Dedicated to him, whom I regard “as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
We have a great deal of critical writing on Victorian novels—the grand products of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, et. al.—but not as many accounts of how readers come to read these novels. In 1979, an entire cohort, especially of women, would have pounced on Jane Eyre after reading Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s fetchingly titled feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, I was otherwise absorbed (incidentally, like the heroine of Jane Eyre) in reading classical German literature. But now, nearly half a century later, I am with Jane, struck by its power and beauty.