Lucy hasn’t been as popular as Jane, perhaps because she is so incredibly prickly, so deeply unlikeable an unreliable narrator who locks the reader out, a heroine who refuses to be a heroine. This was the novel that made Matthew Arnold say Charlotte’s mind contained nothing but “hunger, rebellion and rage”. “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm” she says and we know she is lying through her teeth, and it is that conflict that makes us keep on reading. In Villette, Charlotte went back to what she did best, creating a heroine, Lucy Snowe, whose lust and fury are perpetually at war with her vehement attempts to be cool, unruffled. And neither Shirley nor Caroline inspires the same devotion as Jane or Cathy. When Charlotte tried to simplify things in Shirley, giving all the passion to one heroine and all the denial to another, she drained the life out of both. They are messy, flawed and difficult and all the better for it. One reason the Brontë heroines have stood the test of time is because they are such fun to argue about. And yet (and I confess that for a long time, Cathy was the only heroine for me) love sometimes feels that way. And it’s hard not to love her when she asks Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” Or when she insists she is talking to him “as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal – as we are!” It’s a stark contrast to Cathy’s declaration “I am Heathcliff!” which makes love sound like a rather terrifying merging, a loss of self. Her demands for justice and for happiness seem just as authentic, as vital, as urgent as they did to Woolf and, perhaps, to Charlotte herself.Īnd Jane is so bold! She is clever, and not afraid to show it. Think of the drawing-room, even, those ‘white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers’, that ‘pale Parian mantelpiece’ with its Bohemia glass of ‘ruby red’ and the ‘general blending of snow and fire’– what is all that except Jane Eyre?”Īnother hundred years have gone by, and Jane feels just as present. Think of the moor, and again there is Jane Eyre. “Think of Rochester,” wrote Woolf, “and we have to think of Jane Eyre. How had she written a novel that still seemed so fresh after so many years? The secret was, she decided, the heroine, who pervaded every line and every image.

She was worried it would seem antiquated, but instead, she was so absorbed and exhilarated she couldn’t put it down, and when she did, she wondered how Charlotte had done it. A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf sat down to re-read Jane Eyre for Charlotte Brontë’s centenary.

Novel written by charlotte bronte