About Jane Eyre

By Charlotte Brontë · first published in 1847 · Literary Fiction

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, because Charlotte Brontë and her sisters believed that novels by women would not be judged fairly. It was an immediate success, and readers argued about who the author could be. Part of the shock was the voice: a plain, poor governess telling her own story in the first person and insisting that her feelings mattered as much as anyone’s.

The novel follows Jane from a miserable childhood in her aunt’s house, through the harsh charity school at Lowood, to a post as governess at Thornfield Hall. There she meets her employer, the abrupt and secretive Mr. Rochester, and hears strange laughter from the locked third floor. It is a love story and a Gothic mystery, but it is above all a portrait of a person who will not give up her self-respect, whether the pressure comes from cruelty, from religion or from love.

Brontë drew on her own life. Lowood is based on the school where two of her sisters fell fatally ill, and she herself worked unhappily as a governess. This preview contains the opening chapter, set on a wet November afternoon, in which Jane’s cousin John Reed finds her reading in the window seat.