I cannot express what a pleasure and comfort it is to read Jane Eyre again. I first did so (several times) in 6th form for ‘A’-levels. I will not trot out the hackneyed It’s-so-nice-to-be-able-to-read-it-without-thinking tale. On the contrary I enjoyed unearthing the secrets of a story that was so much fun to read, even then. Literature class can be hell if you’re stuck analysing, line by line, a book you abhor or find wearisome. What is nice this time around is to be able to read it without having to worry about an examination. The only person to whom I have to answer at the end of the day is myself. It’s quite, quite liberating.

That may be why I find the tension between confinement, restriction and liberty so striking this time around. All parts of Jane Eyre seem new again, even though certain lines and paragraphs echo in my memory as I read them. This speaks to its potent quality, that the force of Brontë’s themes, her images, her literary allusions can be felt as keenly as if it were the first time. Whether reading a descriptive passage on Thornfield or observing Jane as she looks out her room at Lowood, longing for new, transforming experiences, the conviction of self and of artistic purpose behind every word makes me realise that it is a fierce novel. (I don’t know why this feels like a new realisation for me.)

Re-reading has also made me even more puzzled by the conclusions Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins made when they did a survey for The Guardian last year on the top novels chosen by men to compare to the one they did a year before that for women. For them Jane Eyre is about love conquering all while The Outsider by Camus is about “Brooding lonerdom”. To me the former is as much about solitude, about the outcast and the marginalised (she’s an orphan and a governess, for heaven’s sake) than anything else. Indeed to me Jane Eyre is more about being true to one’s self, holding fast to one’s convictions and principles (in this case very religious ones), the virtues of independence and self-sufficiency, knowing that in the end it is only God to whom one should bend one’s will. Certainly it is about love too, and romantic love is as important as any other but for me it is always framed in the larger context of Christian love, compassion and sympathy, always subordinate to love for God.

I love how Jane’s Christianity is written into her character. It feels very natural, second nature to her and fully incorporated into her philosophy. It works so much better than for Ellena in The Italian by Radcliffe where it felt very much tacked on and artificial; written because the audience expected it rather than it being a necessary component of Ellena’s personality. In other words, as an atheist, for Jane’s story I am fully behind her morally. It feels right. For Ellena or whenever Radcliffe moralised on something it always threw me out of the story and I would roll my eyes at the archaic notions of virtue put on for public show.

Noting this I am amazed that the latest PBS production of Jane Eyre managed to remove all religion from the narrative, according to Little Professor. I don’t know how one can do that and even pretend to be adapting Jane Eyre. Sylvia has made me curious about the adaptation starring Samantha Morton and Ciarán Hinds. My images of Eyre and Rochester do take precedence, but occasionally I visualise the two actors in their place. (Really HBO’s Rome is not the same without my powerful charismatic Julius Caesar so this urge amounts to a need for another Hinds fix.)

I started Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel in preparation for this event (!!) and am sorry to say that I have not been impressed so far. One of the best things I’ve liked about Kay is his accomplished writing style: he can manage to produce the most lyrical, poetic prose I’ve ever read, that just flows, without spilling into saccharine pap. He’s not afraid to change either: for The Last Light of the Sun, to fit the brutal people and setting the sentences became shorter, the tone harsher and more abrupt. For Ysabel it’s just…clunky and awkward. I get the impression that, unlike the other books he’s written, a great deal of this story takes place in the contemporary world. But this isn’t the first time he’s done such scenes: At the beginning of The Fionavar Tapestry the first moments of the book are set in Toronto during the 90’s (I think).

The plotting isn’t working so well either. Ned, the teenage protagonist, is in the south of France with his father who is a photographer. They’re at a church, the set of a shoot, and Ned walks in exploring when whoops he just so happens to meet a pretty, freckle-faced girl; then whoops they stumble upon a leather-wearing, scar-faced, feller with a knife who has “killed children before”; then whoops Ned goes down the hole out of which the stranger came and he stumbles upon a skull and a sculpture of a face that looks similar to the scar-faced feller. And I can’t count the number of times Ned has referred to his iPod. I’m only on page 29.

Eeeeeeh. I’ll keep going but I’m going to bring my copy of Tigana and see if I can get Kay to sign that instead.