Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

About this book

Jane Eyre is Charlotte Brontë’s first published novel. It appeared in October 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and its subtitle, An Autobiography, signals the form: a woman looking back over her life and telling it in her own words, from an unhappy childhood through school, work as a governess, and a love affair that is far from straightforward. The book was a success on publication and has never gone out of print.

It lasted because Jane herself is unusual. She is plain, poor, and without family connections, and she insists throughout on being treated as a thinking person with the same moral standing as anyone else. The novel combines a realistic account of what a woman in her position could expect from life with elements of gothic fiction: a large old house, strange noises at night, and a secret that the narrator is not told. The combination has been copied many times since.

The story

Jane is an orphan living with her aunt’s family at Gateshead Hall, where she is bullied by her cousins and treated as a burden. At ten she is sent to Lowood, a charity school for the daughters of clergymen, where the conditions are harsh and disease spreads through the dormitories. She stays on as a pupil and then as a teacher before advertising for a post as a governess.

The post takes her to Thornfield Hall, where she teaches a young French girl and gradually gets to know the house’s owner, Edward Rochester, a brusque, moody man who begins to seek out her company. The household includes a kindly housekeeper, a servant whose behavior is hard to explain, and a locked floor from which Jane sometimes hears laughter. What Jane learns about the house, and what she decides to do about it, forms the central turn of the book.

Themes and historical context

Brontë drew on her own life for parts of the novel. She and her sisters attended a school for clergymen’s daughters at Cowan Bridge, where two of the older Brontë girls fell ill and died, and Lowood is widely understood to be based on it. Brontë also worked as a governess and a teacher, and the novel’s attention to the awkward status of the governess (educated like the family, paid like the servants) comes from experience.

The book takes up questions of class, religion, and the position of women. Jane encounters several versions of Christianity, from the harsh self-denial preached at Lowood to the missionary zeal of a later character, and measures each against her own conscience. The novel’s insistence that a poor woman has the right to refuse a bad bargain, even an attractive one, was noted by early reviewers, some of whom found it improper.

Jane Eyre was published a few weeks before Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and the three sisters’ shared pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell) led to speculation about whether they were one writer or several. Charlotte revealed their identities after her sisters’ deaths.

Who should read it

The novel runs to around 185,000 words in thirty-eight chapters. The prose is direct, and Jane addresses the reader from time to time, which makes the length easier to carry than it looks. There are passages of French dialogue (short and usually clear from context) and a slow stretch in the final third, but the childhood chapters and the Thornfield section move quickly. Readers who want a Victorian novel with a clear plot and a narrator worth spending time with can start here.

Edition notes

This Project Gutenberg text is taken from an illustrated edition with drawings by F. H. Townsend. The illustrations are included in the HTML and EPUB versions. The text is complete and unabridged.