CMP Review 2025-07-03

July 3, 2025

The magic of a Charlotte Brontë novel transports me to another world. Places, people, scenes, and sights all become real. The stories touch me as if they were happening to a loved one or a friend. Nowhere do I feel this more than the in garden scene of Jane Eyre, chapter 23.

“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” asks Jane. “You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!” These words moved me to record them in a commonplace years ago before I even knew what a commonplace was.

Reading the book with my son has been a delight… but especially when we reached this chapter. Yet though I had read it before, something new struck me this time.

You see, I’ve also been reading Charlotte Brontë’s poems. I’ve been reading her descriptions of sunsets, twilights, stars, and gardens. And yes, even of a chestnut tree. As I read the description of Jane Eyre wandering through the orchard — “no nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like” — I realized I was reading the fruit of years of a poet’s imagination.

Reading Brontë’s poems has given me new eyes for her prose. There in the garden, Jane says, “it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!” There in the schoolroom reading silently with my son, we were equals sitting at God’s feet, partaking of the words of a spirit that did indeed pass through the grave. And it felt a bit like Eden.

@artmiddlekauff