Thursday, February 07, 2002
Last night I got sucked back into Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a book I first read when I was just eight years old and have reread countless times since. It has never lost its appeal for me. Even almost twenty years later the words leap from the page with fresh poignancy...ah, me...
'I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me - because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction - because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady...who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation...There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy...But I was not jealous: or very rarely - the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word...she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness...Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character...this guardedness of his...this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever-torturing pain arose...I felt he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him that treasure. This was the point - this was where the nerve was touched and teased - this was where the fever was sustained and fed: she could not charm him.'
'I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me - because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction - because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady...who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation...There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy...But I was not jealous: or very rarely - the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word...she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness...Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character...this guardedness of his...this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever-torturing pain arose...I felt he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him that treasure. This was the point - this was where the nerve was touched and teased - this was where the fever was sustained and fed: she could not charm him.'
