On Reading Jane Eyre

I, like many avid readers, belong to a book club. For the past 3 years the Sisterhood of the Travelling Suitcase has met on a monthly basis for refreshments, fine food and stimulating conversation about our families, our lives and recent reads. The suitcase is our means of sharing books – a sort of portable book shelf. Admittedly we are a little informal but book club gives us a chance to play dress up once a month as we frequent great restaurants and see fabulous plays and movies based on books. At our June meeting it was decided that we would try to read the same book over the summer. This was our second attempt at a “group read”. One of the English teachers in the group suggested Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, assuring us that it was a literary classic. I should have known that I was in trouble when the sales clerk at Chapters, a young lady one third my age and who had piercings in places that I would never, told me that she just loooved it and that all of her Goth friends just like loooved it too!

The introduction by Carol Joyce Oates did little to assuage my fears, “Reader, if you have yet to discover the unique voice of [Bronte] you have a special delight awaiting you”. This sounded similar to the rapture that the Chapter’s employee showed while talking about the book - I wondered if Ms. Oates had Goth friends and piercings too!

For the first 100 pages or so this “special voice” proved an effective cure for insomnia as I could only read a couple and I was sound asleep! I persevered thinking, “oh, but Jane would have been proud of my struggle”! (Jane is a bit of a drama queen). As it turns out the “voice” of this 1847 classic was the problem. I was introduced to words that were foreign to me and sentence structures that caused my eyes to glaze over. Following is a quiz with using just four of the words I found amusing:

1. If someone possesses hardihood, are they a) wealthy; b) stubborn; or c) courageous?

2. A publication that is hebdonadal comes out a) weekly; b) monthly or c) sporadically?

3. Excrescence describes a) rocks; b) mushrooms; c) hair; or d) all of the above?

4. A hierophant refers to a) elephant trainer; b) priest; or c) king?

Hardihood means courageous; hebdomadal is weekly; an excrescence is an outcropping so it may be used to describe rocks, mushrooms or hair; and a hierophant is a priest. It may come as a surprise but all of these words exist in the modern dictionary, and not one of them was on the hit list of the compilers of the Collins dictionary for their obscurity. Incidentally, did you know that the compilers of the dictionary had the power to banish words? Ever wondered where banished words go? I discovered a compendium over 400 lost words – words that were, at some point, used in the English language. Here are a few that relate to writing, they are followed by the years in which they were used:

artigrapher – writer or grammarian (1753)

famigerate – to carry news from abroad (1623 – 1736)

quaeritate – to question or inquire (1657)

snobographer – one who describes or writes about snobs (1848 – 1966)

I did finish Jane Eyre by the end of the summer but you won’t find me giving it a glowing review because as stories go, I thought it was a bit contrived. The best part of the whole experience was that in my frustration with the diction I purchased a very old dictionary in a second hand store. Scratched on the inside cover were the words, “do not steal this stolen book”.