Jane Eyre

• 1. Introduction

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  Jane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell. The author was Charlotte Bronte, and she had written something that reviewers struggled to place. One called it "pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition." Another said it made the pulses gallop. A third declared, flatly, that no woman could possibly have written it. They were wrong on that last point, and history has corrected most of the rest.

  The novel follows a girl named Jane from the age of ten to roughly thirty. She is orphaned, mistreated, educated against the odds, falls in love with a man who is hiding a secret in his attic, and must choose between passion and principle. But the story of how Jane Eyre became one of the most celebrated novels in the English language is stranger and richer than any plot summary suggests.

  Literary critic Daniel S. Burt called Charlotte Bronte "the first historian of the private consciousness" and named her the literary ancestor of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. In 2003, British readers voted Jane Eyre the tenth best-loved book in the country in a BBC survey called The Big Read. What did Bronte do that earned the novel that place? And what do the arguments it sparked, about class, race, feminism, and madness, still have to say?

• 2. A Life Written Into Fiction

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  Charlotte Bronte began composing Jane Eyre in Manchester. The early sections of the novel, in which a young girl is sent to a harsh boarding school called Lowood Institution, drew directly from her own childhood at the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall, Lancashire. Her sisters Elizabeth and Maria died of tuberculosis there as a result of the conditions. In the novel, Jane's best friend Helen Burns dies of consumption in Jane's arms; Elizabeth Gaskell, in her 1857 biography of the Bronte sisters, wrote that Helen Burns was an exact transcript of Maria Bronte, who died of consumption at age eleven.

  The harsh Mr Brocklehurst, director of the fictional Lowood, was based on the Reverend William Carus Wilson, born in 1791 and died in 1859, the Evangelical minister who ran Cowan Bridge. Wilson preached austerity for his pupils while living comfortably himself. In the novel, his own daughter Augusta exclaims over the plain appearance of the Lowood girls, having never seen them in silk gowns.

  The dissolution of Jane's cousin John Reed echoed a painful family story as well. John Reed's slide into drinking and gambling mirrors the life of Charlotte's brother Branwell, who became an opium and alcohol addict in the years before his death. Like Jane herself, Charlotte eventually worked as a governess. Gaskell's biography, published a decade after Jane Eyre, made these connections public.

• 3. The Gothic Architecture of Thornfield

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  North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in the Peak District in Derbyshire, is thought to have inspired Thornfield Hall, the brooding manor at the novel's center. Charlotte Bronte and her friend Ellen Nussey visited it in the summer of 1845; Nussey described it in a letter dated the 22nd of July 1845. The hall was the residence of the Eyre family, and its first owner, Agnes Ashurst, was reputedly confined as a lunatic in a padded second-floor room. The parallel to Bertha Mason, Rochester's hidden wife, is unmistakable.

  The Gothic atmosphere Bronte constructed at Thornfield depends on a technique literary scholars call the homodiegetic narrator. Jane exists both as a character and as the voice telling the story, which lets her share her terror without resolving it. The reader hears what Jane hears: "a demoniac laugh, low, suppressed, and deep," and a "savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall." The explanation belongs to Bertha Mason, but it arrives late, and the suspense is real.

  The Gothic double, a motif in which a protagonist is paired with a dark counterpart, runs through the entire novel. Bertha is read by scholars as Jane's double: Jane is pious and self-controlled; Bertha is violent and ungovernable. Foreshadowing reinforces the dread. After Jane agrees to marry Rochester, lightning splits a horse-chestnut tree in the orchard. The Wycoller Hall in Lancashire, close to Haworth, is thought to have provided the model for Ferndean Manor, the ruined retreat where Rochester ends up. One of Henry Cunliffe's relatives, who inherited Wycoller in the 1770s, bore the name Elizabeth Eyre.

• 4. A Voice Without Precedent

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  "Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings?" Jane asks Rochester directly in chapter 23, after he has proposed in an indirect and callous way. She continues: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will." It is a declaration of spiritual equality across class and sex, ending with the claim that her spirit addresses his spirit "just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal, as we are."

  R. B. Martin described Jane Eyre as the first major feminist novel, while noting that it contains no explicit demand for political, legal, or educational equality. The equality Jane insists on is moral and spiritual. Feminist critic Ellen Moers cited the Bronte fictions as prime examples of Female Gothic: stories that explore a woman's entrapment within domestic space and her dangerous attempts to escape. The novel's influence on feminist literary criticism intensified in 1979, when S. Gilbert and S. Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, a title borrowed directly from Bertha's situation.

