This last week I read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for the first time. I found it fascinating, because it seems to sit right precisely in between Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer.

Jane Eyre is a classic, and so I’m going to presume that you’ve already read it. If you haven’t, feel free to move on.

Jane Austen’s books are naturalistic. The people in them feel like real people, and the events seem like events that could really happen. Mr. Bingley really could rent a house nearby; and his great friend Mr. Darcy might really come to visit, and end up attending a local ball. A foolish young woman might really run away with a profligate army officer. A haughty old woman might really cavil at the thought of a loved nephew marrying someone of a lower class. The constraints of life among the gentry are finely drawn; and actions have real (and sometimes devastating) consequences. In short, although there’s a romance at the heart of Pride and Prejudice, there’s little in the book that is romantic in the artistic sense.

Georgette Heyer’s books, on the other hand, are pure romance in the light, frothy modern sense. Coincidences and absurd plot contrivances abound, troubles are mostly played for laughs, and everything ends happily, at least for the two (or four, or six) principals. The books are thoroughly entertaining, but they are not at all serious. Although they pay lip service to the strictures of society, they delight in flouting them. In Austen, a young woman might really ruin herself by traveling alone with an older man not her relation, even for the best of reasons; in Heyer it just adds zest.

Jane Eyre, written over three decades after Pride and Prejudice, sits intriguingly in between Austen and Heyer. Romanticism is in the air, in Jane Eyre’s drawings, in Mr. Rochester’s speech, in a way you’d never find in Austen. Absurd coincidences and plot points abound: Jane Eyre is an orphan and badly treated poor relation. She ends up at a badly run charity school. She becomes a governess to support herself. (In Heyer, no one ever actually becomes a governess; they just plan to, with no real knowledge of what it involves, and are rescued by the male romantic lead in the nick of time.) She falls in love with a man who has a mad wife shut up in the attic. Starving, she is not only saved by a kind family, but discovers that they are her long lost cousins. Nearly destitute, she becomes wealthy upon receiving a bequest from a long-lost uncle. The mad wife dies by her own hand, and at last her love is free to marry her.

About halfway through the book, I said to Jane, “This book is just like Shakespeare: it’s full of clichés.” In Brontë’s case, though, I don’t know whether they were original with her, or were simply typical of the fiction of the day. They certainly aren’t at all likely; we’ve come quite a way from the naturalism of Jane Austen.

And yet, Brontë is infinitely more serious than Heyer. Her book is not only romantic but also moral. It really will mean Jane Eyre’s moral destruction if she gives in and runs away with Mr. Rochester despite his mad wife in the attic. It really will mean her physical and emotional destruction if she goes in Indian with her cousin Mr. St. John. She is determined to do what is right and just, and she is not to be put aside by the demands of those around her. Jane Eyre’s decisions matter, not just in the context of the book, but in the context of real life, of true morality. If the events are somewhat absurd, the world-view is not.

I was particularly taken by two character sketches, of the two characters in the book who are seriously into religion; they also happen to be two of Jane Eyre’s cousins.

The first is Eliza Reed, who, when Jane Eyre last sees her, has taken up in her childhood home an orderly monastic life in which every day is precisely the same, in which she can concentrate on her God, and in which there is evidently no space for charity or love of neighbor. We are told that she goes to France, joins the Catholic Church, takes the veil, and ultimately becomes the superior of her convent. Perhaps so; perhaps at that time a convent would welcome one with the attitude (or fortune) of Eliza Reed. But she shows a love much more of order and of herself than she does of her God or of anyone else. One can only hope that her attitude changed during the formation process.

The second is Mr. St. John, vicar and would-be missionary, a man who is tireless in his service of the poor of his parish, who is utterly certain of his rectitude and his calling, who is utterly certain of God’s will for those around him, who emphasizes the intellect until he is almost devoid of normal human feeling, and who uses his rectitude and certainty to coerce those around him. He insists that Jane Eyre marry him and come with him to India, not because he loves her but because she is a fitting helpmeet. He tells her that if she doesn’t come she is flouting God’s will, and is abandoning herself to pleasure, dissipation, and ultimately damnation.

