Jane Eyre

Where does it come from that we always come back to Jane Eyre with the same appeal? With the feeling of finding the romance brought to a degree of perfection? No doubt, the novel offers a concentrate of what the genre can offer: the story of a band, the confrontation of a solitary being with his destiny, passion, fear, mystery. It answers what Stevenson expected of any fiction worthy of the name: the reading is absorbing and voluptuous. Absorbing, its skillfully engineered plot holds the reader’s breath to the point that the publisher, it is said, when he received the manuscript, could not interrupt its reading. Voluptuous too, this “romance” that inextricably intertwines passion and fear. It almost seems as if Stevenson is thinking of Jane Eyre when he evokes (in the essay on the art of fiction) the bewitching memory of a book he read as a child: “it was about a high, dark house at night and people groping up a staircase lit only by a light coming from an open bedroom door,” he says. As soon as it was published, in 1847, the novel was a huge success. Even Queen Victoria mentions it several times in her reading notes Excess is at the heart of the novel’s poetics. It operates a synthesis between a form of dark realism, à la Dickens, Christianity, its sense of evil, its great symbols, and romanticism, heir to the Gothic, this “literary exploration of the avenues of death. Rochester’s character is at the crossroads of all these influences: a complex figure of Satan, Don Juan, and sinner. Charlotte Brontë’s greatest achievement is probably to have drawn from herself, from that thirst that “teaches water”, in the words of Emily Dickinson, that unforgettable figure of a dark horseman, a haughty master – that perfect Adam.