I am about halfway through chapter 21 now, and I am discovering things that I missed when I first read this book in high school.
First, I had remembered Jane as very prim and proper after her stay in Lowood. I have used the word Quakerish to describe her, because that’s a word that’s often used to describe her in the book. But as I said in Part I, Jane has a very strong personality underneath her public face. A large part of the chapters between 11 and 21 are Jane’s thoughts about restlessness, her fierce love of Mr. Rochester, and her imagination. I used to be surprised that Mr. Rochester could fall in love with Jane, but I’m not surprised by it any more. She is the perfect foil for him.
Second, and I was probably not educated enough to spot this before, but this book is a lot more than a Gothic romance with a loony in the attic or a proto-Dickensian work about an orphan who triumphs. There’s a lot of Romanticism here. For one, Rochester and Jane both share a love of wild and lonely places. Rochester and Jane, our protagonists, have strong wills and passions. Rochester in particular is willing to throw off society’s rules in pursuit of his goals. Some of the least sympathetic characters in this stretch of the novel are the characters who are all artifice and no soul—notably Blanche Ingram. The characters who have my sympathy are the ones who feel mostly deeply—Rochester and Jane.
More fun next time, when I will probably get to the bit where the shit hits the fan.