Book rummage – 9: Jane Eyre

The last of the original series, co-written with Jamie Sellers back in Brighton in 2001 or thereabouts. Anyone interested in me continuing this with purchases made on the cheap in Brisbane?

JANE EYRE
by Charlotte Bronte
(Penguin, pub 1847, this edition 1959)
Now this is a novel. Make no mistake. None of your namby-pamby Nick Hornbys or Irvine Welshes, none of your real life survival tales or “I spent three hours as Madonna’s valet” or crap Channel 4 tie-ins. You knew where you were with Jane Eyre. Right from its formidable dedication – “to W M Thackeray esq, this work is respectfully inscribed by the author” – to its imposing reproduction of the Bronte Sisters on the back sleeve, everything about this book screams “NOVEL!” On page 19 of our edition, someone’s been underlining all the adjectives, and you know precisely how they feel. In the 19th Century, you had to pay attention when faced with the printed word. This was the era of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and yes, the aforementioned Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair remains to this day the most dreaded book on an English Lit course, even more so than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and that really is saying something, take it from one who suffered. This is a novel. Bronte never uses one word where three hundred will do, and even if this book never did reach the dizzy heights that her sister Emily achieved posthumously, what with Ms Bush and her frizzy hair, this is most assuredly and unashamedly a NOVEL. Or have we said that already. Don’t for God sake’s attempt to read it.
Cost: 49p
Bargain value: 3 (it’s very common currency)
Cover: 6 (the classic Penguin orange and white)
Author’s authenticity count: 10 (she the woman!)