Booking through Romance

What’s the most romantic book you’ve ever read?

And, secondly, did you like it? Is it your usual kind of reading, or did it take you by surprise?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë wins hands down for me. I read it while I was in school. It enthralled me then, it still enthralls me now. Jane was one very strong character. She knew her mind and was a very independent female. Her integrity is always left intact, and Rochester too does not believe in the classes. An amazing novel which is quite modern, considering those times.

These are a few of my favourite quotes from the novel:

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags" (Chapter 12). 

"The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint; the friendly frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him" (Chapter 15). 

"And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude and many associates, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire"(Chapter 15).

"I knew," he continued, "you would do me good in some way, at some time: I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you; their expression and smile did not.strike delight to my inmost heart so for nothing" (Chapter 15) 

"I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me" (Chapter 17).  

 "In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards.  What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours: it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (Chapter 26). 

 "Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine.  May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love" (Chapter 27). 

 "Reader, I married him."