This year is my twentieth Eyre-versary: I’ve been reading and re-reading Charlotte Bronte’s (aka Currer Bell) masterpiece for two decades.

Jane Eyre is one of the stock answers to “favorite novel” and “greatest books in the English language”. It feels insipid or at least, unoriginal to admit how much I adore it. And yet every time I return to the text, I discover something new: another reason why this novel is so gripping, so original, and just absolutely breathtaking for every stage of life.

I met Jane when I was a junior in high school and she was assigned reading for an English lit class. Like many teen girls reading the classics, I was awash in the romanticism of it, the swoonyworthy dark glamor and mystique of the setting, and the intense love between Jane and the tortured, wealthy, sophisticated Mr. Rochester. Their love story is the obvious narrative thread of the book (especially for a first-time reader) - Jane, “plain and obscure”, with no money or connections, captures his heart so violently that he dresses up as an old fortune teller to try and suss out if she likes him too. He tries to use his love for Jane to erase the existence of his first wife; Jane flees. She finds community, career, wealth, and family elsewhere. They reunite after tragedy and divine interference.

Dear Reader, they live happily ever after.

BORING.

Okay, not really boring. It is, on one level, an extremely captivating romance. But the story of Jane Eyre is so much richer and more fascinating than a basic employer/employee, rich older guy / poor younger woman trope.

I read Jane Eyre again, after college, and was fascinated by Jane.

It’s the mid-nineteenth century. Jane is a penniless, plain orphan. Shouldn’t she be grateful to have a stable home and modest career at Lowood? Her life is neatly arranged before her, a path well-trod by countless other young women in her situation: she will be a teacher, educate the next generation of average girls, and eventually, if she’s fortunate, she’ll retire to some quiet little cottage.

No.

Teenage Jane rejects this; she sees birds soaring in the sky and aches for their freedom; she has the audacity to declare that “women feel as men do” and Lowood offers no “liberty” for her.

So this powerless, friendless little person goes hunting for a job - with no connections to guide her - and finds herself a position. She’s never traveled before, she’s never left Lowood since she was dumped there at age 8,; and off Jane goes, traveling seventy miles to Millcote, and stays alone in an inn before her new employer meets her for the final trek to Thornfield.

Just think about that. Even today, I know plenty of people who won’t travel alone, who are too afraid of change to seek a new job, who couldn’t possibly summon the courage to leave everything they’ve ever known to go live with strangers in a new place. And Jane - imagined by a thirty-year old Charlotte Bronte - packs up her bags and head off, into the unknown.

Throughout the story, Jane continuously shows this plucky courage that is extraordinary not only for a woman of her time, but for anyone, anywhere, anytime. She starts her new life at Thornfield. When she realizes it is impossible to remain, after her failed wedding and Rochester’s devastating secret, she simply walks away.

Jane leaves everything behind, nearly dies of exhaustion and exposure, and then begins a new life, again, with nothing but her wit and her unshakeable conviction that she’s doing the right thing and making the right choices, as much as they torture her.

When she’s offered a stable marriage to a man who could provide and offer her a reasonable life as a pastor’s wife (alright, first she’d have to head to India, which doesn’t appeal to Jane), Jane vehemently declines. She knows what she wants, she’s known love before, she knows that she is just fine on her own, and Jane is just not going to accept anything else.

I’ve returned to Jane Eyre countless times, and each time I experience this as a book fundamentally “about” something beyond romantic love.

It’s about faith; not a dogmatic paradigm, but Jane’s resolute belief that there is a higher order to the world and she must act according to her conscience.

There’s true horror in Jane Eyre. Rochester describes a marriage built on deception, then confines Bertha Mason in the attic of his country estate, where she wanders the halls at night and tries to escape her captivity. The scene in which Mason interrupts Jane’s long-awaited wedding to declare, essentially, “Actually, this man is married to my sister,” is still a jaw-dropping plot twist. The revelation is not only true; everyone seems to have known except Jane. Nightmare material.

Jane Eyre is about autonomy; Jane makes her own decisions, lives the consequences, but ultimately, owns her own life even though she was born into circumstances that told her she doesn’t matter.

When Jane inherits and reallocates her late uncle’s estate and Rochester tries to dissuade her from staying with him - now uglier, lamer, and poorer, although single! - Jane just tells him that she has her own money now and she’ll just build her own house next door to his. She has utmost confidence that she intends to spend the rest of her days with him, whatever that looks like, and that is just what Jane is going to do.

There is also so much dark humor in this book.

I always howl at two in particular.; Rochester the fake-Gypsy, dispensing invented fortunes to dissuade fortunehunter Blanche Ingram. St. John is so deeply repressed that he essentially sets a timer for a morally acceptable length of time where he asks Jane to wax poetic about the virtues of his beloved Rosamunde. Insane. What a true psycho.

Plus the Real Housewives of Gateshead dialogue that unfolds when Jane’s prickly cousins explode on each other as their mom dies:

This is such a solid nineteenth century version of “Not if you were the last person on earth.” I love that siblings have fought like this for ages.

If you haven’t given Jane Eyre a try, she’s worth it.

If you’ve tried before and got stuck in the first part of the orphanage years, I give you permission to skip the first nine chapters; Chapter 10 begins with Jane herself reassuring the reader that yes, she knows the first eighteen years were kind of boring, but don’t worry: this is when it gets good.

And once you’ve lived through Jane Eyre, it’s time to wade into Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s reimagining of Bertha Mason (the spooky wife in the attic!) before she prowls the halls of Thornfield at night.

It will expand your sense of narrative, perspective, and the stories that live in the margins of literature.

And if you have ever wanted permission to read or write fan fiction, Wide Sargasso Sea is some of the most consequential literary fan fiction ever written

Twenty years in, Jane Eyre still feels less like a book I return to than a companion I keep growing into: stranger, fiercer, and more alive each time.

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