Yay Jilli! I'm in the middle of re-re-re-reading Jane Eyre right now (illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg; sadly, none of his Eyre illustrations are Googleable), and loving it (first read it at 10, the age Jane is when it opens, and I still think of Jane as one of my oldest friends). In my current reading, Mr. Rochester has just been rescued from a suspicious fire in his bedroom. Can't wait for... well, everything that comes after. All of it.

It's very, very different from Wuthering Heights (Charlotte and Emily were, after all, rather different writers and different persons, or at least as different as two extremely close siblings in a self-contained family in an isolated region of a small country can be).

If you end up liking Jane Eyre, Jilli, read The Eyre Affair after that. Very fun book on its own, but it adds a lot to have read JE, or at least be familiar with it.

My "want to smack the lead character upside the head for being a dolt" book is Tess of the D'Ubervilles. I literally threw the book across my dorm room in disgust with her when I had to read it for my Victorian Lit class.

I admit, it was Dame Darcy's art that sold me on it. She's so deliciously loopy and over-the-top Gothic Victorian.

Dame Darcy was just in town reading at my friends' store where I work on the weekends. You might be interested one of these lovelies from her that they are selling at their new art toy store (and also online of course):

[link]

If you end up liking Jane Eyre, Jilli, read The Eyre Affair after that. Very fun book on its own, but it adds a lot to have read JE, or at least be familiar with it.

I agree that it definitely adds to have read JE, although I was disappointed by the book as a whole. There were some clever bits, but the writing bothered me. I may have wanted to scream when we got an entire chapter about events Thursday DID NOT WITNESS and every time Thursday told us what OTHER CHARACTERS WERE THINKING. If you're going to do first-person, Fforde, do first-person. Don't cheat. It also bugged me that the Eyre stuff didn't happen for, like, 200 pages.

I haven't read The Eyre Affair. Only Wide Sargasso Sea.

I always list Jane Eyre as my favorite book ever.

Also, JZ is me WRT

first read it at 10, the age Jane is when it opens, and I still think of Jane as one of my oldest friends.

I read JE three times because it was the Academic Decathlon book. Thus, I gained a certain affection for it, but I don't think I would really love it on its own merits.

Wide Sargasso Sea is excellent. I didn't like The Eyre Affair (in part for the reasons PC mentions), though I agree that without JE first, it would be even less comprehensible.

though I agree that without JE first, it would be even less comprehensible.

I hadn't read JE since high school (the aforementioned three times), so I was really, really confused about what appeared to be the ending of JE in the world of TEA for most of the book, because I thought I had misremembered what actually happened in JE. I did think it was very, very clever for the events of the book to actually end up creating the ending we know now.

I was pretty much, um, obsessed with Jane Eyre the way 12 year olds can be obsessed.

I don't think I've read it in a decade. Probably should.