Title: Jane Eyre Author: Charlotte Brontë Creation Date: 1847 Location: England Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in London in October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell, three weeks before her sister Emily published Wuthering Heights under the name Ellis Bell. It was an immediate sensation — praised by Thackeray, reprinted twice before the year was out. Its first-person narrator, a plain, poor, intelligent young woman who refuses to be diminished, was unlike anything Victorian readers had encountered in the standard three-volume novel; its emotional intensity struck contemporaries as almost physiological. Elizabeth Rigby, writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review, denounced its moral tendencies and suggested that if a woman had written it she must be a woman who had forfeited the good opinion of her sex. The pseudonym held only until 1848, when Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to confirm their identities to the publisher George Smith. The book has not been out of print since.
Charlotte Brontë was thirty-one when Jane Eyre appeared. She was the eldest surviving daughter of an Anglican clergyman in the Yorkshire village of Haworth. Her mother had died when Charlotte was five; her two older sisters had died of tuberculosis, likely exacerbated by the brutal conditions of the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, which she would transpose into Lowood in the novel. She had worked as a governess and as a teacher, taught briefly at a school in Brussels where she fell painfully in love with her married employer Constantin Héger, and in 1846 persuaded her sisters Emily and Anne to join her in producing a joint volume of poems under the masculine names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The poems sold two copies. The sisters immediately turned to fiction. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights; Anne wrote Agnes Grey; Charlotte wrote The Professor, which was rejected, and then, in about a year, Jane Eyre.
The novel's twentieth-century reputation underwent a significant transformation as postcolonial readers began to press on silences Victorian readers had accepted without examination. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is the pivotal intervention: Rhys told Bertha Mason's story, the Jamaican Creole wife locked in Rochester's attic, and made visible the West Indian economy — sugar, slavery, plantation wealth — that underwrites Rochester's estate and Jane's inheritance. After Rhys, after Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, after Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, Jane Eyre is read simultaneously as a foundational feminist text and as a document of imperial complicity. Its heroine's moral triumph depends on arrangements — the inheritance from a colonial uncle, the elimination of the Creole wife — that the novel refuses to examine. The empire is the novel's unconscious, and that unconscious is among the most revealing parts of it.
The Prohibition
The prohibition Charlotte Brontë wrote against was the one that pressed on nearly every respectable Englishwoman of the early Victorian period who tried to earn her own living by writing. There was no legal bar against women publishing novels, but the cultural and professional conditions of serious authorship were arranged against women in ways that were subtle and pervasive. A novel published under a woman's name in the 1840s was assumed to belong to a particular category: domestic, moral, sentimental, minor. Serious novels — novels of ideas, of passion, of social critique — were assumed to belong to men. Reviewers read women's novels looking for the marks of femininity and penalised those that did not conform. A woman who wrote a novel of strong feeling risked being read not as a serious artist but as an unchaste person whose work was a symptom of her own moral irregularity. Elizabeth Rigby's review of Jane Eyre made this logic visible.
The second prohibition was economic. Respectable women of the Brontës' class — daughters of the clergy, of the minor gentry, of the professional middle class — had almost no means of supporting themselves if their male relatives could not. The few professions open were teaching and governessing, both of which Brontë had practised and both of which she described with unsparing precision in her novels. A governess was a woman of education in a household where education was valued only insofar as it could be transmitted to children; she was paid poorly, housed in liminal rooms between servants and family, socially invisible to the adults around her, and vulnerable to the moods of her employers. The position was, in the economic vocabulary of the nineteenth century, a genteel form of servitude. The prohibition, for a woman in her position, was a prohibition against any life that did not end in either an advantageous marriage or a long dependent spinsterhood.
