”Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am souless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!” -Jane Eyre.
Ah, what fourteen year old heart could fail to be moved by this impassioned speech? Perhaps we love the Brontes because they taught us how to love, or at least gave us an ideal to strive towards and a sense of self worth. No matter how poor, obscure, plain and little we were, sweltering away in our high school classrooms a world and an age away from the Brontes’ damp parsonage on the Yorkshire Moors, Jane Eyre gave us the possibility of grand love if we stayed true to our own sense of right and wrong, while the life of its author and her sisters showed us that great passion and imagination can exist in lives that are outwardly ordinary.
And if it turns out our true love has a mad wife in the attic….well, the course of true love never did run smooth. But have faith, because it will all work out in the end. Jane Eyre is a classic, for a reason.
