Friday Memories of Books that Shook My World
While I will be devoting a special post next week to the late Gloria Steinem, I examine today a work that helped open me up to feminism’s message. I can remember exactly where I was when I first sat down to read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
The year was 1965 and I was a first-year cadet at the Sewanee Military Academy. The school library had the 1943 edition of Bronte’s novel, featuring the haunting woodcuts of Fritz Eichenberg, and my attention was captured by the cover illustration. Featuring tormented orphans walking two by two (as in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline, which I loved as a child), it spoke instantly to something deep inside me, prompting me to pull the book off the shelf.
Although it was a hot September afternoon—no air conditioning—I lost myself in the sad story of orphaned Jane, who is first bullied by her cousin John and then punished for rebelling against him and his mother. Things go from bad to worse as she is imprisoned in a room, has a fainting fit, is cross-examined by the tyrannical hypocrite Rev. Brocklehurst, and is shipped off to Lowood school. There she is first publicly humiliated but then comforted by headmistress Miss Temple and befriended by the saintly Helen Burns. Eventually she becomes a teacher herself and then a governess in a haunted house.
I don’t know how much of this I read on that first day, but it was enough to hook me. Realizing that my mother had a copy of the same edition (which is now in my possession), I continued reading it at home. I remember hoping that Jane would marry Rochester (despite the bigamy), fearing that she would marry St. John, and savoring the “Reader, I married him” ending.
Looking back, I think I was drawn to the cover illustration because I didn’t want to be in a military school, even though it offered the best high school education in the area. (It was associated with the University of the South.) First-year cadets were constantly being hazed so that one had to ask permission to enter the common area; refer to older students as “sir”; undergo constant uniform inspections; and drill several times a week. I once was thrown up against a locker for saying something wrong. No wonder I identified with Jane.
Not that identifying with girl protagonists was new for me. In fact, I preferred Mary in The Secret Garden to Tom Sawyer, Alice to Penrod and Mowgli, Wendy to Peter. Jane, however, hit with particular force.
One reason was her special energy: she stands up for herself even though everything is stacked against her. Wanting nothing more than to retreat into a book that she is reading, she is dragged out and assaulted by her male cousin. I cheered as she fought back:
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first—”
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud.
When Jane goes into full rebellion, I was there for it:
I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
I myself didn’t rebel against military life—not, at least, until my senior year, when I published an underground newspaper—but Jane acted out my fantasy.
I now know how shocking Jane’s rebellion was to certain 19th century readers. As I note in my book, reviewer Elizabeth Rigby called the book unchristian, unladylike, and communist. She even came to the defense of Jane’s aunt and Rev. Brocklehurst, saying of young Jane, “It pleased God to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless—yet she thanks nobody and least of all Him.” Other reviewers agreed the book was unladylike, with the Christian Remembrancer (April 1848) castigating the book for its “masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression.”
Jane Eyre was published at a time—1847—when revolution was in the air, which is one reason why it elicited such strong reactions. (The following year revolutions would break out all over Europe and Marx and Engels would pen The Communist Manifesto.) It was within this context that readers read such a passage as the following:
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
It wasn’t only Jane’s longing for freedom that unsettled Victorian readers. Lucasta Miller, in her book The Bronte Myth, points out that by foregrounding a woman’s individual psyche—“unheard of in the novel at the time”—Jane Eyre was revolutionary:
Charlotte had found a way of relocating the Romantic individualism that had shaped her literary ambitions in the outcast figure of the small, plain, shabby-genteel governess, the social persona into which she herself had often felt boxed. Instead of trying to emulate male writers in her quest for literary identity, she had found a path of her own, distinct from the exhibitionism of a Byron. Disbarred by her gender from the public posturing of the man of genius, she instead poured her egoism into a new and specifically female form of self-expression. In Jane, she let out the pent-up emotions of a woman who feels the world against her, and in doing so she indicted the society that had told her to suppress her passions and ambitions in the interests of womanly duty.
Little wonder that when I encountered the feminist movement at Carleton College, I would instantly sympathize. I still had a lot to learn—being male came with many privileges, which I didn’t discard all at once—but a novel I read in high school had set me on the right path.
Memories of Books That Shook My World
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)
