Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It is one of the most famous romance novels of all time. The novel is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine. It revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative.
About Jane Eyre in brief
Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It is one of the most famous romance novels of all time. The novel is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine. It revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative. The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, and it is considered by many to be ahead of its time because of Jane’s individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism. It was originally published in three volumes in the 19th century, comprising chapters 1 to 15, 16 to 27, and 28 to 38. The second edition was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray. Jane Eyre, aged 10, lives at Gateshead Hall with her maternal uncle’s family, the Reeds, as a result of her uncle’s dying wish. She was orphaned several years earlier when her parents died of typhus. Jane’s aunt, Sarah Reed, dislikes her, abuses her, and treats her as a burden, and Mrs. Reed discourages her three children from associating with Jane. The nursemaid, Bessie, proves to be Jane’s only ally in the household, even though Bessy occasionally scolds Jane harshly. Jane finds that life is harsh and attempts to be an older girl, but does not have the courage or tenacity to show this.
At Lowood Institution, a school for poor and orphaned girls, Jane soon finds that she is not an orphan and that she will tell everyone at Lowood how cruelly treated she has been. She is eventually sent to school, an idea Mrs. Reed happily supports. Jane also tells Mrs Reed and declares that she’ll never call her daughters, Georgiana and Eliza, again. Jane leaves, however, when she confronts Mrs aunt Reed and tells her that Jane has a ‘endency for deceit’, which he interprets as Jane being a liar. She also tells Mr. Brocklehurst, who is the director of the charity school for girls, that Jane will never call Mrs aunt or daughter again. It goes through five distinct stages: Jane’s childhood, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins. Her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. The novel’s setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III. It is divided into 38 chapters. The first American edition was published in 1847, by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, and the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. It has been called the \”first historian of the private consciousness\”, and the literary ancestor of writers like Proust and Joyce.
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This page is based on the article Jane Eyre published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
