Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Reading Generously: Sacred Reading with Jane Eyre

By Megan Willome 6 Comments

Christmas pine tree sunsetJane Eyre cover Karen Swallow Prior

Jane Eyre By Her Side (And Yours)

Being someone who treats a text as sacred is asking a work of art to do mysterious things to you; it is the most vulnerable way to interact with a text.”

– Vanessa Zoltan

Imagine a beloved book as a friend. You carry her with you everywhere you go, so you can pop in anytime. At any moment you can pull up a paragraph and know exactly where you are in the story, and, all at once, you can find something wholly new. That is part of what it means to practice sacred reading. And no one knows more about that practice than Vanessa Zoltan, author of Praying with Jane Eyre. She describes a summer when she worked an internship as a hospital chaplain, carrying into every room her personal bible, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Zoltan is the founder and one of the co-hosts of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and other podcasts. Each week she and her HP co-host read a chapter and do some type of sacred reading practice, such as lectio divina or havruta. She does not think the book is perfect but that it is worthy of reading sacredly. She advocates reading any beloved text with 1) faith—that the text always has something to say, 2) rigor—that commitment to a text, even when it is hard, pays off, and 3) community—that reading together yields great gifts. I might sum those points up by saying sacred reading involves reading carefully and generously.

I have written about Jane Eyre before. (She is worth rereading.) This third read was done in community, with a friend who’d never read it. She’s a fan of Karen Swallow Prior and wanted to read Prior’s new edition of Charlotte Bronte’s classic, with notes and reflection questions. My friend and I also both listened to a nine-part podcast with Prior and hosts discussing the book.

Before writing her own edition, Prior already owned multiple copies of Jane Eyre — each purchased at a different time and each with a different personal meaning. And even after that rigorous exercise, discussing the book on the podcast yielded fresh insights. That is the benefit of sacred reading.
Praying with Jane Eyre cover
Zoltan and Prior are two very different women who both love Jane Eyre. Zoltan is a Jewish atheist, and she explores both identities in her book. Prior is a Christian, who reads Jane Eyre as “the story of a Christian seeking to be faithful within a nominally Christian society (similar to our own), which fails to affirm the basic human dignity of one who is poor and connected.” Jane is certainly not the kind of Christian any other character in the book expects her to be. She likes “Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel, and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job and Jonah.” But Psalms? “Psalms are not interesting,” she says, and is condemned as wicked for saying so.

Each time I read Jane Eyre — each time with a little more attention and comprehension — I find I am reading a parallel story of becoming myself. One of my favorite things about Jane is that despite her life’s many trials, she is always, 100 percent authentically herself. I cannot always say the same for myself. I would like to be able to say that.

It is the interior life of Jane, not the exterior one, which is so believable. The ‘self’ the novel portrays, far more than the events of the story, rings true. The voice of the girl who says, ‘I resisted all the way.’ The voice of the woman who demands in the face of the worst pain of her painful life, ‘Do you think I am an automaton?–a machine without feelings? … Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! –I have as much soul as you–and full as much heart!’ And the voice of the modern self who asserts, ‘I am not an angel … and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.'”

– Karen Swallow Prior

As I prepared this post I did a sacred reading practice called florilegia, which combines favorite sentences from a book, making them into a new “bouquet of flowers” and seeing what new things they might have to say when paired. I took “I will be myself,” which Prior highlights, and “I must keep in good health, and not die,” to  which Zoltan dedicates an entire chapter.

I will be myself / I must keep in good health, and not die. Here Jane sounds like a motivational speaker quoting her own bestselling autobiography: I am Jane! Hear me roar! And yet, I know these scenes. She is not roaring but asserting herself in the presence of powerful men. She is drawing lines for her own life.

I must keep in good health, and not die. / I will be myself. Here I sense Jane’s smile of self-knowledge. Part of her good psychological health is being herself, a woman who is full of feeling, neither stoic nor manic. She accepts herself as a woman who is free to dislike Psalms and to like fairies quite a lot.

And for me? What vulnerable questions is Jane asking me? How can I keep in good health today? With whom am I not being myself? I certainly cannot keep from dying, but how might I live in such a way that when death came I could go with few regrets?

