Jane Eyre, like many people, is at her best alone

ONE OF THE great thrills of reading is encountering a situation that is familiar in feeling yet alien in context. So it is on reaching chapter nine of “Jane Eyre”, in which the narrator, a malnourished orphan in a grim Victorian charity school, describes how life is upended by a typhus epidemic. Liberated from the classroom, she is left to her own company and the outdoors, as millions of others have been in the age of covid-19. The school is set in glorious countryside, and it is May: “All this I enjoyed often and fully, free, unwatched, and almost alone.”

All Charlotte Brontë’s protagonists are solitary to some degree, and her habit of addressing the reader directly heightens that sense: it is as if her characters have no one else to confide in. But whereas in “Villette”, another great novel about an outsider, solitude is mostly a source of misery, in “Jane Eyre” (first published in 1847) it is often a positive state, or at least a productive one.