Thank you ennison for your comments.
I wrote as much for my own clarification as to invite comment. You wrote “Most of the more intelligent comments on Austen and on Romance as a serious fictional genre seem to come from women.”, where are they? Just shy or moved on to Harlequin romances? I am more pessimistic than you “the century wore on a more serious climate of opinion would draw literate young women (and men) towards more serious literature.”, we are living in the visual age and our enjoyment comes from predigested dramatizations of the classics.
I am as guilty as the rest since I would not have read Jane Eyre had I not seen and been dissatisfied with the recent dramatization. However I am puzzled with comments from readers on the forum that analysis diminishes one's enjoyment. It would seem to enrich it as in reading the biography of the Bronte sisters gives greater appreciation of the first half of the book.
The Romantic Novel part 2
The conclusion of Jane Eyre must have been very troublesome for the Victorian reader. While enclosing love in the custom of a family and a repentant Rochester, Charlotte finishes the sketch of Jane's character with themes that would have belonged in a novel by Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence., and were an anathema to the majority of Victorians.
Before she flees Thornfield and utters these word “Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours”, we have a glimse into Jane's mind in the following: to Rochester's question “What do you anticipate of me?” Jane answers “For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now – but when you get used to me, you will perhaps like me again, - like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends.”
A year latter Jane responds to Rochester seeking assurance that she was not an illusion - “and felt that she loved me, and trusted that she would not leave me.”
“Which I newer will, sir from this day.”
And to Rochester's - “but you cannot always be my nurse, Janet: you are young – you must marry one day.”
“I don't care about being married.”
Is this an affirmation of a Platonic love? How to reconcile the explicit sensuality in “I sought a seat for him in a hidden and lovely spot: a dry stump of a tree; nor did I refuse to let him, when seated, place me on his knee: why should I, when both he and I were happier near than apart?” When Rochester from jealousy asks “Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my knee, when I have given you notice quit?”
“Because I am comfortable there.”
Not only is there's humor in Charlotte's description but an explicit indication of a profound change in Jane's character. Jane is at ease with both the spiritual and physical parts of love. Her love has matured and feels no contradictions.
Charlotte ends Jane Eyre not with thoughts of love of Jane or Rochester, the heroine and hero of the novel but of the secondary male character St. John. Not with a meditation on the happiness of marriage as required by the Romantic novel's emotionally satisfying ending but on death of a religious fanatic. Consequently if one accepts the definition of the Romantic novel then Jane Eyre does not fit. We are left with the Victorian novel, with contradictions in the novel that reflected the unsettling changes in a social order evolving from an agricultural to industrial society.
The aborted wedding at Thornfield permitted Charlotte to avoid the discussion of sexuality which was integral to the planed honeymoon. She begins the ultimate chapter with “Reader I married him.” and a few pages further “I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth.” A page latter, when discussing the partially restored sight of her husband, Charlotte writes “When his first-born was put into his arms he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as once were – large brilliant and black.” Again Charlotte avoids the subject of sexuality. This is quite in line with the repressive sexual values of a small but morally influential Victorian class.