The third prohibition attached specifically to female feeling. Victorian culture imposed on women an extensive regulation of what they were permitted to want, to say about what they wanted, and to do in response. A respectable woman was not supposed to feel strong sexual desire, express anger openly, acknowledge ambition, or claim equality with men in intellect or will. The novel Brontë wrote violates every one of these prohibitions in the voice of its first-person narrator. Jane feels; Jane says what she feels; Jane's feelings include rage and sexual longing and a fierce insistence on her own worth. That a female narrator should speak in this way about her own inner life was, for many of Brontë's first readers, the shocking thing about the novel — more shocking even than the bigamy plot or the madwoman in the attic. The prohibition Brontë was breaking was a prohibition on the contents of a woman's speech, and she broke it by allowing Jane to speak in the register traditionally reserved for men.
The Strategy
Brontë's strategy was the pseudonym and everything that followed from it. The three sisters chose deliberately ambiguous initials — Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — that preserved their real Christian initials while yielding no conclusive signal of sex. Charlotte explained later, in the "Biographical Notice" for the 1850 edition of her sisters' works, that they had not wished to declare themselves women because authoresses were liable to be looked on with prejudice, critics sometimes used the weapon of personality against them, and the flattery granted in return was not true praise. The Bells' names were calculated to make the book available to a reader who would bring masculine expectations to it. By the time that reader discovered the author was a woman, the reading had already happened. The pseudonym bought a fair hearing in a market that would not ordinarily grant one.
The second strategic element was the choice of first-person narration and the specific voice Brontë constructed. The book's subtitle is An Autobiography, and the voice is Jane's throughout: confiding, direct, argumentative, sometimes fierce, always the voice of a specific consciousness working out its position. Brontë had tried the third-person mode in The Professor and had been rejected by publisher after publisher. For Jane Eyre she put her reader directly inside the head of a woman who was neither pretty nor rich nor socially advantaged, trusting that the intensity of the inner life would compensate for the absence of external glamour. The gamble was decisive. It was the voice that made the book, and the voice was the product of Brontë's specific refusal to apologise for what Jane thought and felt. Readers who had never met a woman quite like Jane on the page felt themselves addressed by a real person for the first time in their reading lives.
The third strategic element was Brontë's willingness to write into the emotional zones that convention reserved for male fiction — passion, religious doubt, rage, sexual attraction — while framing them as the experience of a morally serious woman. She did not abandon the moral framework of Victorian Christianity; she placed her heroine inside a continually tested faith, fought over repeatedly in the course of the novel, and brought her through to a conclusion that was recognisably Christian even as it was unorthodox. The strategy allowed her to satisfy the formal requirements of the respectable novel (Jane is chaste, Jane is devout, Jane ultimately marries within the law) while using those requirements as the structural scaffolding for an interior life the respectable novel had never before contained. The novel's scandalised early reviewers sensed that something had been smuggled past them but could not always identify exactly what it was. What had been smuggled past them was the full emotional range of a woman's consciousness, narrated from inside, with the authority the form had previously granted only to men.
The Price and the Legacy
The price Charlotte Brontë paid for Jane Eyre was mixed with the larger price her family was already paying for tuberculosis, isolation, and a father whose eyesight was failing. The novel made her famous and comfortable, but it did not save her sisters. Emily died of tuberculosis in December 1848, refusing treatment almost to the end; Anne died of the same disease the following May, in Scarborough, in Charlotte's arms. Their brother Branwell, who had been disintegrating for years under the pressures of alcoholism and laudanum, died between them in September 1848. Within the space of nine months Charlotte had lost all three of her surviving siblings. She continued to write — Shirley appeared in 1849, Villette in 1853 — and she made one or two trips to London and sat for a portrait by George Richmond and corresponded with Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, but the house at Haworth was emptied of the voices that had been her whole world. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, after a courtship in which her father at first opposed the match. She became pregnant not long after. She died in March 1855, a few weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday, of complications of pregnancy compounded by what was probably hyperemesis gravidarum. She did not live to see the long consolidation of her fame.
The legacy is three-layered. The first layer is the immediate one: Jane Eyre changed what the English novel could contain, in the direction of female interiority, and the writers who followed Brontë — George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mrs Humphry Ward, Virginia Woolf — all wrote in a literary culture she had helped to reshape. Woolf acknowledged the debt explicitly in A Room of One's Own, where Brontë figures as both a breakthrough and a cautionary example of what anger can do to prose. The second layer is the cultural saturation the novel has achieved outside the academy: Jane Eyre has been adapted for stage, film, radio, and television more often than almost any other Victorian novel, and the figure of Jane — the small, stubborn, self-possessed woman who refuses to be reduced — has become a recognisable archetype in Anglophone culture. The third layer is the critical one. Jane Eyre is now read simultaneously as a foundational text of feminist literary history and as one of the most studied cases of imperial complicity in nineteenth-century English fiction, and the conversation between these two readings — the conversation Rhys made possible with Wide Sargasso Sea, that Gayatri Spivak extended in her essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," that Said placed within his larger argument about the culture of empire — is one of the richest in modern literary criticism. The novel's long career demonstrates that a book can be simultaneously emancipatory and complicit, and that its continuing importance depends on its readers' willingness to hold both truths at once.
The Reading
Jane Eyre is an orphan. Her parents died of typhus when she was an infant, and she has grown up in the household of her aunt, Mrs Reed, where she is raised alongside cousins who despise her and an aunt who resents her presence. The opening chapters establish Jane's social position with precision: she is dependent, unwanted, without money or family connection or beauty, and she is enraged by her condition. The rage is what distinguishes her from the conventional Victorian heroine of the 1840s. When her cousin John Reed hits her with a book and she hits him back, when she tells her aunt that she is cruel and dishonest and that Jane would rather die than return to her, the reader understands from the first chapters that this is going to be a novel about a woman who refuses the social position assigned to her. Mrs Reed responds by locking Jane in the red-room, the bedroom where Mrs Reed's late husband had died, and Jane's terror in the red-room — her conviction that she sees her dead uncle's ghost — produces an illness and brings the household apothecary Mr Lloyd, who suggests that Jane might be happier at school. Mrs Reed seizes the suggestion. She sends Jane to Lowood.
Lowood is a charitable school for orphaned and poor girls, run by Mr Brocklehurst on ostentatiously Christian principles — austerity for the students, comfort for himself and his family. The food is inedible; the clothing is inadequate to the Yorkshire winters; a typhus epidemic kills many of the girls, including Helen Burns, the older student who has become Jane's first real friend. Helen Burns is Brontë's portrait of a certain kind of Christian resignation — the acceptance of suffering as spiritually productive, the turning of the other cheek, the belief that earthly injustice will be rectified in heaven — and Brontë gives her a dignity and a grace that are genuinely moving. Jane admires Helen profoundly but cannot emulate her. Jane's instinct is not acceptance but resistance. The kind headmistress Miss Temple, who acts as a protector and a moral exemplar during Jane's years at the school, represents a middle path, a dignified endurance that is not quite Helen's resignation but is recognisably its cousin. Jane learns from both women without becoming either of them.
Jane stays at Lowood for eight years, six as a student and two as a teacher, and then, wanting something more than the school's claustrophobic world, advertises for a position as governess. The advertisement brings her to Thornfield Hall, a large country house in the north of England, and to Edward Fairfax Rochester.
Rochester is the novel's great romantic creation and its most troubling figure simultaneously. He is not handsome — Brontë is explicit about this — but he has force, intelligence, irony, and an intensity of attention that Jane has never experienced directed at herself. He speaks to her as an equal, or near enough, and this alone is extraordinary. Their conversations crackle with a pleasure both intellectual and erotic, and Brontë dramatises the gradual, mutual recognition of two people who are lonely in the same way: too much for the polite world they inhabit, too aware of their own hunger to pretend otherwise. The early scenes between them — Jane's accidental encounter with him on the icy road where his horse slips and he injures his ankle, the evening conversations by the fire in which he questions her about her education and her inner life, the night he is nearly burned alive in his bed and she saves him with a pitcher of water — accumulate into the novel's central emotional fact: for the first time in her life, Jane is being recognised by someone whose recognition she can feel.
