I enjoyed Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’ however for some reason found it difficult to pick up, it wasn’t necessarily page turning. ‘Jane Eyre’ follows the younger years of Jane as she goes through charity school and then works as a governess and falls in love, each making up three major arcs in her life. I very much enjoyed her earlier years, heightened by the love of literature presented in these  and then felt the book really slowed down in the middle, this may be down to the fact that I didn’t really like the character of Rochester to some degrees and wasn’t rooting for he and Jane. He is a really interesting character but preferred the story in sections where he was out of the picture.

Jane on the other hand was a narrative voice from an autobiographical perspective. This allowed you to really intimately connect with her as a protagonist and she felt quite real. Though many of her later decisions I don't really agree with it is easy to forget that for the majority of the novel she is only 19 and such perhaps brings context to a lot, despite this she feels very matured. Another character I will bring brief attention to is Jane’s student Adele. The ward of Rochester is a young French girl and all her dialogue was in French. My ignorant brain can’t understand French therefore with it being untranslated in my copy much ended up being missed surrounding Adele. 

Brontë places a lot of emphasis on character and most of whom are really well written and developed, the plot would be extremely lacking if not for this. However, Bertha is crucial to both the plot and literary theory (coining the concept of the ‘madwoman in the attic’) yet is hugely ignored by Brontë and her characters. There is certainly a justification for Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’.