May I just say that Mr. St. John, for all his sterling and admitted qualities, is an obnoxious piece of work, and it was a joy to watch Jane Eyre refuse to give into his bullying.

The book begins with an author’s preface, in which appears the following quote:

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

What’s fascinating to me is that Brontë gets it right: in his missionary work, Mr. St. John is motivated by ambition and pride; while in her teaching and in her care of Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre shows real virtue, especially patience, diligence, charity, and prudence.

So…I can’t call it a “fun” book, exactly, not in the way that a Heyer romance is a fun book; but I liked it, and stayed up late one night to finish it. On the other hand, I don’t think it will ever become comfort reading, quite the way Pride and Prejudice has. Eliza Bennett is my kind of girl.

The Crown of Dalemark is the fourth and last volume (surprise, surprise) of Diana Wynne Jone’s Dalemark Quartet, and as I hinted yesterday it has its problems.

In this book, it is clear from the get go, Jones is going to weave together all of the threads from the first three books; and it is equally clear that by the end of the book some character we’re already familiar with is going to pull together the earldoms of the North and South into a single kingdom again. It’s not clear which of them it will be (though I had a shrewd guess) or how it will take place; therein lies the tale.

And of course there are the Undying floating about all over the place.

I remember reading Great Expectations in school, many years ago now, and being amazed how Dickens managed to bring out hidden relationships between all of the myriad characters in the book. The cast of characters, each one seemingly isolated, were all part of a web of relationships that in fact drew them tightly together. Part of the charm of the book was discovering each of these relationships as the book progresses—I vaguely remember a housekeeper with peculiarly strong hands who turns out to be the estranged wife of somebody else, for example. Keeping track of everything was dizzying.

The situation is similar here, except that each of the Undying seem to have multiple names, most of which we’ve heard before but hadn’t previously connected together, and many of which we’ve heard only in conjunction with legends that are alluded to but not actually spelled out in the course of the series. You kind of need a scorecard to keep track.

And then, Jones pulls in a young girl from a hundred years or so into Dalemark’s future, and makes her one of the major viewpoint characters, which just complicates things all the more. It all worked out OK—I enjoyed reading it—and it left me wanting more, which is always a good sign; but nevertheless it didn’t quite work.

The Spellcoats is the third book in Diana Wynne Jones’ Dalemark Quartet, and it has quite a different feel from its predecessors. The first two books involve the magical and mythical breaking out into ordinary life, somewhat in the first and much more thoroughly in the second. This book takes place a couple of centuries earlier, in a time when the magical and wondrous walks the land openly…and we begin to see the backstory for much of what happens later.

I liked the book well enough, but ironically, given that the book involves the weaving of two “spellcoats”, it’s with this book that the execution starts to unravel. The mythosphere of Dalemark involves the Undying Ones, god-like beings (though not gods) who have interbred with human beings. The older of the Undying Ones have great difficulty making themselves visible or comprehensible to humans; the younger, having more human in them, have less trouble; and some simply seem to be humans with magical powers and indefinitely long lives. And the problem is, they all have a plethora and a superfluity of names, and figuring out who is who and how they are related, and that this one is really that one at another time becomes rather a trial—though more in the next book than in this one.

But that’s another review.

Drowned Ammet is the second book in Diana Wynne Jones’ Dalemark Quartet. Its predecessor, Cart and Cwidder, is OK; but Drowned Ammet is much more the sort of thing I expect from Diana Wynne Jones, and I liked it a lot.

Drowned Ammet is not a direct sequel to Cart and Cwidder; rather, it’s a separate story, roughly contemporaneous, and set in the same land of Dalemark. Alhammitt—Mitt, for short—is a young lad in the southern earldom of Holland. As is usual in the South, the Earl is a real piece of work; there is great unrest, and when Mitt’s family loses their farm, his father joins a radical group among the fisherman on the waterfront. And when Mitt’s father dies in an abortive attack on the Earl’s warehouse, Mitt naturally joins the group as well. He’s bent on vengeance, on both the Earl and those in the movement who betrayed his father.

