Jane Eyre, published on 16th October 1847, was an instant popular
success. More than 150 years later, it still powerfully affects its
readers with all the charge of a new-minted work. It is easy to
forget, now, how shocking it was to its mid-19th century readers.
Virtually every early reviewer felt obliged either to condemn or
defend its impropriety. As Josie Billington reminds us in this
compelling guide, the most savage reviews denounced the
"coarseness" of language, the "unfeminine" laxity of moral tone,
and the "dereliction of decorum" which made its hero cruel, brutal,
yet attractively interesting, while permitting its plain, poor,
single heroine to live under same roof as the man she loved. What
caused most outrage, perhaps, was the demonstrable rebellious anger
in the heroine's "unregenerate and undisciplined spirit", her being
a passionate law unto herself. "Never was there a better hater.
Every page burns with moral Jacobinism," wrote an early critic. As
the poet Matthew Arnold was to say of Bronte's "disagreeable" final
novel, Villette, "the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger,
rebellion and rage". In this book Josie Billington looks at the
passion and indeed rage which filled Bronte, and shows us that,
though sometimes criticised for melodrama, this is a novel of great
intellectual seriousness, moral integrity and depth of feeling. She
quotes George Henry Lewis: "It is soul speaking to soul; it is an
utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring
spirit.
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