by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others
Sarah Waters
I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. “Do you think,” she asks him, “because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on “the fateful third storey” of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her “goblin ha! ha!” … What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon – like Dracula or Mr Hyde – that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without. Just like Jane herself, Bertha lives on in many forms – and gets her own story, of course, in another inspiring novel, Jean Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre, a brilliant bit of post-colonial revisionism Wide Sargasso Sea.
Tessa Hadley
Jane Eyre is so built into the shape of my imagination that I can hardly think about it critically; I’m always in among its trees – the sturdy, northern, low-growing hawthorn and hazel bushes of its terrain – and can’t dispassionately estimate the size of the wood. The novel touches not one responsive note in me, but a whole sequence of them, each quite distinct. There’s the little girl Jane, reading and dreaming in her window seat behind the drawn curtain, looking through the glass at the dreary November afternoon outside. There’s Jane the governess at Thornfield, knowing she ought to be grateful because she is employed and fed and sheltered, yet still divinely discontented.“Anybody may blame me who likes … I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit.” There’s Jane after she has inherited her fortune, joyously and fervidly domestic, cleaning down Moor House from chamber to cellar, getting ready for Christmas. And then there’s the dreamlike reconciliation with Rochester at the end of the novel, dark with the “small, penetrating rain” of overgrown Ferndean.
I do have my reservations; I’ve never been able to believe in Mr Rochester and his ponderous teasing courtship, no matter how hard I try. I don’t think Charlotte Brontë had met enough worldly men – he sounds like an unworldly woman’s idea of one. But the novel entrances me, literally – there are any number of passages that induce a submission in me that goes beyond critical appreciation: they have a dream-like power. Its symbolism, woven into the textures of its realism, transports me each time to the familiar ritual place, with its secret life that doesn’t fail. The morning after Jane’s coming together with Rochester in the orchard at Thornfield, “the great horse chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away”.
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Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, Andrew Motion, Maggie O'Farrell, Polly Samson, Helen Dunmore, Blake Morrison, Julie Myerson, Cornelia Parker, John Mullan, Helen Simpson, Polly Teale, Samantha Ellis, Mick Jackson, Joanna Briscoe, Linda Grant, Sarah Perry
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/a ... -winterson
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