantic. My guess is that Emily Brontë (mischievously) based Lockwood’s style on her sister’s: all that “not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange” and “no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” sort of thing, native to Lockwood and the Lintons, picked up by Nelly Dean and shown up for what it is by Heathcliff. Where Emily Brontë gives it to particular characters as the mark of … well, what it obviously is the mark of, in Jane Eyre it is everywhere, as the mark of … nothing in particular. It’s just the regular stuff of the author’s own style.

It is how the bullying Reverend Brocklehurst speaks:

... decisions are perfectly judicious
... grateful for the inestimable privilege of her election
... obviating the aim of this institution
... improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils 
... evince fortitude under the temporary privation.
... wherein a judicious instructor would take the opportunity of referring to

But it’s just as much how Jane herself speaks (and any number of the other characters):

... a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretentions
... in consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site
... dismissed the chaise and driver with the double remuneration I had promised
... contrived to reserve a moiety of this bounteous repast
... I accorded it, deeming that I did well in showing pliability
... judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition
... afford a vent to unusual ebullition of the sensations
... organ of veneration expanding at every sounding line
... the etymology of the mansion’s designation 
... striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality
... the sun is far declined from its meridian
... attesting the hour of eventide

And Charlotte-Jane has a grammar to match her vocabulary. It’s complex but complex in a particular way, one unit diagrammatically or schematically paralleling or balancing another. Her characteristic sentence structures might have been produced by a real transformational-generative grammar machine, generating complex sentences by regularly expanding simple ones. The following are typical (again all Jane’s own):

He was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled or destiny encouraged.

A lamb-like submission and turtle-dove sensibility, while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased his judgement, satisfied his common-sense, and even suited his taste less.

He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people’s thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage.

It’s a bookish prose, an eighteenth-century style not so much decayed as petrified; and going with it, equally petrified and equally bookish, a would-be poetic prose that combines bad Augustanism with bad Romanticism:

Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman — almost a bride, was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate.  A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. (P. 323)

Jane Eyre was published in 1847; 12 years earlier, Carlyle, defending his own style in Sartor Resartus, wrote 'the whole structure of our Johnsonian English [is] breaking up from its foundations;' and here, in the style of Jane Eyre, unrecognised by its author, is the break-up that Carlyle was trying to escape.

It is no coincidence that the Lintons in Wuthering Heights speak as they do and are terrible snobs. It is similarly no coincidence that Jane Eyre speaks as she does and is a snob too. The following is plainly snobbish but the snobbery, as with Lockwood and the Lintons, is already in the style before anything particular is said in it:

I found estimable characters amongst them — characters desirous of information and disposed for improvement — with whom I passed many a pleasant evening hour in their own homes. Their parents then (the farmer and his wife) loaded me with attentions. There was an enjoyment in accepting their simple kindness, and in repaying it by a consideration — a scrupulous regard to their feelings — to which they were not, perhaps, at all times accustomed, and which both charmed and benefited them; because, while it elevated them in their own eyes, it made them emulous to merit the deferential treatment they received.

I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood. Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like 'sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;' serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray. (P. 392)

And, as the style is not just Jane Eyre’s but Charlotte Brontë’s, so is the snobbery. (Emily must have based the Nelly-Lockwood-Linton side of her book on her sister.)

Mainly on character (and style)

Unable to judge style, Charlotte Brontë cannot judge — create — her characters either. St John Rivers is a clergyman with (if you can believe it) rare qualities. He has a first-rate brain, is truly able and a profound scholar. He has talent and principle to be venerated. He is a good and great man, great and exalted, with a high calm mien, a noble simplicity, an austere charm of language and manner and a heroic grandeur in look, manner and conversation. So, Jane reports him.

And, with all those qualities, he’s a powerful preacher. How could he not be? You’d think his author would want to give us — would feel obliged to give us — an example. She doesn’t but she does have her narrator try to describe it: “an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language. This grew to force — compressed, condensed, controlled. The heart was thrilled, the mind astonished, by the power of the preacher.” But the sermon is too powerful to describe, too powerful to have its effect described (too powerful, Charlotte Brontë might have added, even to remember). And if Jane Eyre — a reliable witness and fit judge — taking her first opportunity to gauge St John Rivers’s mind and estimate its calibre — says so, so (if you can believe it) it is.

