Book 15 - Regarding Jane Eyre

More Jane Eyre folks! I promise I am almost done with the topic.

Regarding Jane Eyre is a collection of writers' responses to Jane Eyre. It's an eclectic little collection, containing excerpts from various biographies on Bronte, some literary criticism, and some fictional writing as well. It's an Australian publication edited by Susan Geason, and several of the texts had a distinctly Australian flavour.

Here's a quick rundown of what's included: an excerpt from the Bronte biographies of Gaskell and Lyndall Gordon; an article on what boarding school was really like at the time (the stories are chilling), a psychologist's analysis of the child abuse and recovery that Jane experienced, questions about where Jane's rage went after Lowood; Amy Witting writing the ongoing story of a very minor character; and Morag Fraser relating the complex relationships of fathers and lovers to her own modern family. I will talk about the other three texts in a little depth as they had more of an impact.

My favourite article was janeyre@window by Carmel Bird (click the title to read the full text online, it's worth it). She has terrific fun identifying all the recurring symbolic motifs within the text - from red, fire and windows to Jane's inherent materialism revealed in an ongoing obsession with describing the furniture of a room. I love recurring motifs and teasing out their possible significance, it's what draws me to poetry as well.

Bird envisioned a cd-rom with a hypertext network of links between all these themes - clicking on "window" in the text would take you to all the other references to window etc. This was probably reasonably groundbreaking, given that it was written in 1996 in the early days of the web revolution. It's certainly a great idea and if it's been done I would like to know about it.

The strangest text was Jean Bedford's Crown me with Roses Pastiche, a somewhat bizarre modern re-imagining of the story where Gateshead is a commune, Lowood is an abusive cult and Thornfield a solitary outback homestead. Let's just say that the ending is nowhere near as positive as in the original text!

The last text, a series of letters by Jean Rhys, actually leads me to her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which I think deserves an entirely separate review. So sorry, you will have to put up with Jane Eyre for one more post!

My final take on Regarding Jane Eyre: overall I felt there was a bit of an obsession with Jane's childhood and the boarding school, and Rochester suffered significantly under the withering gaze of modern feminism. But nevertheless it is quite a refreshing way to dig deeper into a text without having to resort to the traditional and not always reader-friendly literary criticism.