Help, please... if you have NOT read Jane Eyre.

[mer]

...Or, if you remember what you thought it was about before you read it.

Those of you who have not read Jane Eyre, nor seen the movie, could you summarize in the comments for me what you think the book is about... with specifics regarding plot... and what your occupation is? And how/what other Victorian literature you have read instead?

I realize this is a weird request, but it's research for a book. I promise.


When I asked my husband the question, he said, "It's about women. And there's yammering. Because they can't marry who they want to marry." He's a computer guy. I couldn't even guess what Victorian literature he's read, but I'd suspect it's like one work of Dickens forced on him in school.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Think I did read part of the book many years ago at school. Have seen several TV adaptations, mostly BBC which are generally pretty faithful to the book though of necessity abbreviated. Have recently read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

Plain Jane Eyre is sent by her stingy aunt to a horrible school where her best friend dies of consumption thereby starting the story in the wrong place and using up several thousand unecessary words. She survives and as the story proper starts she gets a job as governess (on her own initiative) to Mr Rochester's niece (Adele?) at Thornfield Hall. She meets Rochester when she causes his horse to shy and pitch him off. They make an instant bad first impression on each other, but gradually discover there is a meeting of minds despite Rochester being a bully and a liar and not terribly handsome, not to mention dallying with a flirty piece of muslin-wrapped, brain-free eyecandy. There's a visit to Jane's dying aunt (more wasted words) and a few kefuffles in the night, but I can't remember the order. Footsteps in the corridor, Rochester's room set on fire (Jane to the rescue) and a visitor who is mysteriously injured by a passing vampire (or someone with teeth) in the sekrit attic. Jane once more saves Rochester's butt by playing nusemaid until the doctor arrives. Rochester proposes to Jane. At the wedding someone (a lawyer? or Mr Vampirevictim himself?) turns up as Mr Just Impediment because of Wife Number One who is Mad Woman In The Attic. Despite thinking Rochester is sex on two legs, Jane's too hidebound to grab him with both hands and elope without benefit of clergy (as he wants to do), so she wimps out and flees, miraculously getting found in the middle of a moor by a very boring set of religious fundies who just coincidentally turn out to be cousins she didn't know she had. (Yeah, try slipping that past an editor these days!!!) Cousin StJohn persuades her to go a-praying and a-misionarying with him, but luckily she wakes up and smells the testosterone before she has her bags properly packed. She has a change of heart and decides she will jump the broom with Rochester after all, but on returning to Thornfield discovers Mad Woman has burned it down, killed herself and blinded and crippled Rochester who was daft enough to go walkabout on the rooftop. As karmic justice for dallying Jane gets a semicastrated version of Rochester, blind and dependent and not at all the man she fell in love with, but that seems to me enough because: Reader, she married him!

Other old stuff I recall dates from school: Dickens (Hard Times, David Copperfield, Christmas Carol) Hardy: Return of the Native; Jude-the-so-obscure-I-can-remember-a-thing-about-it. (I hated Hardy with a passion.) Austen: Northanger Abbey; Pride and Prejudice; Mrs Gaskell, North and South. About the only things I've re-read or read since school for pleasure or necessity are Hard Times and Christmas Carol, both for productions I was in (or working on).

My list is woefully short. Does having a complete set of Dickens count for anything even if I haven't read them? (The binding is pretty.)

Funnily enough I was intending to re-read Jane Eyre after reading The Eye Affair.