Charlotte Brontë may not give us any of his sermons but she does give us his talk — of which, the first, brief glimpse is enough to show that what she means by heroic grandeur and austere charm is wooden pomposity. Having taken Jane in, when they find her ill and destitute on their doorstep, St John Rivers and his sisters discuss her. He says, “in the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment”,

‘Rather an unusual physiognomy; certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or degradation.'

'Far otherwise,' responded Diana. 'To speak truth, St John, my heart rather warms to the poor little soul. I wish we may be able to benefit her permanently.'

'That is hardly likely,' was the reply. 'You will find she is some young lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends, and has probably injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability.'

He stood considering me some minutes; then added, 'She looks sensible, but not at all handsome.'

'She is so ill, St John.'

'Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features.' (P. 366)

And when he is expansive — lightly, playfully, imagining himself tempted to sacrifice duty to love — he is more blocklike than ever:

Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am doing: human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I have so carefully and with such labour prepared — so assiduously sown with the seeds of good intentions, of self-denying plans. And now it is deluged with a nectarous flood — the young germs swamped — delicious poison cankering them: now I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond Oliver’s feet: she is talking to me with her sweet voice — gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well — smiling at me with these coral lips. She is mine — I am hers — this present life and passing world suffice to me. Hush! say nothing — my heart is full of delight — my senses are entranced — let the time I marked pass in peace. (P. 399)

Who has ever talked like this? Who could? Who could bear to listen to it? Who, if they heard it, wouldn’t die of embarrassment, for the speaker’s sake? Nothing like it could ever exist outside the pages of (bad) books. And only a girl in a (bad) book would want to listen to it — a girl with “as sweet features as ever the temperate clime of Albion moulded, as pure hues of rose and lily as ever her humid gales and vapoury skies generated and screened.”

St John Rivers resists the temptation to marry this girl because he wants a wife of another kind, for another purpose, altogether. He wants Jane. But not for love. He wants her — as he tells her — for her usefulness as a missionary’s wife. He might be another Mr Collins, telling the girl he is proposing to that he values her not for “personal, but mental endowments ... for labour, not for love ... not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.” As a proposal, it’s not very different (except to Jane Eyre and her author) from Mr Collins telling Elizabeth Bennet that he favours matrimony because it’s his duty as a clergyman to set an example in his parish. St John Rivers concludes (as another Mr Collins might): “cease to mistrust yourself — I can trust you unreservedly. As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will be to me invaluable.”

These last words of his tempt Jane — not, like Elizabeth Bennet, to laugh but, like Charlotte Lucas, to accept — even though Jane is, we will have understood by this late point in the book, no Charlotte Lucas, looking for merely a comfortable home, but a woman whose life is centred on sexual love — love not the less sexual for being conditional on marriage. And, we also have to understand, she has known what it is to be loved. Rochester has given her what she doubts she deserves: the sweet homage given to beauty, youth and grace. In contrast, St John Rivers is, by his own admission, hard and cold. Under his notice, Jane, even as a friend, is fettered and frozen. To please him she has to disown half her nature, stifle half her faculties, wrest her tastes from their original bent, force herself to pursuits for which she has no natural vocation. As a lover, he would bestow endearments on principle and as a sacrifice. Marrying him would be to have the forms of love scrupulously observed, and to endure them. It would be a monstrous martyrdom. It would kill her.

But, despite all this, such is the force of his personality — founded on the most high-minded and self-sacrificing Christian principles — that he gains influence over her to the point where she does almost marry him. She falls under his spell; a charm frames around her; he takes away her liberty of mind; daily, she wishes more to please him; his ascendancy holds her in thrall; she cannot resist him; he holds her in awe; persuasion advanced with slow, sure steps; she feels his influence in her marrow, his hold on her limbs. She comes to feel a veneration so strong that its impetus thrusts her to the point she has so long shunned: she is tempted to cease struggling with him — to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose her own. She grows as pliant as a reed and, like him, puts love out of the question and thinks now only of Christian duty … . 

