30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some fresh insights into Becoming Jane Eyre, December 5, 2009
This review is from: Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Halfway through Sheila Kohler's biographical novel Becoming Jane Eyre, I decided to reread the Charlotte Bronte original novel on which Kohler's book is at least partially based. Side by side I read Kohler and Bronte to get a better sense of Kohler's achievement with her novel. This was a good decision on my part because I was able to learn much about Charlotte Bronte in Kohler's novel that helped me appreciate Charlotte's achievement with Jane Eyre, surely one of the most popular of Victorian novels.
Kohler shows us how Charlotte Bronte's life contributed to her art, first with the unsuccessful first novel The Professor, and then with the very popular Jane Eyre. Additionally, we learn about Charlotte Bronte's family: father, son Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne. All three sisters spend the lonely hours in their father's parsonage on the moors writing novels. They send them to various publishers only to be politely rejected, until Emily's Wuthering Heights - a great novel - and Anne's Agnes Gray find a publisher willing to print the books if the girls send fifty pounds to underwrite the project. This modest success of her sisters motivates Charlotte to finish Jane Eyre and it immediately becomes highly successful, changing Charlotte's life forever.
I asked myself several times during the reading of Becoming Jane Eyre about the potential audience for such a book and concluded that it will be for all those people interested in learning more about Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, and the Bronte family. I think this audience will not be disappointed in Kohler's work. The Bronte children lived short, mostly unhappy lives - Branwell, Emily, and Anne were dead by their late twenties or early thirties. Charlotte did not live much longer, but as Kohler points out toward the end of her novel, Charlotte did marry happily, even if it lasted less than a year.
Any reader of this review, who decides to read Becoming Jane Eyre and has not read Charlotte Bronte's great original creation, will almost certainly get a copy and not be disappointed with the story of one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. In Becoming Jane Eyre the reader learns that Jane's creator was herself a heroine and one of the important novelists of Victorian England.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Couldn't Put It Down, December 28, 2009
This review is from: Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I approached this book with skepticism as I didn't like the title (and still don't) and I'm leery and weary of books spinning off the brilliance of the Brontes and Austen. (If I see one more book continuing the story of Darcy and Elizabeth, I'll scream.) But as a total Brit. Lit. fan, I found the premise of this book engaging enough to give it a try, though I was expecting to throw in the towel before getting 20 pages in. How surprised I was to find this tale told in sparkling prose with a deep respect for the Brontes that kept me turning pages fervently until the end. I positively devoured this book in a few hours. The author's fictional voice of Charlotte Bronte charmed me utterly. I'm ashamed to admit that although I'm familiar with most of the "major" facts about the Bronte family, I've never read an entire scholarly biography of any of them. This book filled in the framework and made it warm and human. It made me feel as if I had gained a true understanding of what Charlotte and her family and situation were like. Of course, this is a work of fiction, but I felt that the author took very few liberties and stuck to the facts as they are known and generally accepted. She didn't throw in any wild surprises to make Bronte's life more interesting. Rather she told her story in a voice that seemed sincere and authentic and fleshed out the facts with real emotion. I think this is a very well done book that any Jane Eyre or Bronte fan will be glad to have read.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable, quiet read for Bronte fans, December 12, 2009
This review is from: Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I should start out by saying that I am not a die-hard Jane Eyre fan. As a teenager, I went through my Bronte phase, reading
Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights with a wistful desire for a dark and brooding hero (I think most young book-centric girls do, while their not-so-book savvy friends have a horses-are-wonderful phase). But 19th century literature is rarely my first reading choice.
However, there's something about Jane Eyre that inspires people to explore the moor-filled worlds of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte. At least two of the books borne from Jane Eyre have inspired me, though in very different ways. First is Jasper Fforde's
The Eyre Affair (which I heartily recommend as giggle-worthy for anyone as over-educated as I -- really, DO indulge in it). The other is Jean Rhys'
Wide Sargasso Sea, which I read in college. It significantly influenced my own writing (it describes the life of Rochester's mad wife and how she came to be that way -- without ever quite shouting, "I'm the other half of Jane Eyre!") because it taught me to look at a story (real life or otherwise) from different people's viewpoints. And of course there's Kate Bush's song, "Wuthering Heights" (it's on
The Whole Story) to complete the mood. (Really, with all those references you'd think I was seriously into the Brontes.)
As a result of that background, I was attracted to Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre when I saw it in my Amazon Vine selections. I'm glad I read it -- but once was enough.
I like the historical novel, as my knowledge of the Bronte's own history was minimal. I enjoyed the author's exploration of what it means to write, to invent a story, to re-interpret one's daily events into the heroine's experiences (perhaps having her say what one does not dare). Kohler writes well, and she certainly kept me turning pages. I turned them slowly, because this is a quiet read without a lot of derring-do and action scenes (not something you care about, probably, if you're into Jane Eyre), but I certainly kept going.
A few things were a little irksome. I wish the author had stayed in one person's head (presumably Charlotte's) rather than changing viewpoint characters so often. Perhaps I would have enjoyed that more if I was "into" the Bronte family history; then, maybe, the servant's observations about the father-and-daughter relationship would have been enlightening. And while I did like the glimpse into "a writer's life" (that is, the creative process), I rather wished for a better (fictional) enlightenment about Charlotte's moments of writing brilliance. For example, her turning away from the story and writing, "Reader, I married him" is one of the most powerful moments in 19th century fiction, yet Kohler puts most of her attention on plot development.
I also found the ending disappointing, because so many important events are wrapped up in a few chapters. Granted, the story is about *becoming* Jane Eyre (or rather becoming the author of a best-selling book) and those "what came after" events occur once she achieved the goal, but it felt like a cheat. After all those interminable details about writing and being a governess and coping with their brother and so on -- to summarize the sisters' deaths in a few pages? That didn't work for me.
However, I did like the book overall. Like, not love. If you're REALLY into Jane Eyre or any of the Bronte sisters, this is a no-question purchase. If Jane Eyre was an assignment you vaguely recall from a school Required Reading List, I think your enjoyment of this novel will match your appreciation of the Bronte's work (for good or ill). That is, if you remember that you liked the book when you read it, you'll like this too. If it was an "Eww do I HAVE to?!" chore, you won't like this book either.
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