I'm glad I read this book, but I didn't particularly like it. Of course, it doesn't help that I knew about the mad wife in the attic well before I read the book.
I didn't care for the 19th century language. Another annoying thing was that sometimes two people would talk in the same paragraph. Even worse, sometimes Jane's thoughts were set off in quotation marks. I don't know if it was the author's or the editor's choice, but it got confusing.
More importantly, I couldn't stand Rochester--he was horrible. He masqueraded as an old fortune-teller to test and manipulate Jane and his houseguests. He tried to gaslight Jane about the strange visitor to her bedroom. He proposes and plans a wedding to Jane that is interrupted by the news of his marriage. Worst of all, he imprisons his wife in a windowless, attic room with only an occasionally drunk caretaker. The guy was rich--why didn't he place her in a secluded manor house or at least a nice farm?
I also thought Jane's escape from Thornfield Hall with only a few coins was ridiculous. It made it hard to sympathize with her.
Charlotte Bronte was a descriptive writer. I loved this--it could have described the moon I saw the other night, except for the rain.
I lingered; the moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense cloud; the night grew dark; rain came driving fast on the gale.
Here Jane described the danger of marriage to her cousin St. John:
There would be recesses in my mind which would only be mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down; but as his wife--at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked--forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital--this would be unendurable.
I won't seek other books by Bronte.
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