"The most immediate surprise of 'Jane Eyre' for today's readers is the directness, even bluntness, of the young heroine's voice. Here is no prissy little-girl sensibility, but a startlingly independent, even skeptical perspective....Another surprise of 'Jane Eyre' is the seemingly 'real--that is, non-romantic--nature of the lovers-to-be....Why does 'Jane Eyre' retain its appeal after so many decades, and so many intervening novels of virginal young heroines, Byronic moody mysterious elder men, and melodramatic disclosures? One answer is, simply, the quality of Jane's and Rochester's characters. They are believable. They are intelligent, yet emotional, superior beings who are human, even flawed; as the 19th-century reader would have discerned, they are models for us all." "Reader, if you have yet to discover the unique voice of Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre', you have a splendid delight awaiting you...Like 'Villette', 'Jane Eyre' is a story of hunger; unlike that more complex, and perhaps more aesthetically pure novel, it is a story of hunger satisfied...'Jane Eyre' is remarkable for its forthright declaration of its heroine's passions and appetites...She is ravenous with appetite. "So we open 'Jane Eyre'....The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë....It is the red and fitful glow of the heart's fire which illumines her page." "The suggestive use of language and the magical quality of her writing, which distinguishes Charlotte Brontë equally from her predecessor Jane Austen and her successor George Eliot, is one of the characteristic aspects of her work...Charlotte Brontë, no less than her sister Emily, was a splendidly original artist." "At the conclusion of 'Jane Eyre' we do not feel so much that we have read a book, as that we have parted from a most singular and eloquent woman, met by chance upon a Yorkshire hill, who has gone with us for a time and told us the whole of her life history." "Talk about respect for the feminine! Which, it turns out, is simply respect for the soul. That this author was sent by Providence...to show me the difference between convention and morality, I count as one of the great blessings of a blessed life." "...the masterwork of a great genius."