Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
The novel revolutionized prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist's moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity.
Charlotte Brontë has been called the first historian of the private consciousness, and the literary ancestor of writers like Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
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, along with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous romance novels of all time.
Jane Eyre is divided into 38 chapters. 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.
More information: The British Library
The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character.
Its setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820).
It has five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, 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. Throughout these sections, it provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.
Throughout the novel there are frequent themes relating to ideas of ethnicity, specifically that of Bertha, which are a reflection of the society that the novel is set within. Mr. Rochester claims to have been forced to take on a mad Creole wife, a woman who grew up in the West Indies, and who is thought to be of mixed-race descent.
More information: Literary Devices
In the analysis of several scholars, Bertha plays the role of the racialized other through the shared belief that she chose to follow in the footsteps of her parents. Her alcoholism and apparent mental instability cast her as someone who is incapable of restraining herself, almost forced to submit to the different vices she is a victim of. Many writers of the period believed that one could develop mental instability or mental illnesses simply based on their race.
The idea of the equality of men and women emerged in the Victorian period. R.B. Martin described Jane Eyre as the first major feminist novel, although there is not a hint in the book of any desire for political, legal, educational, or even intellectual equality between the sexes.
Before the Victorian era, Jane Austen wrote literary fiction that influenced later popular fiction, as did the work of the Brontë sisters produced in the 1840s. Brontë's love romance incorporates elements of both the gothic novel and Elizabethan drama, and demonstrate[s] the flexibility of the romance novel form.
More information: The Literature Network
I am a free human being with an independent will.
Charlotte Brönte
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