The story
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography was published in London in October 1847 by Smith, Elder and Co., with the author named as Currer Bell. The narrator, Jane, is an orphan, raised cruelly by an aunt and then sent to the harsh Lowood school. She becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her brooding employer, Mr. Rochester. On their wedding day she learns that he already has a wife, Bertha Mason, who is kept locked in the attic. Jane leaves, finds independence and a new place in the world, and at the end returns to Rochester, famously writing 'Reader, I married him'.
Charlotte Bronte (1816 to 1855) was a clergyman's daughter from Haworth in Yorkshire, and she and her sisters Emily and Anne published under male pseudonyms because women writers were often treated harshly. She had worked as a governess and a teacher, and Lowood is based partly on a school she knew. The novel mixes the realism of the Victorian novel, the Gothic mode that Austen had mocked and the Romantic stress on feeling, and its first-person voice speaks directly to the reader.
The book was an immediate bestseller, praised for its power and attacked by some critics for its disregard of convention. The author's real identity became known in the following years. Later writers have returned to the novel, as in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which gives Bertha a voice of her own.
Why it mattered
- The novel gave Victorian fiction a woman narrator who claims moral and emotional equality, a model for later feminist reading.
- It brought the Gothic and the psychological into the realist novel, influencing writers such as Daphne du Maurier.
- Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) made it a founding text of postcolonial rewriting.
Sources
- Charlotte Bronte Britannica
- The Bronte novels Bronte Parsonage Museum
- Wide Sargasso Sea Britannica
Community notes
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