On screens big and small, we've seen the story presented as a timeless love story, coupled with some beautiful period costumes and sets.
As Ms. Keller has noticed, now that she's read the novel again as an adult, is that it isn't such a love story after all. If we consider the times during which Charlotte Bronte wrote, we'd see that the story has more to do with women's liberation from traditional roles than it details the boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl gets boy back sort of arrangement.
But beyond that, Ms. Keller makes an important point.
The narrative is driven by magic. And we just don't put that same magic in the modern novel.
So much of a well-told story involves twists of fate that work almost like magic. Out of nowhere, it seems, a relative turns up who just happens to be well-acquainted with a key player in the plot, and on that sudden burst of coincidence the story turns.
It's ridiculous in this day and age to believe that anyone couldn't know everything about a given person. There's all the links via Facebook friends and LinkdIn and Google to prevent the magic of a chance encounter.
Yet the novel is beloved, in spite of things that we don't choose to believe in.
We do need the magic back. Reading fiction is all about suspending disbelief, and why can't we suspend disbelief in a story set in the present time? Could it be that the magic is lacking as authors try to create plots that conform to hard-boiled realism?
Are you listening, literary agents and publishers? How about trying something with a touch of magic and see if the reading public accepts what they love in the classics but can't seem to find in modern novels.
Maybe, just maybe, the decline in reading and book sales would inch up a fraction.
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