Happy Birthday, Jane Eyre.

Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre was published on this day in 1847 to some pretty scathing reviews.  It survived the storm, however, to become a perennial favorite, but mostly among women.  A few years ago my wife made me read it for the first time and I was sold.  Here is what I wrote back then.  

In the words of Ms. Eyre, herself:  "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."   

Thanks to my wife and Brontë, you can strike Victorian women novelists from my prejudices.  If you don’t have time to read a 300-page novel, Cary Joji Fukunaga did a fine job directing a film adaptation a couple of years back.   

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