The recap
Orphaned and unwanted, young Jane Eyre grows up under the cold roof of an aunt who resents her, then survives the hunger and harsh discipline of a charity school for girls. She emerges plain, poor and fiercely self-possessed, and takes a post as governess at Thornfield Hall, a brooding house in the north of England. Its master, Edward Rochester, is moody, sardonic and often away, yet in their fireside conversations Jane finds a mind that seems to match her own. Meanwhile the house keeps its own counsel: odd laughter drifts along the upper corridors, and the servants know more than they let on. Told in Jane's intimate, unflinching voice, Brontë's novel blends Gothic atmosphere with a startlingly modern argument for a woman's dignity, conscience and right to an equal heart. It is a love story, but one in which the heroine never stops asking what love might cost her sense of self.
Why read it
For readers who want passion with a backbone: a Gothic romance led by one of fiction's most independent heroines, and a must for anyone who has ever felt underestimated.
Fun facts
- 01
Charlotte Brontë began the novel in 1846 in Manchester lodgings while nursing her father through cataract surgery; a publisher's rejection of her first novel reached her on the very day of his operation.
- 02
It was published in October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. under the gender-neutral pen name Currer Bell.
- 03
The grim Lowood School is modelled on the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where Brontë's two eldest sisters fell ill before dying in 1825.
- 04
William Makepeace Thackeray said an early copy swallowed a whole day of his reading; Brontë, a devoted admirer of his work, dedicated the second edition to him.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me”
