Book Review: Praying with Jane Eyre
Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice by Vanessa Zoltan (TarcherPerigree, 2021).
Praying with Jane Eyre is not what it sounds like. Author Vanessa Zoltan, as an atheist, has her own ideas about what constitutes prayer. She also has her own ideas about what constitutes a sacred text. For her, what makes a text sacred is not divine inspiration, but simply a reader deciding to treat it as sacred, a source of wisdom that has much to teach. And that’s what she decided to do with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
So in this book, Zoltan explains how, with a group, she read the novel carefully and closely, and shares with us what she’s learned from it. She’s guided, at least in part, by the traditions of her Jewish heritage. She appreciates many things about these traditions, but as a woman whose grandparents suffered in the Holocaust, she cannot quite bring herself to believe in God. “They didn’t find their way back to God,” she writes,” and so I don’t want to. … I flirt with God, but the place where I feel as though I can be of most service to the world and most honor my elders is outside, rejecting God; demanding more of him before I accept him.”
This is why she searches for other texts she can call sacred, other kinds of prayer. In her view—as the idea that readers can sanctify a text suggests—the only kind of meaning is the kind we make for ourselves. And reading is one major way that we find meaning—so much so, for Zoltan, that at times I thought she was praying to Jane Eyre, not with Jane Eyre. “In literature,” she writes, “I try to drown myself in meaning.”
I do too, which is why I was able to find many things to like and relate to in this book, despite my vast differences from the author in matters of faith. Zoltan has the ability to take people as she finds them, with all their weaknesses and strengths, and to believe there’s more to them than their bad side. She can be fully aware of a character’s terrible deeds (e.g., Rochester), and still have respect, appreciation, and hope for him. Conversely, she can root fiercely for a misunderstood and violent underdog (e.g., Bertha), and still acknowledge that she might leave a safe distance between herself and that character if they were ever to hang out together in real life.
Zoltan is also able to wrestle with her sacred text when she runs into problems in it—assumptions and prejudices that repel her to the point that she feels she has been “betrayed.” (If you know your Brontës, you know that Charlotte, admirable woman that she was, could nevertheless be very prejudiced.) Zoltan wills herself not to succumb to cynicism (she calls this “a cheap-grace way out,” quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer), but instead to go back to the book and search there for answers that will help her make sense of the book’s own betrayal. If something in a book made you trust it, she reasons, you have to go back to the thing you trust to find your way back to hope.
What doesn’t quite work here, at least for me, is that Zoltan can’t bring herself to extend the same treatment to Scripture. She loves Judaism, she works as a chaplain, and she consults religious thinkers. So this is no side issue for her. But when she comes up against the possibility of belief in God, or of reading Scripture in the same way she reads Jane Eyre or one of the other texts she treats as sacred, you can practically hear a door slam shut in her mind. It’s jarring, almost a repudiation of that openness and generosity she extends to so much other literature. And it interferes with her own reading of her preferred sacred texts; for instance, she tiptoes around Jane Eyre’s belief in God, shying away when brought directly in contact with it, and spending considerably more time on Jane’s passing mention of a fairy than on Jane’s Christianity.
On Zoltan’s own terms, I don’t think this works. It appears that in this matter, which she herself realizes is important, she is after all taking the easy way out that she said she didn’t want to take. And that leaves me feeling that the author is being untrue to her own stated mission. The follow-up I’d love to see is a book where Zoltan tries wrestling with the Torah that has “tripped [her] up” so many times, in the same way she does with Jane Eyre. Not necessarily a book where she comes to belief, but one where she is at least willing to engage fully with the betrayals she perceives in her tradition’s holy book, and see what kind of hope she can find there.
Unless and until we get a book like that, this book, to me, will feel incomplete.
(Cover image copyright TarcherPerigree.)
Book Links:
Praying with Jane Eyre on Amazon
Praying with Jane Eyre on Bookshop