> Podcast
Marilyn Lightstone Reads
The Enduring Appeal of Jane Eyre / BY Athena McKenzie / December 7th, 2020
>Jane EyreChances are good that even if you haven’t read the classic gothic novel Jane Eyre, you’ve heard its most oft-quoted lines. “Reader, I married him” is arguably one of the most famous sentences in English literature.
When the book was first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography edited by Currer Bell – the male pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë – it became an instant bestseller. Many readers assumed the story of the young governess falling for her brooding master, Edward Rochester, with his mad wife locked in the attic, to be true. It set all of London reading and speculating about the author’s identity – the modern day equivalent of going viral – and was such a sensation that the publisher commissioned a second printing in just three months.
The genius of Jane Eyre, with its clever political and social commentary layered into a suspenseful romance, has inspired legions of devoted fans as well as other writers. In January, U.S. author Rachel Hawkins will add to the Jane Eyre genre with The Wife Upstairs, which features Jane as a broke dog-walker in Birmingham, Alabama who falls for the recently widowed and very rich Eddie Rochester. The canon also includes Jean Rhys’s ground-breaking 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel of sorts, since it imagined the story of Rochester’s wife, a beautiful Creole woman he married in Jamaica and took back to England, through a feminist lens and cast the temperamental heartthrob as a heartless villain.
In 2015, when The Guardian published its list of the 100 best novels written in English, Jane Eyre was No. 12. “Its great breakthrough was its intimate dialogue with the reader,” the London newspaper declared. It even made it PBS’s list of America’s 100 most-loved books.
Numerous film adaptations reflect its enduring cultural impact, from a 1914 silent short to the critically acclaimed 2011 version with Mia Wasikowska as Jane and a suitably moody Michael Fassbender as Rochester.
While modern readers may believe the conflicts in Jane Eyre are so far removed as to be irrelevant, a recent New Yorker piece argues its germaneness in COVID-19 times, given its depictions of typhus and the role of social distancing.
Hear Marilyn Lightstone bring this classic to life on her new podcast Marilyn Reads.
Photos by Stock Montage/Getty Images (English novelist Charlotte Bronte, circa 1840); Hulton Archive/Getty Images (The first page of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, 1846)
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Chances are good that even if you haven’t read the classic gothic novel Jane Eyre, you’ve heard its most oft-quoted lines. “Reader, I married him” is arguably one of the most famous sentences in English literature.
When the book was first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography edited by Currer Bell – the male pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë – it became an instant bestseller. Many readers assumed the story of the young governess falling for her brooding master, Edward Rochester, with his mad wife locked in the attic, to be true. It set all of London reading and speculating about the author’s identity – the modern day equivalent of going viral – and was such a sensation that the publisher commissioned a second printing in just three months.
The genius of Jane Eyre, with its clever political and social commentary layered into a suspenseful romance, has inspired legions of devoted fans as well as other writers. In January, U.S. author Rachel Hawkins will add to the Jane Eyre genre with The Wife Upstairs, which features Jane as a broke dog-walker in Birmingham, Alabama who falls for the recently widowed and very rich Eddie Rochester. The canon also includes Jean Rhys’s ground-breaking 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel of sorts, since it imagined the story of Rochester’s wife, a beautiful Creole woman he married in Jamaica and took back to England, through a feminist lens and cast the temperamental heartthrob as a heartless villain.
In 2015, when The Guardian published its list of the 100 best novels written in English, Jane Eyre was No. 12. “Its great breakthrough was its intimate dialogue with the reader,” the London newspaper declared. It even made it PBS’s list of America’s 100 most-loved books.
Numerous film adaptations reflect its enduring cultural impact, from a 1914 silent short to the critically acclaimed 2011 version with Mia Wasikowska as Jane and a suitably moody Michael Fassbender as Rochester.
While modern readers may believe the conflicts in Jane Eyre are so far removed as to be irrelevant, a recent New Yorker piece argues its germaneness in COVID-19 times, given its depictions of typhus and the role of social distancing.
Hear Marilyn Lightstone bring this classic to life on her new podcast Marilyn Reads.
Photos by Stock Montage/Getty Images (English novelist Charlotte Bronte, circa 1840); Hulton Archive/Getty Images (The first page of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, 1846)