Becoming Jane Eyre

Jen Taylor offers a strong reading of Kohler's parallel autobiographies of Charlotte Bront‘ and her most famous creation, Jane Eyre. Listeners enter the Bront‘ world, following Charlotte and her sisters, Anne and Emily, as they walk through parlor and park, reading to one another from their respective novels and poetry, giving each other ideas and criticism, coping with their jealousies, broken love affairs, health issues, their brother Branwell's dissipation, and their father's recovery from near blindness. Taylor uses a lush, throaty voice for her narration while creating an impressive range of voices for the dialogue and characterizations. Even high-pitched children's voices become credible in her skilled performance. This is an intriguing fictionalized look at how much of a writer's life sometimes makes its way into her novels. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

October 12, 2009
South African Kohler's well-written seventh novel takes the lives of the Brontës: Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and their father, and substitutes imagination for facts. The book opens in 1846 with Charlotte's father recovering from eye surgery in Manchester, England. The narrative follows the internal ragings and musings of Rev. Brontë, the Brontë sisters, the nurse briefly hired to help Charlotte and her father, their own nurse of many years and even the mother of George Smith, the eventual publisher of Jane Eyre
. Charlotte's desire for a heroine with more courage than she herself has spills onto the page during the long, lonely hours of her father's convalescence, as she remembers her doomed love for her teacher in Brussels and other hurts and affronts throughout her life. Kohler (Crossways
) gives us a more multidimensional, passionate and temperamental Charlotte than most biographies. Too much narration and switching of points of view slows the pace, but connecting the writer with her heroine is intriguing. This novel will likely send fans back to the originals and should inspire those who know “of” the novels to finally read them.