Lifelong Favorite

Jane Eyre 
by Charlotte Brontë

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”  ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

This novel is one of my lifetime favorites. I have read and reread it starting when I was in junior high and again in college and since.  I am not sure why I have not written about it here before but this seems like a propitious moment since it was on this day in 1847 that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published.  The reviews were mixed.  William Thackeray, who wrote Vanity Fair, called it "the masterwork of a great genius." One reviewer said: "This is not merely a work of great promise; it is one of absolute performance. It is one of the most powerful domestic romances which have been published for many years."  However, many reviews were negative and some were focused on trying to figure out who had written Jane Eyre, and especially whether the author was a man or a woman. Charlotte Brontë had published the book under the androgynous pseudonym Currer Bell, the same one she had used a year earlier when she published poems by her and her sisters, Emily and Anne. She changed Charlotte to Currer Bell, Emily to Ellis Bell, and Anne to Acton Bell.
Charlotte decided to publish the poems after she accidentally found some poems that Emily had written, and the three sisters realized that they had all been writing poems secretly for years. When she published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in 1846, only two copies sold. But she submitted Jane Eyre for publication the next year. It was rejected five times, and then she sent it to Smith, Elder, and Co., her eventual publishers. She sent it with a note that said: It is better in future to address Mr. Currer Bell, under cover to Miss Brontë, Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire, as there is a risk of letters otherwise directed not reaching me at present.
They agreed to publish it, and it became a huge success, and, a little more than a century later it became one of my earliest favorites, a novel that I would read and reread my whole life.  I am not sure what my original fascination was although the mystery and sinister nature of the boarding school Jane attended was riveting - a different world.  
 The story is of Jane's suffering, first under Mrs. Reed who treats her poorly and then at Lowood the boarding school she is sent to. Jane develops a strong character and excels in her studies. This novel as all the aspects of the traditional bildungsroman and that is one of the reasons I enjoyed reading it. Jane eventually takes position as governess and it is at this point that the novel develops into a romance for she finds a job working for Mr. Rochester teaching a young French girl named Adele at Thornfield. As she teaches there a while, she falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and he falls in love with her. Needless to say there are several more changes in her life before the novel ends, but it never grows old as Bronte's tale seems to inhabit my being more closely than most others.  Perhaps it is the complexity of what seems to be a simple romance; the way Bronte is able to combine the story of the growth of a young girl with a love story that has Gothic overtones.  This was my introduction to classic British literature.

View all my reviews

Faustian Bargain

The Picture of 

Dorian Gray 

by Oscar Wilde

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”  ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of classic Gothic fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It is also a classic example of the Victorian novel and one of those books that can effect the reader in a powerful and unique way. The idea of selling your soul to the devil, like Faust as related by Marlowe, Goethe and others is an image that intrigues the modern reader. But there is in Wilde's version of this story a focus on the purity of innocence (as seen in the passage quoted above) that is lost as one lives a life, whether filled with licentiousness or mere everyday experience.

The plot narrates the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian (whimsically) expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than he. Wilde gives the story his own imprimatur with the artistic twist and thus adds to the evidence of his genius that includes the drama, stories, poetry and criticism that he created.

View all my reviews

Midnight 

by Julien Green

"The girl did not stir; for the last few seconds she had divined the great invisible presence which had invaded the house, and her hands grew cold. Then there rose up a long, bitter cry which terrified them because it was not the voice of anyone they knew, but merely the howl of despair which rises every moment in some part of the world and greets the presence of Death." (p 124)




With Minuit (Midnight) and Le Visionnaire (The Dreamer) two years earlier Green's novels delved into a dreamlike world of battle between good and evil, passion and reason. While these novels picture French provincial life in critical light, some critics see them as more complex than the typical anti-bourgeois novel. The psychology of evil and a sort of metaphysical boredom becomes the source of revolt, not social facts. In Midnight one finds a poetic evocation of the mystery of secrets in a dream. The author, in the preface, describes it as an answer to The Dreamer.


Julien Green was a French-American novelist and playwright, whose works are connected to the tradition of (Roman Catholic) psychological realism and also show the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and the American regional style known as Southern Gothic. Green's central subjects were self-destruction, religion, and sexuality. The stories were usually set in French provincial towns and depicted the lives of neurotic characters, who are tormented by their sensual greed, sins, and fears. Green preferred French to English as the language in which he published his works. In 1939 Green converted to Roman Catholicism for the second time. The first time was 1915 after which he became a Buddhist. Green's early religious tensions are seen in the title of his first published work, Pamphlet contre les catholiques de France (1924). Green is generally seen as writing in the Gothic romance tradition and in this novel you can see signposts that point toward his later, and better, work. From French writers Green was closest to Georges Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest) and François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of Therese Desqueyroux and The Desert of Love among others.






View all my reviews