Praying with Jane Eyre
Our favorite books keep us company, give us hope, and help us find meaning in a chaotic world. Our family stories create us, restrain us, and haunt us. In this fresh and relatable work, atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan asks big questions about her family legacy and turns to her favorite novel, Jane Eyre, for the answers. Informed by the reading practices of medieval monks and rabbinic scholars from her training at the Harvard Divinity School and filtered through the pages of Jane Eyre as well as Little Women, Harry Potter, and The Great Gatsby, Zoltan explores what it means to have a birthright that you want to honor and shake off; remember but leave behind. She also reveals simple practices for reading any work as a sacred text—from Virginia Woolf to Anne of Green Gables to baseball scorecards.
Whether you're an avowed "Eyrehead" or simply a curious reader looking for a richer connection with the written word, this deeply felt and inspiring book will light the way to a more intimate appreciation for whatever books you love to read.
Articles
The Holocaust Is My Nationality
In this excerpt from "Praying with Jane Eyre," Vanessa Zoltan writes about learning the art of hospitality in a family of Holocaust survivors.
Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text
Eventually, we decided that sacredness is an act, not a thing. If I can decide that Jane Eyre is sacred, that means it is the actions I take that will make it so. The decision to treat Jane as sacred is an important first step, surely, but that is all the decision was—one step. The ritual, the engagement with the thing, is what makes the thing sacred. Objects are sacred only because they are loved. The text did not determine the sacredness; the actions and actors did, the questions you asked of the text and the way you returned to it.
Bertha Mason is Sacred
Now we were sitting in my dorm room, and one thing still seemed to be on all of our minds: the violent death of Bertha, the famous “madwoman in the attic.” Why does poor Bertha, who has been locked in a tower for more than ten years, jump to her death after setting Thornfield Hall on fire? In comparison with Jane’s cruel Aunt Reed, who gets pages and pages of a pre-Dickensian death scene, all that Bertha gets is “dead as the stone on which her brains and blood were scattered.” Listening to the conversation, it occurred to me that we were all tripping over this because it is a moment when a great injustice is being done. For a novel so obsessed with respect, where is the respect for Bertha? I had asked everyone to treat the novel as sacred. We had met week after week in order to love it, and we are all predisposed to find good in the things we love. But in our group’s last moment together, we were coming up against our faith in the novel as a force for good. We were being confronted with a real victim.