I am so pleased to introduce Maggie, an author I’ve been chatting to in a small writers’ group. When I asked her if there was a book that changed her life, she told me all about Jane Eyre. Now, if you’ve read any of my books, you’ll realise this is not my genre. But when she began to explain, I couldn’t resist. So, dear subscriber, meet the delightful Maggie Richell-Davies…
With little spare money for books when I was growing up, I haunted the local library (using my mother’s ticket) and begged for book tokens as presents.
An early birthday treasure was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with its introduction to the moody, broody Fairfax Rochester and his collision (I use the word advisedly) with a disadvantaged young governess who astonishes him by considering herself his spiritual equal.
Jane had a hard life, being orphaned, then taken in unwillingly by an aunt lacking the charity to care for her who, instead, sent her to a harsh school run by a clerical hypocrite. Daunted, but not crushed, she emerges as an educated young woman eager to explore the outside world. Advertising for a position, she finds herself in a grand house that conceals a secret of gothic proportions. She also finds herself presented with almost irresistible physical temptation.
The story of Jane Eyre is widely known, from films as well as from the book, but for those who have somehow missed it, I will refrain from further spoilers – except to say that this novel, written in a Yorkshire parsonage in the days of Queen Victoria, has much to say to a modern reader.
The book was the first one to teach me about strong women. That they didn’t have to be Boudicca or Elizabeth Tudor, capable of leading men into battle. That they could be seemingly ‘ordinary’ creatures who made something significant of often narrow lives.
‘Miss Eyre, are you ill,’ said Bessie, highlighting the child’s awkward place in her aunt’s house: she is not a servant, yet nor is she mistress of anything except herself. Young women ‘of the middling short’ in Victorian England had few opportunities other than marriage, teaching someone else’s (often spoiled) children, or becoming companion to a demanding dowager. Yet Jane Eyre uses her experience of cruelty and loneliness to strengthen her natural independence of spirit.
The book takes the reader from a harsh, even cruel, charity school for girls, to the frustrations of a woman yearning for more than society will allow her.
Its language is exceptional, almost poetic:
“Jane, be still; don’t struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.”
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will...”
Jane’s strength of character helps her make a heart-wrenching decision after falling in love with someone beyond her reach, finding that love returned, but discovering that it is forbidden. Her courage, principles and aspirations remain an example even in the 21st century.
While Jane’s creator, Charlotte Bronte, sounds happy with her own eventual marriage to the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, she discovers it has a cost: her husband may be loving, but turns a disapproving eye on her confiding correspondence with a female friend:
“Arthur has been glancing over this note. He thinks I have written too freely…”
If I am left with one sadness about the book, it is because I cannot imagine the spirited Jane allowing Rochester to censor her correspondence.
Jane Eyre changed my life in that my own story – The Servant – was inspired by a visit to London’s Foundling Museum and the stories I discovered there about other disadvantaged young women in the 18th Century.
Set in 1765, young Hannah may be the granddaughter of a French merchant and the daughter of a Spitalfields silk weaver, but she has come down in the world. Sent as maidservant to a disgraced aristocrat, she finds herself in a house of mysteries, with auctions being held behind closed doors. Unknown to her employers, she can read.
But when she uses her education to uncover the secrets of the house, she finds herself in danger…
The eBook of The Servant is on special 99p offer during September on Amazon or is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
Follow Maggie on Social Media:
Twitter: @maggiedavieswr1
Instagram: maggiedavieswriting
Tiktok: maggiedavies999
A timely reminder in the Me Too world of how Victorian women fought to be independent and respected.
Thank you for the opportunity to introduce some Victoriana into the exciting cut and thrust of your Roman world, Alistair...