As a literary illiterate, I expected Jane Eyre to be the same kind of story as Jane Austen's. After all, it are all romantic novels from about the same period, no? It might be obvious for some of you, but they are not interchangeable at all. Where Austen realistically writes about society and people, Jane Eyre seems more to be some kind of a fairytale (but granted, a dark one).
To start with, Jane Eyre has everything against her. She's poor, she's an orphan child, her aunt and cousins treat her badly, she has to go to a terrible school, where the children are kept cold and hungry, there is an epidemic illness and her best friend dies,… How much more can you come up with? My feeling is that Charlotte Brontë is overdoing it a bit, which makes me lose touch with her heroine. The story seems a kind of a fairytale, where in the beginning everything is dark and bad, Jane Eyre has no chances on happiness at all in life, but in the end, all turns out (more or less) well. I've had to get used to this darkness.
What I precisely like so much in Jane Austen is her capacity to write fascinating stories about ordinary bright social life. Her heroines don't have all the luck in the world either: Catherine is rather poor, Anne is an ignored child,… but there is not one who has all the mischances of Jane Eyre. They are rather well off at the start of the story and better off in the end. The books focus much more on all the aspects of society.
But I suppose I just shouldn't read Charlotte Brontë with Jane Austen in the back of my head. After some while I got used to the style, and then it is a really good and well-written book. Compared to the books of Jane Austen (see, there I am doing it again ;-), it only seemed rather "girlish".
