Near the end of life it is customary to look back, to conduct a personal exit interview, so to speak. Some do this to remember the events that made them. Others spend wakeful nights reviewing the mistakes they have made and wonder where they’d be, had they not made them. Personally, I tend to alternate between the two.

One of my many life mistakes was not reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in my formative years. I dimly remember an eleventh grade reading assignment that gave us choices between several novels. I went to the library and paged through the assigned choices. I decided against Jane Eyre, deeming it Victorian chick lit (this term hadn’t been invented then but it describes what I felt). I don’t even remember the book I wound up choosing.

In a belated effort to correct some earlier oversights, I have finally gotten around to reading Jane Eyre. What a read! And what a ride!

The novel has been called many things—a Bildungsroman (generally translated as a “coming of age novel”), a romance, and a social critique with Gothic horror story elements.

Jane Eyre is a book everyone should have read at some point—the earlier in life the better. There are a couple of caveats, however. Modern sensibilities will need to adjust to the excruciatingly minute examination of faces and people. Victorians were judgmental, often basing their thinking on what we would regard unreliable superficialities.

Modern readers will also have to contend with what might be called a florid wordiness. The nineteenth century seldom used one word when ten would do. In those days there were no cinemas, TV, Internet, or video games, so the main source of entertainment was conversation,  and it was carried on at a level rarely reached today.

If allowances can be made for those two qualities, Jane Eyre is every bit as much of a page-turner as any thriller written today. Anyone wanting to learn about empowerment should take Jane Eyre as a role model. Her steel and self-reliance in the face of lifelong adversity is matchless.