What a joy it is to be captured again by Jane Eyre

Cathy Salter devotes today her column in The Columbia Tribune entirely to the Brontës. It's such a nice article that we have been unable to edit it:

It’s spring, and I’m out walking again. On winter days when chill winds were about, I chose instead to walk my way through our film library on the treadmill in our basement. It was while there that I reconnected with Charlotte Brontë and her extraordinary family.
Searching a shelf stocked with classics, I pulled out a video of "Jane Eyre," starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. For the next hour, I found myself walking in the very world that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s writing and that of her sisters, Emily and Anne. In this 1944 black-and-white film, the wind-swept moors of West Yorkshire are as alive with foreboding and mystery as the dark hallways and stone tower of Thornfield Hall.
Fascinated by the story, I then read the novel, which I learned was published in London in 1847 by an "unknown and unrecommended" writer by the name of Currer Bell.
When "Jane Eyre" took London by storm and went into its second printing, readers who had assumed the author was a man learned that the novel had been written by Charlotte Brontë - the sister of Emily Brontë, who had just published "Wuthering Heights" under the name Ellis Bell. Readers in England and America were captured by the Brontë sisters’ stories then, and I have been captured just as completely 160 years later.
There is a timelessness about the Brontë sisters’ passionate and beautifully written novels. Recently, I was reading an article on the subject of change in the April 2007 issue of "More" magazine. There were quotes on the subject by three women - Maya Angelou, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Emily Brontë. Brontë wrote: "I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have changed my ideas. They’ve gone through me … like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
When I enter the world of Jane Eyre and Thornfield Hall - the estate of Edward Rochester, who has employed Jane Eyre as a governess - there is no leaving it until the story is done. The cover opens, the tale begins, and once again I walk with Eyre and Rochester on the grounds of his estate or stand alongside Jane as she looks out from a massive rock outcropping worn smooth and round from the relentless wind that never ceases to blow across the treeless moors.
It is to this wild place, not far from the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, that readers are taken by the lives of the characters in Charlotte’s novel, "Jane Eyre," and Emily Brontë’s "Wuthering Heights."
On the moors, it is said that visitors to the Brontë Museum hear the voices of these extraordinary sisters and the characters they created long ago with their pens - Edward Rochester’s anguished call across the miles heard by Jane Eyre and, in "Wuthering Heights," Heathcliff’s tortured walks on the moors in search of the ghost of his soul mate, Cathy.
Recently, Kit and I watched a 2007 PBS Masterpiece Theater production of "Jane Eyre," and we’ve each re-read the novel. Kit has checked out "Jane Eyre," the unabridged audio book on
12 tapes, from the Daniel Boone Regional Library. And I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s acclaimed biography, "The Life of Charlotte Brontë," which was published in 1857, two years after Charlotte’s death.

The preface to Gaskell’s biography begins: "The dour parsonage of Haworth, on the edge of the moors in the North of England, sheltered early in the nineteenth century a family of doomed children touched by genius. There were Charlotte, who wrote ‘Jane Eyre’; Emily, who wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’; their sister, Anne, also a published writer; and in the background of all their lives, the brooding and wastrel brother, Branwell, who might have become a great painter."
The tragic story of the Brontë family, as told in Gaskell’s memoir to Charlotte, is richly illustrated with sketches of the Brontës and their world.

Like the fictional Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters were rarely idle. After walks together on the moors where tales took shape in their heads, the sisters would scribble prose on scraps of paper and then read their developing dramas aloud to each other late into the night.
These amazing women - Charlotte, Emily and Anne - had no public library, no Internet, no typewriter and no computer. They had no electricity. Their only heat was from the parsonage fireplace. What they knew of the world they learned from books in their father’s personal library and experiences in their own lives. Until their novels were published, they had never traveled to London.
Their novels are among the most passionate in the English language, and yet, of the six Brontës, only Charlotte would marry -tragically, just nine months before her untimely death at the age of 39.

Next week, Boone Countians decide whether to support the Daniel Boone Regional Library’s plans to branch out. What a joy it is to be captured again and again by great literature. What a treasure a local branch library in Ashland and in northern Boone County can be for generations of readers to come.

It's not the first time that Cathy Salter exposes her Brontëite nature :P.

Categories: In the News, Jane Eyre