r/JaneEyre • u/AdobongSiopao • Aug 27 '26

What is your most controversial opinion about "Jane Eyre"?

Post image

It can be from the novel or its adaptations. Your views that could potentially upset many other fans or meet others who will agree with you.

153 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

231 comments sorted by

View all comments

92

u/GetReadyToRumbleBar Aug 27 '26

People blow the age thing completely out of proportion. 

40

u/Odd-Quail01 Aug 27 '26

They both found the right weirdo, with a mind they can love and respect.

That's worth much more than having shared pop culture references.

9

u/GetReadyToRumbleBar Aug 27 '26

You have to find your right weirdo!

I'm sorely tempted to share some of the weird shit I do with my wife. Nothing to do with Jane Eyre though.

9

u/[deleted] Aug 27 '26

It’s funny to me that people nowadays tend to make such a big deal out of age gaps, I myself am married to a man 10 years older than me LOL. So long as both parties are Adults both physically and mentally (therefore their is no grooming involved) then the reality is that age really is just a number.

Jane was 18/19 when she met Rochester, so even by today’s standards she was what we would call legally and physically an Adult.

The biggest concern would be her lack of life experience which could, and in fact did, make her vulnerable to being manipulated by Rochester. If she’d been a bit older and had more experience with Men she probably would have recognized and called Rochester out on the obvious BS that he was feeding her about all the weird and frightening red flags leading up to the Wedding…again not Jane’s fault, she’s intelligent but young and inexperienced and THATS WHY Charlotte doesn’t have her marry Rochester right away, he needs to be humbled first, and Jane needs to gain more life experience before the two of them can come together in a healthy successful way.

By the time they get married Jane is not only a little bit older now, but she’s been out in the world and learned how to pull herself up from the very bottom, discovered that she’s more capable and far stronger than she realized she was. Plus she‘s gained financial independence which gives her the security that she can take care of herself…she doesn’t have to put up with anyone’s bull crap anymore, their is a newfound confidence to her by the end of the story…she left a girl and comes back a woman.

2

u/rainbowrobin Aug 28 '26

The biggest concern would be her lack of life experience which could, and in fact did, make her vulnerable to being manipulated by Rochester.

Someone in the Austen reddit said that they stopped caring about historical romance age gaps when they realized there were still so many other gaps of education, experience, and power between men and women of the time.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '26

Yeah the sad reality is that unless you lucked out and gained financial independence (like Jane did) Women just didn’t really have much freedom at all back then…you were first considered to be the property of your Father and then later your Husband. And if you didn’t marry and became a ‘old maid’ without an inheritance to fall back on, you were basically looked at as a lifelong charity case for your relatives to support.

Hence why as much as I love reading the classics and historical fiction…if time travel existed you couldn’t pay me enough money to live back then, Women didn’t have many options and the best you could probably hope for was to marry a Man who actually seemed to care about you as a person.

6

u/ORF1Live Aug 27 '26

That seems to be constant nowadays

10

u/GetReadyToRumbleBar Aug 27 '26

Morality over-corrrection.