And, in her passion of dutifulness, she is kept from promising herself to him only because, when she entreats heaven for guidance, what she hears is a voice somewhere cry “Jane! Jane! Jane!” — nothing more. Later, she learns that, just at that moment, “Jane! Jane! Jane!” — nothing more — is just what Rochester cried.

It’s not that Charlotte Brontë can’t see that there’s something wrong with St John Rivers’s idea of marriage. His sister Diana thinks such a marriage would be insupportable, unnatural, out of the question. Jane comes to see and comprehend his fallibilities and imperfection. The veil falls from his hardness and despotism. She tells him, frankly, that she scorns his idea of love, scorns his counterfeit sentiment and scorns him when he offers it. 

But it’s a particular sort of scorn she feels. It’s not the low-minded sort a heroine of Jane Austen’s might. There’s no fun or laughter in it. It is itself really quite elevated, more defiance than ridicule. It doesn’t stop her coming under his influence. It doesn’t make it unnecessary for her to debate with herself and his sisters the wisdom of marrying him. It doesn’t stop her getting to the very brink of marrying him. She still thinks such grand things about his goodness and greatness and high principles that she would be willing to go — and die — in India with him just so long as it wasn’t as his wife. It’s a funny sort of scorn that leaves the object of it — unlike Mr Collins as the object of the Bennets’ — as a man, undiminished. What his imperfection — and Jane’s, and his sisters’, insight into it — amount to is that he is not a saint but a mere erring man and her equal. And an erring man with the personal force of, if not Christ, then certainly one of the Wesleys.

This is shadow-boxing, pretend-judgement. Charlotte Brontë can see that an objection might be made to someone who thinks of marriage like St John Rivers. But how far or deep the objection goes she has no idea. She simply isn’t enough of a novelist — not even an intelligent enough woman and critic — to see what the chains of words that make up 'St John Rivers' amount to. 

None of the grand things said of him is believable, but not merely because there’s no evidence supplied for it. That is what’s wrong with Jane’s description of his sisters’ talk as “witty, pithy, original”, when  it’s no such thing, but there’s something more deeply wrong with phrases like “heroic grandeur”, “high calm mien”, “noble simplicity” than the absence of evidence to justify them. There’s the question of what sort of ‘evidence’ could justify them. Charlotte Brontë uses such phrases as if their meaning were self-evident like ‘fat’ or ‘dimpled’ or ‘5’3”', as if they had a known and fixed value she could just choose to draw on, as if they brought with them the qualities they are intended to denote, without her needing to create them. But they don’t. They need work to be done to give them the value intended for them; and such work would necessarily entail recognising that, as they stand — on a level with ‘fat’ — they are simply hollow, like Nelly Dean’s ‘good’, ‘duty’, ‘pity’, ‘humanity’ in Wuthering Heights. But Charlotte Brontë does no such work, doesn’t recognise that it’s needed.  She uses such phrases as if she doesn’t recognise that they aren’t, as it were, native to the post-Enlightenment mid-nineteenth century she lives in. Her phraseology has the look of something that, by 1847, had already had its day, of something exhumed, from a past that’s dead and gone, and won’t be brought back to life — not, at least, like this, effortlessly. Ben Jonson said of Spenser that “in affecting the ancients [he] writ no language”; and it seems to me that something like that is true of Charlotte Brontë. In these phrases, she is '“affecting” a moral world that has no present existence for her (let alone us). It isn’t that such terms and something like the world they belong to couldn’t be brought to life (even for us) but that she uses the terms as if they didn’t need to be, as if the world they belonged to were just there. She has the incurious confidence in words of someone putting the kettle on. She rests her novel on Johnsonian foundations without recognising as Carlyle does that they have broken up.

As St John Rivers is a blown-up version of a cliché-idea of duty, so Rochester is his opposite, a blown-up version of a cliché-idea of passion. It’s passion that draws Jane back to him and — she being as passionate a woman as he a man — it’s passion that makes him the right choice for her. We know they are both passionate because they both say so. He says to her, for example,

You are passionate … 

… the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment — with which your eyes are now almost overflowing — with which your heart is heaving — with which your hand is trembling in mine.  Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion.

