Becoming Jane Eyre - ISBNLookup.com

Ron Charles

f you know Jane Eyre and love it, don't deny yourself the pleasure of this intense little companion book. South African-born Sheila Kohler…sinks deep into the details of Bronte's life to re-create the atmosphere of her tragic, cloistered family. Parallels between Charlotte and her famous heroine are an irresistible subject of critical inquiry, and even if those parallels are sometimes drawn too baldly in Becoming Jane Eyre, Kohler's novel remains a stirring exploration of the passions and resentments that inspired this 19th-century classic.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

South African Kohler's well-written seventh novel takes the lives of the Brontës: Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and their father, and substitutes imagination for facts. The book opens in 1846 with Charlotte's father recovering from eye surgery in Manchester, England. The narrative follows the internal ragings and musings of Rev. Brontë, the Brontë sisters, the nurse briefly hired to help Charlotte and her father, their own nurse of many years and even the mother of George Smith, the eventual publisher of Jane Eyre. Charlotte's desire for a heroine with more courage than she herself has spills onto the page during the long, lonely hours of her father's convalescence, as she remembers her doomed love for her teacher in Brussels and other hurts and affronts throughout her life. Kohler (Crossways) gives us a more multidimensional, passionate and temperamental Charlotte than most biographies. Too much narration and switching of points of view slows the pace, but connecting the writer with her heroine is intriguing. This novel will likely send fans back to the originals and should inspire those who know “of” the novels to finally read them. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews

Kohler (Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness, 2007, etc.) crafts a character from the creator of one of English literature's most vital protagonists. With Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte helped create a new kind of fiction by combining Gothic sensibility and a boldly unconventional, audaciously realistic heroine. She presented vivid scenes of madness, cruelty and passion rooted in the lived experiences of women who were expected to be tractable, gentle and-above all, perhaps-quiet. The emotional tumult Bronte depicted spilled beyond the pages of her novel: Readers were captivated while critics were horrified. Kohler offers an imaginative recreation of the woman who created this once-scandalous, now beloved classic. Bronte's life was as filled with tragedy as any Romantic protagonist's. Her mother died when she was a girl, and her two eldest sisters died at the harsh boarding school where Charlotte and Emily were also students. While studying in Belgium, Charlotte fell in love with her married teacher. Her brother Branwell's alcoholism, opium addiction and generally dissolute behavior were a constant source of anxiety and sadness for the whole Bronte family. Envisioning how these experiences shaped Charlotte's work, the author does not try to reproduce her subject's fiery prose. Instead, she maintains a calm tone, quiet enough to catch the sound of pencil scratching on paper. Bronte is an ideal subject for examining the intersection of an author's life and work: Writing was, for her, as natural as breathing, but she lived in an era that generally denied women a voice. Kohler's exploration of this paradox is sensitive, intelligent and engaging. A beautiful complement to Bronte's masterpiece.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In Sheila Kohler's masterful re-creation of Charlotte Brontë's struggles to write her landmark Victorian masterpiece, we are introducted to Charlotte as the dutiful daughter sitting at her frail father's bedside as he recovers from eye surgery. Charlotte cherishes the silence as she conjures up the character who would become the immortal Jane Eyre, giving her ?a sprite's name, a fairy's name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth amid hypocrisy, the name of one who sees.?

The unconventional and talented Brontë sisters -- Charlotte, Emily, and Anne -- were budding writers in the 1840s, a time when women's lives were considered unworthy of literary treatment and women were inconceivable as authors. Charlotte has already received harsh rejection letters (?Literature...cannot and should not be the business of a woman's life?). But she was spurred rather than deterred, determined to ?write out of rage, out of a deep sense of her own worth.? The orphaned Jane Eyre, the independent-minded governess at Thornfield Hall who falls in love with her employer, Mr. Rochester, whose wife rants madly in the attic, is drawn from Charlotte's own most painful emotions: her longing for her dead mother and her older sisters, her bitter experiences in boarding school and as a governess, and her unrequited passion for her married writing teacher.

Kohler's perspective strongly empathizes with the will it takes for Charlotte to clarify her ambition. Her dream is to reach other women: ?to entertain, to startle, to give voice to what they hold in secret in their hearts.? The obstacles are many, the possibilities appear few; therein lies the tale. Becoming Jane Eyre proves a fresh take on the historical novel, a meditation on the creative process, and a gift for those who take Brontë's passionate act of creation into their hearts. --Jane Ciabattari