Hoi and welcome to you Jane Eyre week. All the videos that I will be posting this week
as you might have guessed will be Jane Eyre themed. This book
is loved by so many people but I just kind of want to devote an entire week to
it maybe its good chance for you to reread it
or if haven't read it yet maybe this is a good time to start. This is my copy
of Jane Eyre it's kind of a weird Penguin edition but I love this mass paperback
size.
I read this book when I was at University I wrote an essay on it but I don't really
remember a lot
and I can’t remember if I read the entire thing but I have seen the adaptations
so many times so I'm quite familiar with the story. I feel like when you review a
classic novel people sometimes expect you to sort of
really break it down and talk about the historical background and almost kind of
teach it as a sort of lesson on the book but what I really want to do is just
talk about my personal experience of
reading Jane Eyre but if you want a more detailed breakdown I suggest you check
out the Jane Eyre episodes from crash course literature.
Jane Eyre is about a young girl called Jane Eyre and when she was younger
her aunt was sort of forced to take her in because she was an orphan and then she sent her
off to this school for girls called Lowood.
Its strict, it's cold, the girls don't get a lot of food
and in general they sort of have a miserable time there but Jane sort of manages to make the
best of the situation she’s always very rebellious but obviously at the schools just
she has to tone that down and learn how to be quiet. She gets a good education
and eventually becomes a teacher there and when she's 18 she decides that she
wants to
advertise as a governess so she can see a little bit more
the world. So she ends up at Thornfield Hall where she is the governess to a young
french girl called
Adele and she lives there with the caretaker house Mrs Fairfax and then one day
when she is out to bring a letter to a nearby town
she runs into someone or he sort of runs into her because
he is on a horse, horse stumbles and he falls off his horse. She helps this mysterious
stranger back on his horse while he accuses her of being a witch.
They both go on their merry way but when she comes back to Thornfield Hall she realizes
that that
was Mr Rochester the man who owns Thornfield Hall.
He seems a bit grumpy and a bit rude but as they spend time together
turns out they get along quite well but meanwhile there are also some mysterious
things happening in Thornfield Hall
and I’m going to stop here because I don't give too much away but there
a lot more going on because quite a big book my edition has about 600 pages.
First of all Charlotte Bronte published this book under the pseudonym Currer
Bell which is either a male pseudonym
or a neutral pseudonym. What I found quite interesting and that there are lot
instances of Jane talking about how she wishes that women to do the same things
that men do
just go out and just have an exciting life and not be stuck at home
and it’s quite interesting to think about how people at the time would have perceived
this if they had known it was written by a woman or they thought it was written
by a man.
I found Jane a very pleasant character she's very smart she really likes to observe people
and figure out their personalities
she seems very stable from a younger age she sort of has this rage inside and she wants
to burst free.
The setting is really remote Thornfield Hall is very quiet
and empty most of the time and it makes it a really good setting for creepy stuff to
happen but Jane Eyre's life in general is quite
lonely and limited she used to live with her aunt
and then she went to Lowood and then she went to Thornfield Hall and like she says
she's never really seen
a lot of the world before although she does fantasize about it and then to contrast that
there is Mr Rochester who has been
all across the world and he has all these amazing stories about far away
countries.
One of my favorite bits is when Jane is talking about how she's never really seen a hot
guy before but she bets that if she would ever see one she would know
gives you a good idea of like how limited her contact with the outside world has
been
which is also something that comes up in the book quite a lot where she talks about
the theme of if you haven’t experienced a lot, if you're quite plain or
if you're younger does it make you less than anyone else?
Especially with the treatment of children at Lowood where they're just
kind of like “mmm kids don't really have feelings
so its okay they just need to learn how to behave
and be quiet” and I feel like a lot of the book is Jane fighting for her little place
in the world. I also like that when she first meets
Mr Rochester and he's being kind of rude her first reaction is
that's very exciting cuz I imagine if he would have been very polite that
would've been quite boring
at least that's the way to bring the excitement to my life. Because the little
girl
Adele is French and Mr Rochester speaks French and
Jane speaks French there is quite a bit of French in this book and there were
sometimes just
entire paragraphs in French and if you don't speak French you can just skip it and
you'll be fine
you might miss a couple phrases but you’ll get the general gist of what's going on.
It's fine to not know everything and it kind of puts you right in that place and it
feels a lot more real than if the narrator goes “well actually this is what they just
said, I'll
just translate it for you”. A lot of the quotes on the back of my copy talk about
love quite a lot and
I don't feel like this book is as much about love as people think it is.
There are lots of problematic things in this book especially romanticising Mr
Rochester which is sort of totally understandable
and while I think it’s really interesting to read about sort of the deep connection that
Mr Rochester and Jane
have it’s always good to think things over while you're reading it.
This is a book that I can see myself reading over and over again
in years to come. I love the story, I really enjoy the writing, there's so many
different themes being discussed. I actually think that this could be a great
starter classic even though it is quite big it's not that hard to read. You don't
have
a bunch of different characters and sort of a nonlinear story. I’m looking at you
Wuthering Heights
and I feel like there's a lot of things that any teenager or adult
could relate to. Those are my thoughts on Jane Eyre I really, really enjoyed reading it
again and while I reading I was sort of doubting how much
I'd actually read of it before. I really wish I could read it for the first time
again.
So in the comments to would be great if you could avoid posting spoilers and if you do want to kind of
discuss something about the
end maybe put spoilers in all caps and have a couple of open lines and then it’ll just
disappear
under the read more bit. Another fun thing that will be going on this week
is that if you tweet using #JaneEyreWeek whether it is
sharing your favourite quote from the book or sharing a picture of your copy or just
talking about Jane Eyre in general
everyone that uses the hashtag is automatically entering themselves in a
competition to win a really cool
Jane Eyre poster just basically the text of I think the first couple
chapters of Jane Eyre
with an image Jane and
Mr Rochester sort of in the middle of that. I think that's it more Jane Eyre themed
videos coming later this week I hope you enjoyed this review
and I'll talk to you guys later. Doei!