I am bound to you with a strong attachment.

… a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

She says of him, for example,

… full of passionate emotion

… his strong passions

… his face all kindled, and his full falcon-eye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament.

His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst and insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild licence.

His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated: his eye blazed

… the blood was forsaking his cheek and lips, they were growing livid

This must be the what-throbs-fast-full-though-hidden-what-the-blood-rushes-through that Charlotte Brontë said Jane Austen knew nothing of. But is there anything in what is supposed to be our classic literature less convincing? There’s more real passion in Darcy’s being tongue-tied around Elizabeth Bennet or Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot being heedless of fellow pedestrians on a Bath street.

Rochester doesn’t just have strong passions. Like St John Rivers he has an intellect too. His conversation is a choice dish, his mind a treasure. At Thornfield Jane has not been buried with inferior minds and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. She has talked, face to face, with what she reverences, what she delights in — with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind: “I have known you, Mr Rochester.”

Unlike St John Rivers, Mr Rochester is a general favourite because he is so talented and so lively in society. He’s the life and soul of the party. If he’s absent from the room an hour, a perceptible dullness seems to steal over the spirits of his guests; his re-entrance is sure to give a fresh impulse to the vivacity of conversation. He has a fine bass voice, mellow and powerful; he’s a good pianist, has an excellent taste for music, is a fastidiously good judge of singing and playing and a connoisseur of painting and drawing. He’s a good judge of character, a wonderful actor, a useful amateur doctor, speaks French like a native and has excellent taste in women’s clothes.

His wit-combat with Blanche Ingram illustrates the conversational vivacity he gives an impulse to. Blanche tells him to sing and says she will accompany him:

'I am all obedience.'

'Here then  is a Corsair-song. Know that I dote on Corsairs; and for that reason , sing it con spirito.'

'Commands from Miss Ingram’s lips would put spirit into a mug of milk and water.'

'Take care then: if you don’t please me, I will shame you by showing how such things should be done.'

'That is offering a premium on incapacity: I shall now endeavour to fail.'

'Gardez-vous en bien! If you err  wilfully, I shall devise a proportionate punishment.'

'Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to inflict a chastisement beyond mortal endurance.'

'Ha! Explain!'

'Pardon me, madam: no need of explanation; your own fine sense must inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute for capital punishment.'

'Sing!' (P. 208)

He has qualities of character that go deeper too. His merit as a singer isn’t just technical. He so throws his own feeling, his own force, into it that his voice finds a way through the ear to the heart. His face, unlike St John Rivers’s, isn’t beautiful but it shows energy, decision, will, a sternness with a power that goes beyond beauty. His nose is decisive, more remarkable for character than beauty too. And as for physical courage … when Thornfield burns down, he is the last to leave the house. Having helped all the servants out, he goes back into the flames in an unsuccessful attempt to save the mad wife in the attic who has ruined his life. His reward is to be blinded and crippled.

But, beyond all this — if we can take Jane’s word for it — there is something deeply life-giving about him. In his company her destiny seemed to enlarge and the blanks of existence to be filled up. She gains more colour and more flesh, more life, more vivacity. His life is an existence more expansive and stirring than her own: as much more so as the depths of the sea to which the brook runs are than the shallows of its own strait channel. Every good, true, vigorous feeling she has gathers round him. Over her, he sheds the real sunshine of feeling. He has in him such a wealth of the power of communicating happiness that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered was to feast genially. He gives her to drink, in an abundant flow, bliss. He is her morsel of bread and drop of living water. To part from the sunshine of his presence would be a nightmare, union with him paradise. He was becoming her whole world, more than the world, almost her hope of heaven. (And that, there, she is, in her own judgement, blasphemously in error hardly takes away from what we are supposed to think his impressiveness.)

Now, it’s pretty generally recognised that for a novelist who isn’t a genius to try to portray someone who is, is bound to be a mistake. And what Rochester is supposed to have genius for isn’t merely this or that, writing novels or composing music, but living and imparting life to others. He has life, has it more abundantly and makes it more abundant in others. (If the character has qualities the novelist herself hasn’t, shouldn’t it be he writing the novel about her? The author of At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien, might have done something with it.)

