Friday, April 25, 2025

Readers, they love her!

 Those of my readers who love literature, especially English literature, would instantly recognise that the title of our blog today is a take-off on one of the most famous last lines in world literature. Yes, typically literature enthusiasts love the first lines of many literary texts. But some authors have the powerful appeal that holds their readers till the last line which they make simply (in all possible senses of this term) memorable.

Charlotte Bronte, whose birth anniversary falls on April 21, is one such author, and  "Reader, I married him" is the last sentence of one of the most loved novels in  world literature, "Jane Eyre" (published in 1847), especially as far as writing by women authors goes.

Charlotte, whose own life was chequered in very many ways, wrote of unusual, independent women when the Victorian era she wrote in idolised the "angel by the hearth" as the female role model. Yes, her heroines are truly unusual. They are not raging beauties. Nor do they come from highly connected, richie-rich families.

Yet these women are exceptionally  intelligent and truly ethical. However difficult may be their circumstances, these otherwise sweet, straightforward women refuse to compromise on their principles. In other words, Charlotte chooses to make her women characters lovable for their inner beauty and strength.

Her eponymous heroine, Jane Eyre, is one of the most interesting and much loved characters in world literature. Orphaned at birth, ill-treated by her maternal aunt and cousins in her early childhood, raised most frugally in an institute for the destitute, she trains herself to be a governess in an era when her own author had to take a pen name to write her story.

Just as she refuses to be the mistress of the man whom she loves and whom she finally marries despite all sorts of emotional travails and financial troubles, she disagrees to be pressurised in to marrying a man whom she does not love, however kosher his proposal might appear to everybody else.

Be it Lucie Snowie of "Villete", and certainly Jane Eyre, Charlotte's authentic heroines, whose stories she passionately narrated in unusual literary forms, have influenced generations of readers and women writers such as Jean Rhys whose "Wide Sargasso Sea" opens up Charlotte's vamp, Bertha Mason in "Jane Eyre", most interestingly from the post-colonial perspective. Hence the relevance of her novels written roughly two hundred years ago!

Pratima@ Literature indeed is the best teacher. No wonder, it is said, "Vyasochchishtam jagat sarvam", that is to say, there is nothing in this world that Vyas Muni, the arch author, did not deal with. 


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