Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s iconic novel was originally subtitled ‘An Autobiography’. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created ‘a heroine as plain, and as small as myself, who’, she told her sisters, ‘shall be as interesting as any of yours’.
Indeed, Jane’s ordinariness as well as her extraordinary passion are key elements of her enduring appeal. In creating a young heroine who works, demands respect and combines self-control with intense emotion and rebellion, Charlotte directly challenged 19th-century conceptions of appropriate female behaviour and attitudes towards children. Brontë’s intimate and immediate first-person narrative placed the reader for the first time directly in the mind of the rebellious child and the outspoken woman, addressing its reader head on from its opening lines right to its famous close: ‘Reader, I married him’

Jane Eyre is an example of a Bildungsroman: a story that that follows its heroine’s journey from childhood to adulthood. The title character, Jane, is a bullied but rebellious orphan. She suffers neglect first in the household of her unloving aunt, and later at Lowood School as a half-starved pupil and then as a teacher. She eventually becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she is to care for Adele, the ward of the mysterious Mr Edward Rochester. A romance blossoms between the governess and her employer, who eventually proposes to her. But Rochester holds a dark secret: he is already married, to an insane woman incarcerated in the attic.

This tale of a headstrong governess is a curious mixture of fantasy, romance and realism, that speaks not just of Brontë’s wild imagination but her keen observation of daily life. Indeed Jane Eyre draws heavily on the author’s own attempts to make her way in life as the daughter of a Yorkshire parson, and Jane’s miserable childhood years at Lowood have their roots in Brontë’s early school experiences.