No novelist who was one could fail to notice the discrepancy between the character supposed to be found in the book and the one there. His conversation would be hopeless, even as that of a man meant to be ordinarily sensible, let alone of someone as extraordinarily gifted as he is supposed to be. The dominant note is (it would be if it were ever found in real life) adolescent. It’s not life he has in abundance and would make more abundant in others but self-consciousness. He behaves, when he and Jane, are getting to know one another, like someone who wants (so we should think if we met anything like him) to draw attention to himself, to make us wonder about him: Who or what is he? What has made him like this? What does it mean about him?

To invite these conjectures, from both Jane and the reader, one irritating and clunky habit Charlotte Brontë gives him is that of involuntarily giving away that he’s got something on his mind that makes him interesting:

'Ah, the governess!’ he repeated; ‘deuce take me if I had not forgotten! The governess!'

 'Confound these civilities! I continually forget them.'

… ' — But never mind that.'

'How I do still abhor —’ He ground his teeth and was silent: he arrested his step and struck his boot against the hard ground.

And in case we haven’t got the point, Jane adds, after that last example, 'Some hated thought seemed to have him in its grip.'

And he’s moody, of course. He goes in for none of the conventional politenesses. Having asked Jane to take tea with him, but not being in the mood to notice her when she approaches, his manner seems to say, “What the deuce is to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not? At this moment I am not disposed to accost her.” And Jane — like one piece in a jigsaw fitting another — doesn’t think “What a dope!” but finds “the eccentricity of the proceedings piquant”, and gets from Mrs Fairfax, the housekeeper (another piece in the jigsaw) little hints that there is something to wonder about: he has painful thoughts to harass him and make his spirits unequal. So Jane wonders what the nature and origin of his trials can be and how he will go on.

Well, he goes on, of course, just the same. He calls her attention to himself: “Excuse my tone of command; I am used to say, ‘Do this,’ and it is done: I cannot alter my customary habits for one new inmate.” And he calls her attention to herself: “your features and countenance are so much at variance.” And then he calls both their attentions to both of them:

'You examine me, Miss Eyre, do you think me handsome?'

'Ah! By my word there is something singular about you.'

'Go on: what faults do you find with me, pray?'

'Criticise me: does my forehead not please you?'

‘ … though you are not pretty any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you.'

'Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night.’ 

'I think you will be as natural with me as I find it impossible to be conventional with you.'

'Strange! … Strange that I should choose you for the confidante of all this, young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly.'

And so, impossibly, intolerably, the last conversation (if you can call it that) goes on, with him hinting, hinting what he might say, if he only would. Since they last spoke, he had almost forgotten her because “other ideas have driven yours from my mind” (What could they be?) and he now wants her “to divert my thoughts, which are galled with dwelling on one point — cankering as a rusty nail.” (What could it be?) He might have been very different. He had once had a kind of rude tenderness of heart. He might have been as good as she. And what stopped him? He gives her (and us) a clue. Somewhere there must come into it, “Céline Varens, as she used to appear on the boards at the rising of — but never mind that.” An obvious tease, you’d think. But not to Jane Eyre who is only “sensible that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration.”

And it’s not as if this sort of thing comes to an end when he and she get to know one another better. When they think they are getting married, he says to her: “Oh it is rich to see and hear her! Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio.” And then this — when she refuses to go off with him when it turns out that they can’t marry:

‘Never,’ said he, as he ground his teeth, ‘never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand. I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me with more than courage — with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it — the savage beautiful creature. If I tear, if I rend …’ (P. 344)

And more of the same. Indomitable is the least she’d need to be. A girl who could put up with this could put up with anything. By comparison, a lifetime as a conductress of Indian schools in the company of St John Rivers would be quite jolly.

(Apart from anything else wrong with it, the dialogue between Rochester and Jane is often fake, narration grammatically recast, remarks put in the first or second person which might as well be in the third: “Now and then, in passing a casement, you glanced out at the thick falling snow; you listened to the sobbing wind, and again you paced gently on and dreamed.” This isn’t dialogue.)

