A masterclass in prose

According to Collider, Jane Eyre is one of '5 Classic Books That Are a Masterclass in Prose'.

'Jane Eyre' (1847)

I think Jane Eyre was my first "oh wow!" read as a kid, and what I remember most is not Rochester, Thornfield, or even the woman in the attic. I remember Jane. Charlotte Brontë gives a poor, plain, orphaned girl the kind of interior authority nineteenth-century literature was not exactly handing out freely, and Jane uses every bit of it. When Rochester tries to contain her, she answers, "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will." The sentence itself refuses containment: one declaration pushes into its next iteration until Jane has talked herself all the way from metaphor to a plain statement of freedom.

That's why Brontë's prose feels so immediate nearly two centuries later. Jane turns a conversation into an existential crisis because the real drama is whether she will betray herself to get something she desperately wants, and Brontë lets us consider every bit of the argument. Jane also talks directly to the reader, collapsing the distance between the girl experiencing the story and the woman who survived long enough to tell it, giving the novel an intimacy that feels startlingly modern. Even when the novel gets wildly Gothic, the prose keeps returning us to one stubborn consciousness asking what she owes herself. Love is important, but so is dignity, and Jane does not simply want Rochester; she wants him without having to disappear inside him. (Linda Chavers)

Sun-Sentinel reviews Unspeakable Things’ by Elizabeth Hand.

Elizabeth Hand spins a well-plotted Gothic tale with echoes of “Wuthering Heights” and Daphne du Maurier’s classic novels in her moody historical “Unspeakable Things.” (Oline H. Cogdill)

The University of Utah features a student of piano performance who 

learned [...] a lot of Paul Gordon, who’s written musicals like Jane Eyre and Daddy Long Legs. His piano parts sit strangely well in my hands.