I've spent this weekend trying to pull together resources to teach one of my all time favourite novels to my Year 9 class. Jane Eyre is flavour of the month at the moment (although I didn't realise it would be when I chose to do it!) and so, as I've waded through my resources, updating and tweaking them a little bit, I've been thinking about why I love this story so much! Normally, I'm quite twitchy about film and TV adaptations of classic novels, but with Jane Eyre I don't really mind so much because I actually saw it before I read it: a made-for TV film one evening in the summer holidays between leaving primary and starting secondary school. It starred the unlikely combination of George C Scott and Susannah York as Rochester and Jane, both excellent actors but (with hindsight!)totally miscast. However, the story captured my adolescent imagination and I borrowed a copy from my local library. (Libraries: remember them? They were so good...). To say I read the book might be an understatement: I devoured it, although how much of it went over my head at the time is hard to say. I have vivid memories of sitting in our back garden, in a makeshift tent, eating chocolate biscuits and living the story...
When I was around 14 or so, the BBC produced their adaptation starring Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke which I still consider to be the definitive version. In fact, when I read the novel now I cannot do so without hearing their voices speaking the lines! Much later, Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson stepped into the roles in a production which was just about perfect until they mangled the ending. (Like North and South all over again: why can't scriptwriters trust that Victorian writers actually knew what they were doing???) It's one of those books - like Great Expectations and Little Women and To Kill a Mockingbird - that I have to go back and read again every few years.
I know why my twelve- and fourteen- year old selves loved it so much - it was entirely down to that complex, saturnine, brooding hero with his dark, dark secret - but my now (much) older self finds that I'm drawn more to Jane's character - I am impressed by her feisty-ness, her determination not to lower her standards even if the cost is a devastating one, her capacity for forgiveness and the depth and complexity of her love. Oddly, too, St John Rivers - the character I originally felt to be completely unnecessary to the plot - fascinates me now: a man who loves deeply but ultimately rejects love as a merely unworthy character trait, missing out on so much in the process.
And what of Edward Rochester? Well, I still adore him - of course - but I can see him a little more clearly these days. He's really a weak man, wounded and vulnerable, arrogant and proud, not really a proper hero at all, when all's said and done. And, in truth, all the better for it.
A book of contradictions, it is far-fetched and contrived: a gothic romance - but somehow also very real in the way it deals with the themes of love, betrayal and inequality. It has events of pure melodrama but lines that ring with truth in your ears long after the book is closed. It is a real masterpiece.
And so I'm off once again, taking up my proverbial candlestick and stepping out into the dark, shadowy corridors of Thornfield Hall, in search once more for the truth behind that 'praeternatural laugh' and the deep dark mystery hidden on its third floor - I can hardly wait!