Your Turn

1. Try it! Take two favorite sentences from a beloved book. Arrange them in one order and then in the opposite one. Write out what you notice. How might these different bouquets apply to your life?

2. What is your association with Jane Eyre?

3. Share your August pages. Sliced, started, and abandoned are all fair game.

August’s Pages

Poetry
Love Poems from God, translated and edited by Daniel Ladinsky
Cane, by Jean Toomer (a Tweetspeak rec!)

Picture Books and Early Readers
Cooper and the Big Apple, by Camille Cohn, illus. Riley Cohn (mother-daughter duo)
Llama Llama Misses Mama, by Anna Dewdney (Join us for Children’s Book Club next Friday, September 10!)

Middle Grade and YA
The Children of the Green Knowe, L.M. Boston

Grownups
The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, by Charles Dickens (short story within The Pickwick Papers)
The Autobiography of Santa Claus, as told to Jeff Guinn (reread select chapters)
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, reading guide by Karen Swallow Prior
Praying with Jane Eyre, Vanessa Zoltan

Photo by Sharon Tate Soberon, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome.

Browse more Reading Generously 

MW-Joy of Poetry Front cover 367 x 265

5 star

I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

Buy The Joy of Poetry Now

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Megan Willome
Megan Willome
Megan Willome is a writer, editor, and author of The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems and Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, and a walk in the dark.
Megan Willome
Latest posts by Megan Willome (see all)
  • Perspective: The Two, The Only: Calvin and Hobbes - December 16, 2022
  • Children’s Book Club: A Very Haunted Christmas - December 9, 2022
  • By Heart: ‘The night is darkening round me’ by Emily Brontë - December 2, 2022

Filed Under: A Story in Every Soul, Blog, book reviews, Classic Books, Reading Generously

Try Every Day Poems...

About Megan Willome

Megan Willome is a writer, editor, and author of The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems and Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, and a walk in the dark.

Comments

  1. Glynn says

    September 3, 2021 at 6:34 am

    I read “Jane Eyre” years ago, as in decades ago. I think I’m inspired enough to read it again.

    August reading

    Fiction
    Third and Long by Bob Katz
    The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
    Coming Home to the Loch by Hannah Ellis
    OOF by Strobe Witherspoon
    Back in the saddle by Ruth Logan Herne
    Brush Creek Cowboy by Liz Isaacson
    Paradise Palms by Paul Haddad
    Healed by Dean Skinner

    Mystery
    A Fatal Secret by Faith Martin
    Down Among the Dead by Damien Boyd
    When Stars Grow Dark by Scott Hunter
    A Fatal Truth by Faith Martin
    Dying Inside by Damien Boyd

    Shakespeare Project
    As You Like It
    Macbeth
    Troilus and Cressida
    Antony and Cleopatra

    Poetry and Criticism
    bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward
    The Truth of You by Iain Thomas
    Let Our Memories Escape by Thomas Colquith
    Spoon River America by Jason Stacy

    Drama
    Our Town by Thornton Wilder

    Reply
    • Megan Willome says

      September 3, 2021 at 8:11 am

      Oh, I love “Our Town” so much! Whenever I visit a cemetery, I think of that third act.

      I highly recommend Karen Swallow Prior’s edition. Four of the six are out: “Sense and Sensibility,” “Heart of Darkness,” “Frankenstein,” and “Jane Eyre,” and the two coming are “The Scarlet Letter” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”

      Reply
  2. Bethany R. says

    September 3, 2021 at 11:36 pm

    Wonderful piece here, Megan, thank you for sharing it. I chose this book to be my silent reading companion in 10th grade. A lovely “friend” to visit each school day.

    Reply
    • Megan Willome says

      September 6, 2021 at 10:27 am

      What a lovely practice for a teacher to institutesnd a worthy choice by you.

      Reply
  3. Kelly Oberheiden says

    December 2, 2021 at 5:46 am

    This article is beautifully written. I agree with you that in our lives, we have beloved books who are our friends, who accompany and teach us to reflect on the way we live. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

    Kelly | Author of Kindheart

    Reply
    • Megan Willome says

      December 2, 2021 at 10:23 am

      Thank you, Kelly. Do you have a book that has kept you company?

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy