I have always enjoyed reading but had never properly ventured into the realms of the classics. I had only ever been told to reading them at GCSE but when I tried I never could get past the first page. Luckily though, this never happened to me with Jane Eyre and so had no prevvious meeting with the book and so 2 years later at 18, I decided it was time for me to get to grips with these famous books!
I picked Jane Eyre by chance. I had been reading the Princess Diaries series(! lol) and some of the characters had been mentioned in these books and so when I went to the bookshop, decided to start with Jane Eyre!
In the past when I had tried to read classics before, I found that I just could not get into to the book and found them hard to read. I had no such problem with Jane Eyre! It is very easy to read and there is something happening from the very beginning all through the book that grips you straight away and leaves you wanting to know more.
The books starts out with Jane as a child living with her aunt and her children. You really warm to Jane here as she struggles with her relatives apparent complete dislike of her and her struggles growing up in this environment. Things seem no easier for her when she moves to Lowood school, but everywhere she goes she always finds someone kind who she trust which helps her through these times and allows her to remain true to herself.
If im not careful I going to end up basically telling the whole story! So now I will move onto the characters.
I am not going to describe them all in detail but rather tell you what I think makes them stand out by the way their written. You tend to build up a dislike towards alot of the characters from their first apperance, but once you get to know them better, you realise you have judged wrongly and I feel this is a main theme in the book. There are a lot of instances today in modern society where people are judged wrongly and wrong assumptions made and so this relates well to life nowadays. So often we judge a book by its cover and descover we are wrong, but what we can learn from this book is to take time to get to know the truth before we cast our opinions.
Back to the characters! Charlotte Bronte descibes the characters in a way which allows you to picture them so clearly and you feel you know so much about them from so little. I must say that my favourite character (along with most females probably!) has to be Mr Rochester. You just cant help feeling rather attraccted to him and no matter what the books says I just cant not imagine him to be rather good looking!
The book seems to contain rather alot of coincidences which feels rather comforting! There's the fact that the horseman Jane happened to meet was Mr Rochester, the house she stumbled into turned out to be of her relatives and you really get a sense that good things really can happen to everybody in the end.
All through the book you find yourself going through such a range of emotions, from anger and happiness, to complete tear jerking moments of sadness! I must say that I found the last part of the book the saddest but the most happiest aswell, I wont spoil it for people who havent read the book yet, but I just couldn't help crying! All I can say is that I love a book with a happy ending!
Well I said that the main disadvantage of this book is that you want to know more at the end and want the story to continue, but I guess i'll just have to imagine my own what happens next, and I suppose the sign of a good book is always wanting it to continue!
I hope I was able to do this book justice! I've never written a book review before but I hope that this will help you. All I can say now is make sure you read the book!!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: Emotional conflict, Mental anguish, Phyiscal suffering and Spiritual strife Disadvantages: The characters that truly deserve punishment don't get their comeuppance
Feb 16th, 2006
very helpful by (100%):
