I’m currently reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Through Bronte’s brilliant writing, I can see Jane on the page, and also the world that she lived in.
This is most vivid to me in the powerful scene after Jane has left Thornfield. She spends the night under an open sky. “Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale before us: and it is the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence…..i saw the mighty milky way….what countless systems there swept space like a trace of light–I felt the might and strength of God.” 332
“But next day, Want came to me, pale and bare. Long after the little birds had left their nests; long after bees had come in the sweet prime of day to gather the heath honey before the dew was dried–when the long morning shadows were curtailed, and the sun filled earth and sky–I got up, and I looked around me.” 332
In Bronte’s work, Jane Eyre’s story is immersed in the physical world. Some call this the setting, but it seems much more. The isolation of the heath embodies Jane Eyre’s solitary existence, and also her deepest feelings and beliefs.
“Make your setting a character,” writing experts say. Setting is not merely the backdrop of a story. It is more than a place to set our characters in, much more than merely selecting various details to include. It is the task of the writer to create a vivid place that can be both seen and felt in the reader’s mind. And now that I have read Bronte’s words, how Jane saw her world is now part of my own view.
“Sure was I of [God’s] efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured….the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits.” 332