One has to wonder whether Decca Aitkenhead has actually read "Jane Eyre." Given the below I can only assume that it's languishing at the bottom of a Things I Ought to Have Read pile. Or perhaps Ms Aitkenhead tackled it at too tender an age and quite seriously misinterpreted it (a little bit like me and "Les Miserables," which it turns out does not feature dragons).
Part of the problem is that no one can agree on a definition of chick lit. Bridget Jones's Diary is generally cited as an early example, but Allison Pearson hit the roof when her novel about a working mother, "I Don't Know How She Does It," was assigned to the genre. The book's key ingredient – a sassy but klutzy female protagonist, embroiled in comical misadventures – could arguably be found in Jane Eyre, leaving any definition so elastic as to verge on meaningless.Jane Eyre is many, many things: "sassy but klutzy" is not one of them. Also, Aunt Reed, typhus epidemics and nutso-bananas pyromaniacal first wives hardly constitute "comical misadventures."
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