Jane Eyre is a challenge to the imagination – even the great modernist didn’t find it easy. It’s fascinating to read about the difficulties and delights she encountered

Last week, I wrote about the imaginative stretch required of readers tackling Jane Eyre two centuries on from its publication. Since then – last week, that is – I’ve been comparing notes with Virginia Woolf. It turns out that she – about a century nearer to Charlotte Brontë than we are – was not feeling readily intimate with this fictional world either.

Writing in the Common Reader in 1916, Woolf also wrote of the mental knots we have to twist ourselves in in order to understand Charlotte Brontë:

When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.

She also wrote about the difficulty of stepping back into the world of 1847, when the novel was published:

A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious.

Happily, like most readers, Virginia Woolf found she could quickly bridge that chasm of time and connect with Jane: “The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Virginia Woolf. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

It is well worth reading the whole of Woolf’s essay (which also considers Wuthering Heights.) She’s especially good on Charlotte – and Emily – Brontë’s striking use of pathetic fallacy, where the natural world reflects their characters’ swirling, turbulent interior lives: “They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation – they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book …

“At the end,” she writes “we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë.” It’s hard to disagree with any of that. Yet by the end of Woolf’s essay I began to wonder if she wasn’t also talking down to her with some pretty mean-spirited snobbery. For instance:

We read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry.

Being a parson’s daughter – not to mention one from Yorkshire! – seems to Woolf to be an obstacle to intelligent thought. The notion is so silly that it’s easy to dismiss, but even when she is less unkind there are objections to be made. The crux of Woolf’s argument is that Brontë is an essentially “poetic”, emotional writer: “All her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer’.”

There’s truth here. After all these years, it’s the emotions we most respond to in Jane Eyre. We might not understand St John’s austere, colonial Christianity, but we all recognise Jane’s near physical revulsion from being with him. We all understand Jane’s fury at her treatment by the Reeds, her ardour for Rochester, her longing for recognition, her refusal to be ground down. (Joyce Carol Oates writes brilliantly about this cussedness; to her, the moment at the beginning of the book when Jane is dragged into the red room and “resisted all the way” is the heart of the book: “This attitude, this declaration of a unique and iconoclastic female rebelliousness, strikes the perfect note for the entire novel.”)

Even in her impotent fury with John Reed in chapter one, Jane’s sense of injustice has intellectual as well as emotional roots.

‘Wicked and cruel boy!’ I said. ‘You are like a murderer – you are like a slave-driver – you are like the Roman emperors!’ I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

Jane has thought through her situation, as well as felt its wrongs. To boil her reactions down to love, hate and suffering is to lose some of the most subtle and interesting flavours in the book. For this is also a novel about intellectual growth, written by a fiercely intelligent writer: a country parson’s daughter who was almost certainly better read (in more languages) than most people in London in her day; possibly, as the depth of allusion in Jane Eyre suggests, better read than the undeniably learned Virginia Woolf.

Jane thinks, understands, judges. It’s her mind that first attracts her to Rochester, that she will take him on, out-argue him, outwit him. She weighs and checks her potential relationship with St John against that of Rochester. She knows where she will function best, do the most good and be happiest. Likewise, key to her marriage with Rochester is the fact that she has become his equal, financially and in terms of social standing. She can take him on her own terms. It’s an intellectual choice as much as an emotional surrender. It’s one of the things that make Jane Eyre a radical feminist novel, a good distance ahead of its time (and Woolf’s).

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But this isn’t entirely to criticise Woolf. It’s easy to be blinded by Jane’s emotions, so deeply are they felt. But it’s also worth remembering that Jane is, as her author has it: “Clever, composed and firm.” She has a formidable brain as well as a strongly beating heart, and so it will still seem another 100 years from now.