Jane Eyre, like many people, is at her best alone

ONE OF THE great thrills of reading is encountering a situation that is familiar in feeling yet alien in context. So it is on reaching chapter nine of “Jane Eyre”, in which the narrator, a malnourished orphan in a grim Victorian charity school, describes how life is upended by a typhus epidemic. Liberated from the classroom, she is left to her own company and the outdoors, as millions of others have been in the age of covid-19. The school is set in glorious countryside, and it is May: “All this I enjoyed often and fully, free, unwatched, and almost alone.”