Jane Eyre (the US Edition!)

Inspired by Rob's enthusiasm for Jane Eyre and my (and his) recent reading of The Eyre Affair I thought, after carefully avoiding it for 49.5 years, I should give Jane Eyre a try.

I've always struggled with reading "classic" literature so I thought I'd try it as an audio book and so last night I downloaded it from BooksShouldBeFree.com.

The good news is that Rob's right: judging by the first few chapters it is going to be a ripping yarn.

The bad news is that the reader of the first few chapters speaks American English and although she has a lovely clear voice there are problems.

For a start it's a first person narrative, set in England, so the reader being American is very odd. But that wears off after a while.

Her reading was also very flat. The only time it changed at all was when she did funny voices which she did for a couple of characters (and it seemed like the same voice to me). Again I could live with that.

But the thing that was driving me insane was her occasional mispronunciation of words. I don't think it was because American English pronounces them differently either, instead I got the impression that they weren't in her vocabulary so she was guessing how to pronounce them.

By the end of chapter 3 I'd decided to give up. However as it started a new voice took over. Good news. Another American but still it gave me hope and I got half way through chapter 3 by the time I got home.

Subsequent research revealed that the recording was originally from LibriVox, who offer readings of out of copyright books by amateur readers and that this version is by a variety of readers so that was worrying.

But better news was the discovery that they had a second reading of Jane Eyre, by a single reader. So I click on the link. She read out the title and it was another American reader. Oh well. And then she started to read the book ... in an English accent! Oh happy day. It turns out that she's an English professor so I suppose that's how she knows how to talk our version of English. She's not perfect, you can detect the trans-Atlantic effect in there, but she's a lot better. And equally important she reads well with varying stress and different voices where required.

Anyway, if you see me in Milton Country Park over the next few weeks with Jake I'll probably me listening to this.