Jane Eyre (1847)
Orphan governess Jane falls in love with Mr Rochester, whose mad wife is hidden at Thornfield
Literature · Novelists
Charlotte Brontë
1816–1855 · English
Victorian novel; Gothic romance and realism
Charlotte Brontë, eldest surviving child of the Haworth parsonage family, published Jane Eyre (1847) under the pseudonym Currer Bell and won immediate success. Its passionate first-person heroine, who insists on her equality with Mr Rochester, made it one of the most influential English novels; she also wrote Shirley and Villette before dying in pregnancy at 38.
How to spot them
- ▸Pseudonym Currer Bell, alongside Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell
- ▸Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester, Thornfield Hall, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic
- ▸'Reader, I married him.'
- ▸Villette and Lucy Snowe; Brussels and the Pensionnat Héger
- ▸Haworth, Yorkshire; biography by Elizabeth Gaskell
Key works
Shirley (1849)
Yorkshire novel set amid the Luddite riots of 1811–1812
Villette (1853)
Lucy Snowe teaches at a girls' school in a fictional Belgian city, loving M. Paul Emanuel
The Professor (1857)
Her first novel, rejected in her lifetime and published posthumously
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846)
The sisters' joint verse collection, which famously sold only two copies at first
Key ideas
- Jane's claim to equal spiritual worth regardless of class, sex or looks
- Autobiographical fiction: Lowood reflects Cowan Bridge school, Villette her time in Brussels
Quick-fire facts
- •Jane Eyre opens: 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.'
- •Jane Eyre is subtitled An Autobiography
- •Born in Thornton, Yorkshire; the family moved to Haworth in 1820
- •Her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth died after attending the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, model for Lowood
- •Helen Burns and Mr Brocklehurst are figures at Lowood; St John Rivers proposes to Jane
- •Studied in Brussels in 1842 with Emily, and fell unrequitedly in love with Constantin Héger
- •As children she and Branwell invented the imaginary kingdom of Angria
- •Married her father's curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died in March 1855
- •Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë appeared in 1857
- •Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) tells the story of Rochester's first wife
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Charlotte Brontë
- Juliet Barker — The Brontës