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Whew! I finished this one this morning, and I'm glad I finally read it. I can't say, however, that I enjoyed it, would recommend it, or will ever read it again.
Not in this lifetime, anyway.



For starters, I didn't like Jane. Yeah, when she was a kid I felt sorry for her, but the older she got the less I liked her. Her religious convictions and the decisions she made because of them had Bertha looking like the picture of sanity by comparison. Speaking of, why in the world did she wander off in the middle of the night with no money?
What did she think would happen? Was manna supposed to drop out of heaven?
And I don't buy that an educated, sensible woman would just run off into the night without taking enough with her to make sure she could survive. An idiot would have better sense than that.
But by the end of the story, I was almost wishing she had wandered off after St John and contracted some disease. The fact that she didn't totally realize what an awful freak St John was nailed the lid on her coffin to me. Even at the very end of the book, she kept talking about all of the great works he was doing for God.



Seriously?
He was an ass, and I would have told him to give me my five thousand pounds back!
At least Bronte had the sense to kill him off at the end. Well, maybe he wasn't quite dead yet, but he was on his way to meet his maker. Ugh.
I also thought it was more than just a teeny bit fishy that she ended up on the doorstep of the only family she had in the entire world.
Exactly how likely is that? Not very.



Then there is the man himself, Mr. Rochester. He wasn't anything to write home about for sure. Let's start with the obvious, shall we? He was cold, condescending, secretive. Wow.
Oh yeah, and he was ugly to boot. Yum.



Can anything else be said about him to make him more of a catch? I know! Just in case, let's have him keep a drooling homicidal wife hidden away in the attic!
Personally, I think Bronte had covered all the bases at this point.
Did he honestly not see anything wrong with letting her marry him while he had that crazy bat of a wife locked upstairs? If he had just told her the situation to start with, I might have liked him a little better.
Nah. Probably not. I never actually figured out what she saw in him. My best guess ended up being low self-esteem coupled with a bad childhood.



The 'gothic mystery' part of the plot ended in the middle of the book, and shortly thereafter ended anything remotely interesting. Say what you will about Looney Bertha, but at least she pumped some life into the story.



And wasn't it just awesome that Bertha burned the house to the ground and then leaped to her death? Nice exit big girl! I gotta say, she was by far my favorite. Lest we forget, she also managed to mangle Rochester's good looks even more before she bowed out. Now Jane's man looks like a one-eyed, one-armed, flying purple people eater. Of course, she doesn't mind, because now she feels she can be of use to him.



Jane, I can tell we will never see eye-to-eye on things, so I'll just let it go. Our friendship was never meant to be. For some, you will forever remain the stoic heroine who finally gets her Happily Ever After. For me, you are just a ninny with bad taste in men. As Adele would say, Adieu.
Reader, this review is over.