And what else but adolescent can we call the way he plays with the feelings of Jane and Blanche Ingram when his party of aristocratic friends comes to stay. In the middle of the party, he leaves Thornfield on the pretence of business and returns disguised as an old fortune-telling gypsy woman, who tells both Blanche and Jane their fortunes. Having, as himself, led Blanche on — so that she and everyone else thinks he wants to marry her — as the gypsy, he puts her off, by telling her that her prospective bridegroom isn’t as rich as she thinks he is. When he tells Jane’s fortune, he uses the opportunity to play on what he knows to be her unadmitted love for him and to stir up her fears that he’s going to marry Blanche. And he continues to press this tender spot, hard and deliberately, for the next few chapters. Then, having roused her to a such  a pitch of  “grief and love” (including by telling her he’s found her a new position in Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland — perhaps, the rough equivalent of up-country Congo today) that she can’t help confessing what being parted from him means to her (“my drop of living water dashed from my cup” and so on), he lets off his firecracker: it’s she he has intended to marry all along; it’s for her that all the wedding preparations are being made!

If ever there were a reason to go to Bitternutt Lodge — or the Congo — wouldn’t that revelation be it? But not for Jane Eyre and not Charlotte Brontë. He is quite unashamed of his behaviour: “Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be the best ally I could call on for the furtherance of that end.” If not adolescent, what? Not only the behaviour but the complete incomprehension of what the behaviour amounts to? What would it do for any ordinarily sensible girl (Jane Bennet, say) but cure her of her infatuation?

Jane Eyre does say that “It was a burning shame and a scandalous disgrace to act in that way” but being satisfied that Blanche Ingram doesn’t feel “the bitter pain I felt myself a moment ago” and that Blanche dumped him not he her, she is … satisfied. In his treatment of herself, she finds nothing to object to. All is well and there is nothing even to forgive. It’s a token criticism again, like that of St John River.

Of course, in a different novel by a different writer, it might mean that she herself is wanting, but not here. The question  of how reliable the narrator’s judgement is, which is so important when reading Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations, doesn’t arise in Jane Eyre. In all respects that matter, Charlotte Brontë identifies with her heroine-narrator and invites the reader to do the same. She makes no judgement of Jane, or of any other character, explicitly or implicitly, that differs from Jane’s own; and there’s no difference, either, between the judgements Jane makes as a character, from within the action, and those she makes as narrator, ten years later (as we are supposed to think). Unlike Pip in Great Expectations, there is no 'later' Jane Eyre.

Mainly on plot

But, considered as a machine for wringing feelings, Jane Eyre works as well, for those for whom it does, as any washing machine (or mangle). Of course, currently, this is thought to be no bad thing. If you’re going to talk like someone living in the twenty-first century and in touch, you shouldn’t speak of things as good or bad but as working or not: the play, the poem, the film (the movie), the song, the opening or closing ceremony of an Olympiad, all work or don’t work, as if the only kind of merit anything possessed — things of even the most intangible sort — were that of a light bulb. Good and bad are so unverifiable — whereas whether something works or not is just a matter of observation and measurement: does the light come on or not, does the steam-hammer knock the posts in at the required rate, does the stuff do what it says on the tin? Plays, poems, ceremonies ... all kit, for getting the job done.

In this use, the phrase might have been created with films in mind. For what are just about all films — even the very best — but bits of kit, machinery for making you feel this or that, good perhaps, for giving you a thrill of some sort, a fright, a cry, a lump in your throat (or trousers)? They’ve got designs on you — to make you care about characters or outcomes that aren’t worth caring about, characters that, once you’re outside the cinema and its spell, have plainly never had any character, don’t have the kind of existence that can be cared about: soap opera, soaps, soapy. And, of course, novels may be like this too. Jane Eyre is.

