Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

About this book:
Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England.

It tells the story of a plain governess (Jane) who, after early life difficulties, falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester. They marry, but only after Rochester's insane first wife (of whom Jane initially had no knowledge) dies in a dramatic house fire. In its internalization of the action — the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane's moral and spiritual sensibility and all the events are colored by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain of poetry — the novel revolutionized the art of fiction. Charlotte Brontë has been called the 'first historian of the private consciousness' and the literary ancestor of writers like Joyce and Proust.

The novel begins with the titular character Jane Eyre living with her maternal uncle's family, the Reeds, as her uncle's dying wish. The novel starts when Jane is ten years old and several years after her parents died of typhus. Mr. Reed was the only one in the Reed family to be kind to Jane. Jane’s aunt Sarah Reed does not like her, treats her worse than a servant and discourages and, at times, forbids her children from associating with Jane. Mrs. Reed and her three children are abusive to Jane, both physically and emotionally. The servant Bessie proves to be Jane's only ally in the household even though Bessie sometimes harshly scolds Jane. Excluded from the family activities, Jane is incredibly unhappy with only a doll and occasionally books in which to find solace. One day, Jane is locked in the red room, where her uncle died, and panics after seeing visions of him. She is finally rescued when she is allowed to attend Lowood School for Girls, after the physician Mr. Lloyd convinces Mrs. Reed to send Jane away. Before Jane leaves, she confronts Mrs. Reed and declares that she'll never call her "aunt" again, that Mrs. Reed and her daughters, Georgiana, and Eliza are deceitful and that she'd tell everyone at Lowood how cruelly Mrs. Reed treated her...
(source: Wikipedia)

About the author:
Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.

Speculation about the identity of Currer Bell and whether the author was male or female heightened with the publication of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights by "Ellis Bell" and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey by "Acton Bell". Accompanying the speculation was a change in the critical reaction to Charlotte's work and accusations were made that the writing was "coarse", a judgment more readily made once it was suspected that "Currer Bell" was a woman. However sales of Jane Eyre continued to be strong, and may have increased as a result of the novel developing a reputation as an 'improper' book.
(source: Wikipedia)

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