His time comes during the annual Sea Festival, when the Earl and his family process down to the docks and throw in two effigies: a man of straw known as Poor Old Ammet, and a woman of fruit known as Libby Beer. Not to do so would be horrible luck for the city. And it’s said that if a ship comes upon Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer out at sea, and takes them on board, that ship will have good luck.

Mitt’s attempt fails…and he finds himself on the run, on board a pleasure yacht, alone with two of the Earl’s grandchildren, heading for the North. And on the way he finds that maybe there’s more to the old legends and less to vengeance than he thought.

There’s magic; there’s villainy; there’s poetic justice; there’s courage; there’s redemption; and in general the result is enchanting.

Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones, is the first book in a young adult fantasy series called the Dalemark Quartet. Written in 1975, it’s one of Jones’ earlier books, and I was curious to see how it stacks up.

Our story takes place in the land of Dalemark, a vaguely medieval country which was once united under a king but is now split into the North and the South, both of which consist of a number of relatively independent earldoms. The North, where the king’s city used to be, is tolerably free; in the South, the earls rule as tyrants, and revolution is in the air. Few are able to travel from North to South and back again.

One of these few is Clennen the Singer and his family, who travel about Dalemark in their brightly colored cart, performing in the towns they pass through and carrying messages. Clennen’s younger boy, Moril, plays the cwidder, a stringed instrument that seems to be like a lute or mandolin, though it comes in different sizes, and Clennen is teaching him to play Clennen’s own cwidder, an instrument that supposedly belonged to the great bard Osfameron in years gone by. When Osfameron played, the mountains walked and the dead rose. So happens that “Moril” is short for Osfameron Tanamoril; and when Clennan is murdered and their passenger Kialan is being sought by the wicked Earl Tholian, Moril has to find out whether those legends are true.

In general, I liked the book. The characters are well-drawn, and the relationship between Clennan and his wife Lenina is fascinating. On the other hand, the book seems too short; and I thought the denouement was somewhat rushed and unconvincing, not handled with the skill Jones shows in her later books.

I read this one to myself, rather than to the kids; but it’s likely that I’ll read it to them at some point in the future.

Our latest family read-aloud has been Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones. I’ll let Mig Laker, the narrator, introduce Aunt Maria:

We have had Aunt Maria ever since Dad died. If that sounds as if we have the plague, that is what I mean. You have to call this plague Ma-rye-ah. Aunt Maria insists you say her name like that. Chris says it is more like that card game, where the one who wins the queen of spades loses the game. “Black Maria,” it is called. Maybe he is right.

During the Easter holidays, Mig, her older brother Chris, and her mother all go to visit Mig’s father’s Aunt Maria in the little English seacoast town of Cranbury. Aunt Maria is getting on in years, and they are her only relations; and though they don’t like her much, going to check up on her is simply the right thing to do. Mig’s mother is big on doing the right thing.

At first, Aunt Maria just seems like a stuffy, old invalid who likes to have things just so, the sort of woman you have to humor or you feel bad about your self. Then they discover that Aunt Maria’s companion and housekeeper Lavinia has gone on vacation, and Mig’s family has to take up the slack. Aunt Maria seems ever more manipulative…and the ladies of the town back her up. Aunt Maria must not be distressed. Then they discover that Lavinia left some of her things behind. Then they discover a cat who looks unpleasantly like Lavinia….and Aunt Maria begins to seem like more than just a tiresome old lady.

My kids all enjoyed it. Me, I thought it was subpar. Not bad, not bad at all, but not Jones’ best (which is very, very good). It’s rather slow paced, and the subtext (the battle of the sexes) is a little too obvious. But it has its moments of humor, and there were a few scenes where everyone in our family were rolling on the floor. So…good, but not great.