Reader, I married him.

One of the most famous lines in English literature; a happy end to a gruesome tale of love, deception, morality, cruelty, redemption, etc. etc….you get the picture. I could almost write the blurb for the movie preview, One plain orphaned woman…one wealthy gentleman in need of a governess…

I remember the elegant, illustrated green-bound volumes on my parents’ bookshelf, a set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; I must have been eight or nine, and although I was intrigued by the woodcut engravings, the text was impossibly difficult for my childish brain, saturated as it was with Nancy Drew stories and other easy reading. It was the illustrations which had drawn me, but they were vaguely menacing, too adult, pictures of a world I wasn’t ready for.

Nor was I ready at age 12, when our eighth-grade English teacher set Jane Eyre as the first text of my first semester in a new school. I was still into pre-adolescent detective stories, and although Jane Eyre is a thriller in its own unique way, it was not the kind I felt drawn toward. I struggled, my grades were mediocre, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Jane was boring, Mr. Rochester was creepy, and as for that woman in the attic…they just weren’t cool.

And so for four decades I have ignored one of English literature’s best-loved novels, until the other night, when a new Channel Four/PBS miniseries aired/eyred, although there have been no less than four big and small screen adaptations since my miserable half-hearted eighth-grade read, none of which I had seen. Reader, did it really take me so long to grow up and appreciate the qualities of this classic gothic novel, and above all, of its characters? And this is only the miniseries I am basing my revised judgment on. I must, and will, go back to the novel itself.

Because Jane Eyre has it all. Someone said once, about Jane Eyre, It never gets better than this, and I can see why, in a way, certainly from a woman’s point of view. And despite all the changes in women’s status over the last 150 years—and it is sobering to be reminded of the dearth of options available to an unmarried woman in 1847—the archetypes remain, the emotional barriers, misunderstandings, hopes and disappointments; they are all there, brilliantly expressed and resolved.

Jane is plain. That we know; she is a governess who wears frumpy gray dresses and a strict, simple hairstyle, in an era hardly flattering to women who need extra help from fashion and hairstyles. She has no dowry and few hopes of ever marrying. She is the antithesis of the beautiful heroines of the era, the Elizabeth Bennetts and Becky Sharps or even her “cousin” Catherine Earnshaw. Therefore, any woman who has ever honestly looked herself in the mirror and admitted to being plain, or not beautiful, feels sympathy with Jane: she will long for an unavailable man, will be overlooked because she is neither beautiful nor even rich, will watch as the man she loves courts a beautiful society girl: a fate many women suffer in silence to this day.[1] All Jane can do—and this she does so well—is be herself.

But Charlotte Brontë, under the guise of a man, is able to play God, and her God is a feminist: she has a twist in store for Jane. Although the object of Jane’s affections, Mr. Rochester, displays all the traits of a typical, good-looking upper-class male scoundrel, he is also in possession of something he honors and respects: a heart. Granted, we are in the thick of 19^th century Romanticism, where emotions reign supreme: Rochester has emotions and he recognizes that he feels something for Jane. It is neither the sexual desire he had for the unhappy (and beautiful) first Mrs. Rochester, nor is it the calculating proprietorial desire he entertains for the (beautiful) Miss Ingram he hopes to install as the second Mrs. Rochester. Jane is his kindred spirit, the person for whom he would try to lead a better life, the woman who would truly care for him as a spiritual, if not social, equal.

But there is the slight inconvenience of an already existing Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic—is this a subliminal suggestion from the Brontë gods that to marry for beauty is to court trouble? Jane is not willing to live with Mr. Rochester as his mistress—it was bad enough being a governess. Without beauty or money, all a woman had left was her reputation.

So Jane flees, accepts her disappointment, wanders the moors, is rescued, begins a new life. Comes up in the world, is made a schoolteacher, inherits a sizeable amount of money. The gods are good to her after all. Until the day she believes she hears Mr. Rochester calling to her.

What she does not know is that the madwoman has made the ultimate literary sacrifice, flinging herself from the roof of Thornfield Hall after setting the place on fire. Mr. Rochester has been blinded and crippled in the fire; Jane goes to him and, contrary to his expectations, of course she still loves him and wants to care for him. And what man has not wished to be loved for all his faults and physical shortcomings, too, in the way that Jane loves her Edward?

Still, despite the happy end, one wonders why Charlotte Brontë had to disfigure—or punish— Mr. Rochester before she could give him to Jane. Was she only too painfully aware in 1847 of what science is even now beginning to prove regarding the purpose of beauty? (Never mind the constant barrage of reminders from the modern media—though no doubt there were equivalent reminders in the 19^th century.) Was this the only way for beauty to cease to be an issue?

I shall give the last word to Mr. Rochester—or to Charlotte Brontë in her capacity as fictional god, for these lines surely sum up what every woman wishes every man could or would feel for a woman. I may be a pessimist or even a cynic, but I feel fairly certain that Rochester’s words are those of a woman, his creator, born of her own frustration with her female condition and her desire to find more of a common ground with men, and make them better human beings:

“Because,” he said [to Jane], “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

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[1] An actress in a TV series called “Ugly Betty” recently accepted her Golden Globe award in tears of gratitude also on behalf, she said, of all the female viewers who could sympathize with her character…Nuff said.