Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jane Eyre was published on the 19th of October 1847 by Smith, Elder and Co. of London. It was written by Charlotte Bronte and released under her pen name Currer Bell. The first American edition followed in January 1848, published by Harper and Brothers of New York.
Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, that follows the orphaned Jane from age ten to approximately thirty. It traces her abusive childhood at Gateshead Hall, her harsh schooling at Lowood Institution, her work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, her love for the brooding Edward Rochester, and her final independence and marriage. The novel is also considered the first major feminist novel and incorporates Gothic elements throughout.
The Lowood Institution sequences drew from Charlotte Bronte's own childhood at the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, where her sisters Elizabeth and Maria died of tuberculosis. North Lees Hall near Hathersage in Derbyshire, which Charlotte visited with Ellen Nussey in the summer of 1845, is thought to have inspired Thornfield Hall. Wycoller Hall in Lancashire, close to Haworth, likely provided the model for Ferndean Manor.
Initial reception was sharply divided. Elizabeth Rigby, reviewing in The Quarterly Review in 1848, called it pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition and linked it to Chartist rebellion. Others praised it enthusiastically; George Henry Lewes said it read like a page from his own life, and a critic in the Atlas called it a book to make the pulses gallop. The Indicator declared, incorrectly, that no woman could have written it.
Bertha Mason is Rochester's first wife, kept hidden in Thornfield Hall's attic, whose existence prevents his marriage to Jane. Scholars read Bertha as Jane's Gothic double: where Jane is self-controlled and principled, Bertha is violent and ungovernable. Questions about Bertha's Creole heritage and implied mixed-race identity have made her a focal point for critical discussions of race and empire in the novel, most famously addressed by Jean Rhys in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966 by Jean Rhys, is a novel that retells events from the perspective of the woman Rochester married before Jane Eyre begins. It won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. Rhys, herself from Dominica, depicts Bertha, whom she names Antoinette, as a Creole woman from the West Indies who is coerced and eventually destroyed by Rochester and by her displacement to England.