Becoming Jane Eyre: A Novel (Penguin Original) Review

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(More customer reviews)Halfway through Sheila Kohler's biographical novel Becoming Jane Eyre, I decided to reread the Charlotte Bronte original novel on which Kohler's book is at least partially based. Side by side I read Kohler and Bronte to get a better sense of Kohler's achievement with her novel. This was a good decision on my part because I was able to learn much about Charlotte Bronte in Kohler's novel that helped me appreciate Charlotte's achievement with Jane Eyre, surely one of the most popular of Victorian novels.
Kohler shows us how Charlotte Bronte's life contributed to her art, first with the unsuccessful first novel The Professor, and then with the very popular Jane Eyre. Additionally, we learn about Charlotte Bronte's family: father, son Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne. All three sisters spend the lonely hours in their father's parsonage on the moors writing novels. They send them to various publishers only to be politely rejected, until Emily's Wuthering Heights - a great novel - and Anne's Agnes Gray find a publisher willing to print the books if the girls send fifty pounds to underwrite the project. This modest success of her sisters motivates Charlotte to finish Jane Eyre and it immediately becomes highly successful, changing Charlotte's life forever.
I asked myself several times during the reading of Becoming Jane Eyre about the potential audience for such a book and concluded that it will be for all those people interested in learning more about Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, and the Bronte family. I think this audience will not be disappointed in Kohler's work. The Bronte children lived short, mostly unhappy lives - Branwell, Emily, and Anne were dead by their late twenties or early thirties. Charlotte did not live much longer, but as Kohler points out toward the end of her novel, Charlotte did marry happily, even if it lasted less than a year.
Any reader of this review, who decides to read Becoming Jane Eyre and has not read Charlotte Bronte's great original creation, will almost certainly get a copy and not be disappointed with the story of one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. In Becoming Jane Eyre the reader learns that Jane's creator was herself a heroine and one of the important novelists of Victorian England.


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A beautifully imagined tale of the Bronte sisters and the writing of Jane Eyre The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent. So unfolds the story of the Brontë sisters. At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.

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