I WONDER what Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen might have made, in their time, of the notion of a Kindle – an electronic reading device? Would they, perhaps, have shared my initial rebuff: “I need to hold a proper book in my hands”? Or, given that they (after the pattern of Jesus, one might say) were both so skilled at delicately – and sometimes not-so-delicately – mocking repression and strictly defined roles and purposes, would they immediately have seen the potential for re-kindling widespread interest in the written word – recognising a societal tool much to be both desired and admired? We cannot know. But here’s a portrait of a Brontë / Austen fan who’s been delighting today in Villette, and who, with equal enthusiasm, proposes to read her Kindle version of Jane Eyre at the earliest opportunity. And – in her introduction to that book, Charlotte Brontë proffers a Protest Against Bigotry. It’s worth a read: feisty stuff. Classic books – delivered, with panache, by modern means – kindle “ever old and ever new” ways of looking at ourselves and at how we live, and at what we profess to believe.

… I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as “Jane Eyre:” in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.  To attack the first is not to assail the last.  To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. How very apt a “protest” for – precisely – our own times.