Bronte

I have long thought that choosing a “classic” title for the Sunday Book Club would be a wonderful change (even before Oprah revived her book club), but the idea never seemed to be a good fit. Until now.

Despite being written over 150 years ago, the Sunday Book Club August selection has just about everything modern fiction readers look for in a good book:

Romance? Got it.

Mystery? Check.

Greed? That too.

Secrets and lies? Oh yeah.

Sex? Well ... you’ll have to use your imagination on that one.

Charlotte Brontë’s timeless “Jane Eyre” will lead off the Sunday Book Club’s next theme: “Two Janes.” In September, Jasper Fforde’s “The Eyre Affair” will add a thoroughly modern twist to Brontë’s classic novel, and in October and November the book club will take a look at Jane Austen’s “Emma” and Karen Joy Fowler’s best seller, “The Jane Austen Book Club.”

And for those of you who are having unpleasant flashbacks of high school English class or who managed to skip reading “Jane Eyre” altogether, allow me to shed some new light on an old tale:

The novel begins on a dreary winter afternoon with the young orphan Jane Eyre hiding in a window seat with a book, trying to avoid the notice of her abusive aunt and cousins. After a particularly nasty physical confrontation with her cousin John, Jane is locked in her dead uncle’s spooky bedroom for the evening. Jane’s act of self-defense leads her aunt to send her away to a boarding school for destitute young women known as Lowood.

Eventually, Jane learns to thrive in the sparse and sometimes harsh environment of the school. After several years and the completion of her studies, she begins to yearn for a different life and turns to what was perhaps the only suitable occupation for a young, single woman at the time: working as a governess.

Jane accepts a position teaching a young French girl at a rural estate called Thornfield Hall. She is drawn to the owner of the estate, Mr. Rochester, although she is frequently baffled by some of his actions and troubled by the mentally unbalanced woman living on the attic floor, whose presence Rochester refuses to fully explain.

Rochester eventually proposes to Jane, although their wedding day is destroyed by a dramatic revelation concerning the woman in the attic. Jane leaves Thornfield, heartbroken. After an extended sojourn with a family who takes her in when she runs away from Thornfield with no money or belongings, Jane is reunited with a much-changed Rochester.

Of course, this plot-in-a-nutshell does not do justice to Brontë’s wonderful characters or the rich, Gothic atmosphere she creates for Thornfield Hall. The courtship between Jane and Rochester — the original strong, silent type — is subtle and full of tension. As a heroine, Jane is smart, steely and independent.

So go to your bookshelf and dust off that old copy of “Jane Eyre,” or go to a bookstore and pick up a paperback (one good thing about classics is you don’t have to wait for them to come out in paperback). They just don’t write ’em like this anymore.

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.