What the reader is meant to care about in Jane Eyre is something he’s meant to care about in all Jane Austen’s novels: is the heroine going to achieve happiness in marriage? But whereas, in Jane Austen, that question is worked out in terms requiring a reader’s assent to a wide range of judgements or valuations, found everywhere in the writing, here it is worked out in terms requiring him only to hope and fear for its heroine. Will the bullying of the Reeds and Brocklehurst crush her? Will the example of Helen Burns’s patience more subtly weaken her? Will something come of her first, romantic, encounter with Rochester on the road? Will Blanche Ingram come between them? Will the secret-in-the-attic? Will she give way to ‘passion’ and mistakenly become Rochester’s mistress? Will she die of hunger and thirst? Will she give way to ‘duty’ and mistakenly marry St John Rivers? Will she ever find Rochester again?

And the book is constructed to play on the hopes and fears of the co-operative reader, the reader ready to have his hopes and fears played on. It is plotted as regularly as some of its own sentences.

It has 38 chapters. The first ten — half set in the Reeds House in Gateshead, half at Lowood school — are a sort of introduction, meant not just to play on our feelings, randomly, but to initiate us into the habits required of the right, sympathetic sort of reader. They make up a kind of training manual or system of discipline through which we learn (are meant to learn) how to respond to the more important matter to follow: the ups and downs of courtship leading to, “Reader, I married him.” They arouse — in the right reader — alternating fears and hopes for a heroine who although initially friendless and victimised is today’s ‘strong woman’. Although the change from Gateshead to Lowood looks like a change for the worse, it actually proves to be one for the better. It prepares us for something we meet later in the book: that it is just when the heroine’s fortunes seem most clearly to be on the way down that we can expect them to go up, and just when they seem to be going up that we can expect disaster. Like any system of discipline, monastic or even military, the system Charlotte Brontë practises requires the novice’s co-operation. If the reader rebels against what’s demanded of him … well, that’s an end of it. The book doesn’t work, for him; it’s a bit of kit that doesn’t do its job. But, of course, for many readers, perhaps most, work is, apparently, just what it does do. It’s a classic.

The second group of ten chapters develops the main matter of the book, Jane’s relations with Rochester: are they to remain just master and servant or might they become — as the reader is meant, like Jane, to hope — husband and wife? We hope (if we do) because Rochester is, even if not conventionally handsome, in so many ways so desirable and because he seems to be falling for Jane as she has already fallen for him. We fear (if we do) because he seems destined for Blanche Ingram, who, if not clever, is handsome and rich. So, at roughly the half-way point in the book, hopes and fears are (for the right reader) nicely playing off against one another: although Rochester does seem bent on marrying Blanche, there are teasing hints that he might not; on the other hand, there is still that dratted secret-in-the-attic.

The next five chapters seem to promise, on the one hand, the looked-for happy ending: Jane is reconciled with the Reeds (now all much worse off than she is), an uncle leaves her his fortune and Rochester (after teasing us all a bit more with Blanche Ingram) at last proposes. But they promise disaster too: a giant horse-chestnut tree split by lightning, bad dreams and a night visit from the secret-in-the-attic.

In the next group of ten chapters, Jane is removed from Rochester and gradually brought to the brink of marrying St John Rivers. Just as, in chapters 11 to 20, the further from a proposal she seemed to get, the closer she actually got and, in chapters 21 to 25, the closer to marriage she seemed to get, the further from it she actually got, so, in chapters 26 to 35, the further from marriage to Rochester she seems to get, the closer to it she actually gets. Whatever direction her fortunes seem to be headed in, where they are actually headed is the opposite. So, all the time, the reader’s (the right reader’s) feelings of hope and fear are kept on the go.

All that remains for the last three chapters is getting her away from St John Rivers, finding Rochester again and being able to announce, “Reader, I married him.” From which point the reader can luxuriate, along with her, in how well — how perfectly — everything has turned out for her. She began depending on others, she ends being depended upon, including by a husband who is crippled but with whom she is in perfect concord. She was destitute, she is rich. She was a servant, she is the mistress. She was friendless, without family and unloved, she is loving and loved — by husband, children, cousins. What else is it but wish-fulfilment, for author and reader together? Nelly Dean follows a path that’s similar. She too began as the most menial of servants but ends with a position in the household so very different that, when Lockwood, right at the end, gives her a tip, she’s insulted. So: are you going to identify with Nelly and her success? Well, some of us are, and with Jane Eyre and her success too.

So, does it work for you?