  The bildungsroman form amplified Jane's voice further. The novel spans Jane's life from age ten to approximately thirty, and the narrative technique is explicitly autobiographical. The original title, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, announces this. Feminist scholars have argued that female bildungsroman tracks a different arc from the male version: not conquest of the world, but learning to inhabit a restricting society while preserving a core self. Jane's religious beliefs shift considerably across the novel, from her blunt childhood confrontations with Mr Brocklehurst, to the influence of Helen Burns at Lowood, to her adult refusal of St John Rivers's cold and dutiful marriage proposal.

• 5. The Question of Bertha Mason

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  Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. The novel is a direct response to Jane Eyre, telling the story of the woman Rochester married before the novel begins. It won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. Rhys was herself from Dominica, and she wrote Bertha, renamed Antoinette, as a Creole woman from the West Indies who is coerced into marriage by Rochester and gradually destroyed by the relationship and her displacement to England.

  The source material for Jane Eyre gives Bertha almost no interiority. Rochester introduces her to Jane in darkness as a figure that "snatched and growled like some strange wild animal." Her race is never stated plainly, but the text hints: Rochester says he married her partly because she was of "good race," implying he was not; her hair and face are described as dark and discoloured. American scholar Susan Meyer has argued that Bronte was responding to an analogy common in 19th-century European texts that compared white women to colonised people in order to diminish both. Bertha, neither fully white in the eyes of Victorian society nor fully racialized, occupies an unstable middle position.

  The novel also drew on the intellectual climate of the period, in which a number of writers believed that mixed-race descent, compounded by a tropical upbringing, could produce mental instability. Bertha is the novel's clearest point of contact with British imperial history and with the Atlantic slave trade. Scholars have noted the text's allusions to slavery, particularly its North American form, as a running analogy for the constraints placed on Jane as well.

• 6. How the World Received It

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  Elizabeth Rigby, reviewing the novel in The Quarterly Review in 1848, argued that the same spirit that had "fostered Chartism and rebellion at home" had also written Jane Eyre. An anonymous notice in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction found it dangerously levelling: "Our social distinctions attempted to be levelled, and all absurdly moral notions done away with." The Indicator was confident no woman had written it, staking the reviewer's critical reputation on the point.

  Other readers felt differently. George Henry Lewes wrote that the novel "reads like a page out of one's own life." A critic in the Atlas called it "a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat." The Nineteenth Century, an American publication, defended the novel against charges of immorality, arguing that even critics hired to disparage it had felt "a throb of human feeling" at reading it.

  In the 20th century, Jerome Beaty raised a different kind of critical concern: the first-person narration is so close that readers tend to accept Jane's perspective uncritically, regardless of how irregular her views might be. The pen name Currer Bell, chosen to be gender-ambiguous, complicated early reception; reviewers who assumed a male author were sometimes surprised by the emotional register, and those who suspected a woman found that their assumptions about women's writing did not fit what they had read. The second edition of the novel was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray.

• 7. An Afterlife in Words and Images

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  The line that closes Chapter 38, "Reader, I married him," has had a life of its own well beyond the novel. Liane Moriarty discussed and used the line in her 2018 novel Nine Perfect Strangers. A 2016 anthology of short stories, Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracy Chevalier and published by The Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, was commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte's birth.

  Emma Tennant's novel The French Dancer's Bastard reimagines the backstory of Adele Varens, the French child Jane governs at Thornfield, exploring whether she was Rochester's love child and what her relationship with Jane truly was. The adaptation trail runs across multiple media: theatre, film, television, and at least three full-length operas. A Thai novel, Ruk Diow Kong Jenjira, was adapted in 1993 and became a television drama on Channel 3 in 1996.

  The most recent major film adaptation, released in 2011 and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, starred Mia Wasikowska as Jane and Michael Fassbender as Rochester. The film, its actors, and its costume design team received nominations and awards across 2011 and 2012. The fire Bertha sets at Thornfield, the attic room, the split chestnut tree, and the line "Reader, I married him" have all entered a wider cultural vocabulary, recognisable even to people who have never opened the book.