Dick and Jane : Pre-marriage discussion with youth and others

Only years later, reading it for myself, did I discover what she had done. It was an invaluable lesson for a writer; no story is the final one. I remember being gripped by two aspects when I first read Jane Eyre at the age of 10 or 11 — the horrible school at Lowood and the mad woman in the attic.

The Lowood episode is the most frightening boarding school story ever written, and, of course, all children, me included, think they are friendless, persecuted and despised, and identify with the poor orphan. As an adolescent, I suppose I became more interested in the love affair, though by then I had read Wuthering Heights and much preferred Heathcliff to Rochester, and the fairytale wish-fulfilment elements in Jane Eyre I already found annoying and disturbing.

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On rereading in old age, I now find the arch, self-righteous and implausible dialogues between Jane and Rochester boring: Maybe I prefer tragedy to romance. Also, I do now see more clearly why she shocked her contemporaries so much: Jane does not even attempt to hide her greed and need for love. It is painful to read of her longings, and even more painful to know they were never to be satisfied.

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I was 14 or 15 and living on the top floor of a communal house in a small village in Sussex when I first read Jane Eyre. I had a bedroom with a balcony that looked out over a large terraced garden, and I used to lean over it and see if I could catch sight of the current object of my affections, a married man who lived on the ground floor, with whom I was carrying on a romance of epic proportions, fuelled only by an occasional glance in my direction, the offer of a lift to the next village and, once, the soulful handing over of a flower.

It thrills me, as it must have thrilled readers in , how their talk transcends convention — cutting through politeness, forcing an intimacy that leaves them reeling, altered. He still has hold of her hand. I knew about Jane Eyre for a long time before I read it. Handsome Mr Rochester with his gothic dash and flair, plain Jane with her habit of lurking in window seats; it was an archetype of one kind of love affair, and in its way more sympathetic than the more glamorous coupling of Heathcliff and Cathy.

More sympathetic because more encouraging to an adolescent regardless of their gender with low self-esteem. Then there was the mad woman in the attic. I expect I saw a film version too, which would have reinforced all these impressions. Although I still feel embarrassed to have arrived at the table too late, I comfort myself by thinking that at least I was more or less ready for it.

The central tension between actualities and make-believe anticipates the tragic plea at the end of Villette: The back cover promised a thrilling love story between a poor, plain girl and a brooding, troubled landowner. Later that night, I found myself wrong-footed. What, I wondered, was this neglect and abuse of an orphan child? Whose was this frank, unwavering voice? By the time Jane was locked by her heartless aunt into the terrifying red room, I had forgotten all about the promised love story.

I pressed on, late into the night, straight into Lowood and the deprivations at the hands of religious fanatics. I had, in short, never read anything like it.

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The shock and thrill of discovering this book, aged 13, continues to run in my veins. I read it without a single preconception; I knew nothing about it. I was as unprepared as those first Victorian readers for Rochester, for the fire, for the stalled marriage, for the lunatic locked away in the attic. If Jane Eyre taught me anything as an astonished year-old, it was to strive, to push my reach beyond my grasp, not to settle for compromise.

Jane Eyre is a feminist novel, I was told. Or it is the link between the epistolary and the gothic novel. It is the precursor to all stream-of-consciousness writing. It is a psychological tract about doubles and doppelgangers, addressing levels of human consciousness. It is all these things and yet none of them. One of the reasons Jane Eyre continues to provoke so much discussion and theorising is that, like Jane herself, it eludes definition.

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It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left. Jane Eyre remains the book I return to the most. I read it every couple of years. Parts I know off by heart, yet each time I come away with something different. It is my datum, my pole star, the novel by which all others shall be measured.

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Reading them the wrong way round, which happens to be chronologically the right way round, does rather spoil the romance: Jane falls for a man whose degeneracy and sadism drove his first wife mad. Did love deafen you when he told you of roaming Europe and setting up home with three separate courtesans? What of his STDs? Why did he take her in if he despises her so?

Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others

And on to the spectacle of the mad woman in his attic: It is never made clear in Jane Eyre from what form of madness the first Mrs Rochester is suffering. Something must have turned her from a beautiful bride into this swollen, purple monster. And then, up on the roof, among the flames of Thornfield Hall, Rochester loses his hand, his left hand, the one he gave in marriage. According to Jane Eyre , the woman he gave it to jumps, thus freeing him to marry Jane. What I love most about Jane Eyre is the ferocity of her radicalism. She refuses to see the world as it tells her it should be seen.

She will speak out, although she is a friendless nobody: From the first page there are hints of the fire that burns in her. Jane is out of favour, banished from the family hearth. Jane Eyre is between two worlds and belongs in neither, although she will have to live in both during the course of the novel. She will be a beggar-maid, exposed on the moors, and a princess wooed by the King of Thornfield Hall, Mr Rochester. Neither will satisfy her.

But if Jane Eyre has fairytale and mythic qualities, she is also an intensely political creation. Jane genuinely does not believe that morality has anything to do with wealth, power or social standing. She would rather live alone than accept a relationship that compromises her independence. Strong stuff even in our times, but revolutionary in At 10 years old she castigates rich, powerful Mrs Reed for her hypocrisy and cruelty.

At 18 she sets out into the world to support herself, having done everything possible to secure an education. Her relationship with Mr Rochester is, to put it mildly, challenging. She will not be flattered: Is Jane Eyre lovable? She is intensely critical, and quick to scorn. There is no warmth of humour in her. But if not lovable, she is utterly compelling. There was no one like Jane Eyre before she blazed on to the page, and into a million imaginations. But the sense of recognition I felt when I read it was immense. All adolescents feel like victims, and the mistreatment of Jane in the early chapters, first by Mrs Reed then by Mr Brocklehurst, put me firmly on her side.

I too knew what it was like to be humiliated in class the slate-dropping episode and to lose a close friend as she does Helen Burns. I too distrusted wealth and finery. Whether Mr Rochester would prove worthy seemed doubtful. The romantic denouement engaged me less than the impediments along the way: Miss Ingram; mad Bertha we too had a scary attic ; the halting of the wedding ceremony.

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But I liked the teasing and banter, and there were ideas to grapple with, too, about class and work and beauty. A hundred and twenty years after the book came out, that idea still met occasional resistance, especially in laddish rural outposts. But Jane Eyre showed it was plain common sense. I first read Jane Eyre propped up in my little single bed with a shawl around my shoulders in a cold and creaking attic room at the top of a house in the middle of the starless Nottinghamshire countryside. The room, my old and once beloved bedroom, was badly lit, unheated, dusty and forlorn.

Gray co-authored Pre-Primer with William H. Elson, who had been churning out reading primers since In , it was re-released under the more famous title Dick and Jane. Dozens of sequels would appear over the next 35 years. Editions that were intended for first-graders contained about words apiece. Third-graders were given and, in 6th grade, kids followed similar escapades in word volumes. This method—which became popular during the s—calls for largely ignoring phonics. Instead, a printed word is repeatedly shown to a child while the teacher says it out loud.

Helpful pictures are often involved as well.

So typical Dick and Jane paragraphs go something like this: Oh, look, look Spot. On every third page, all the new words would be combined. And not a single story introduced more than five or six total. Scott Foresman, the Illinois-based company that published Dick and Jane , received a few thousand letters addressed to Dick and Jane—and employees ghostwrote a reply to each dispatch.

When the look-say strategy began falling out of favor, its poster kids were vilified. And author Rudolf Flesch had some choice words for Dick and Jane. Over the next decade, the backlash grew. In , English professor Arthur S. Half a world away, their American counterparts were mastering less than at that level.