Books featured in Issue 64, Winter 2019

Not So Plain Jane

Daisy Hay on Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was the novel that opened my eyes to literature. It was the first classic I picked up that I couldn’t put down. I read it from cover to cover in one heady weekend when I was 13: I had a nightmare about Grace Poole on Saturday night, and a sulk on Sunday afternoon when my mother made me put it down to talk to some cousins who’d come for tea. By Sunday evening I was done and I knew, with a certainty I still remember vividly, that literature was my thing. In the months that followed I devoured Villette, Shirley, The Professor, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the juvenilia – any scraps of Brontë I could get my hands on. I joined the Brontë Society, ploughed my way through each issue of the Brontë Journal, Transactions, and made my long-suffering parents take me to the Parsonage at Haworth.

1 Dec 2013

Books featured in SF Issue 64

Merivel

The Gustave Sonata

Restoration

The Slaves of Solitude

Being an Actor

The Death of the Heart

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

Going Solo (No. 49)

Rosie

The Levant Trilogy

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