Novel
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
Opening lines
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
An orphan is raised by an aunt, Mrs Reed, who hates her, then placed at Lowood, a charity school where it is cold and the pupils go hungry and where her friend Helen Burns dies. She stays there eight years, six as a pupil and two as a teacher, then places an advertisement and gets herself hired as a governess at Thornfield, a manor house. The master of the house, Rochester, is brusque, gloomy, twenty years her senior. At night, someone laughs on the third floor.
Context
The novel appeared on 19 October 1847 from Smith, Elder, under the name of Currer Bell, and its success was immediate. The following summer, the publisher of the other two sisters let an American publisher know that the three author names designated only one person. Charlotte and Anne then left for London and presented themselves on 7 July 1848 at Smith, Elder to prove that they were at least two. The novel's school is modelled on the one where the author had been placed with her sisters.
Who it is for
A long novel in the first person, translated into French as early as 1854 and retranslated again in 2026.
Prizes and reception
Translated into more than fifty languages, it has been adapted for the cinema more than ten times, not counting television.
Sources for this page 11
The pages consulted to check this page.