There is a child at Thornfield: Adèle, a French girl who is Rochester's ward, the daughter of a French dancer named Céline Varens who was once his mistress. Adèle is theatrical and shallow — Brontë's portrait of her is tinged with English condescension toward French femininity and the world of the opera — and she serves mainly as a pretext for Jane's presence at Thornfield. There is also Mrs Fairfax, the kindly elderly housekeeper, whom Jane initially mistakes for the owner of the house. And there is the laugh — the strange, dangerous laugh that comes at night from the upper floors, explained as belonging to Grace Poole, a servant. Jane accepts this explanation for longer than seems credible to a first-time reader, partly because she wants to accept it and partly because the Gothic convention of the haunted house is available to her as a way of not asking.
Rochester courts Jane at the same time as he courts Blanche Ingram, a beautiful aristocratic woman whom everyone in the neighbourhood assumes he will marry. The courtship of Blanche is a performance, and Jane eventually understands it as such — Rochester is using Blanche to make Jane jealous, to force Jane to acknowledge her own feelings, to extract from her an admission of the love she has been guarding. The manipulation is cruel, and Jane knows it is cruel and cannot quite resist it. When Rochester finally declares himself to Jane in the Thornfield orchard, during a thunderstorm that splits the great chestnut tree under which they are standing, the emotional weight of the scene derives partly from relief: finally, this man who has been treating her as exceptional is saying directly that she is exceptional, and is asking her to marry him.
The wedding is stopped. On the morning of the ceremony, in the church, a man named Mason, who has come from Jamaica, interrupts to state that Rochester is already married — that his wife, Bertha Mason, is alive and living at Thornfield. Rochester does not deny it. He takes Jane and the wedding party upstairs to the locked room on the third floor where Bertha is kept: she is large, dark-haired, crawling on all fours, attacking anyone who comes near, neither speaking nor reasoning. Rochester describes her, with repugnance, as his punishment — a wife he was manoeuvred into marrying in Jamaica as a young man because she was beautiful and wealthy and he did not know, or was not told, that madness ran in her family. He asks Jane to stay with him anyway, to be his companion, his love, his life — to accept a bigamy that exists in law but not, he insists, in spirit.
Jane refuses. This is the moral fulcrum of the novel. Her refusal is not because she does not love Rochester — she does, desperately — but because she will not compromise the sense of herself she has spent her whole life assembling. She tells him that she cares for herself, that the more solitary and friendless and unsustained she is the more she must respect herself, that the laws and principles she has been given are not to be discarded for the sake of a single moment's need. The sentence is the novel's centre. Jane leaves Thornfield before dawn with almost nothing — a small bundle, a few coins — and walks out into the moors.
What follows is a period of destitution almost unparalleled in the English novel. She sleeps on the heath; she begs bread from a farmer's wife; she nearly dies of hunger and exposure before stumbling at night to the door of Moor House, the isolated home of the Rivers family: St John Rivers, a young clergyman of intense and cold ambition, and his sisters Mary and Diana. They take her in. She recovers slowly. She becomes a village schoolmistress in the nearby parish and builds a small life for herself, and in the course of this she discovers gradually that the Rivers siblings are in fact her own cousins, that she has living family after all. She also discovers that she has inherited twenty thousand pounds from an uncle in Madeira, John Eyre, whom she has never met. He was, we are told, a wine merchant with connections in the Atlantic trade — the novel mentions this circumstance without dwelling on it, without asking where the fortune came from in any specific sense. Jane divides the inheritance equally among herself and the three Rivers cousins.
St John asks Jane to marry him and accompany him to India as a missionary. His proposal is not romantic — he wants a helpmeet, a woman who will subordinate herself to his mission, which he believes to be the will of God. The courtship is the novel's most frightening sequence: St John is cold, disciplined, manipulative in the way of a man who is certain his will is God's will, and Jane's resistance to him is different in kind from her resistance to Rochester. Her refusal of Rochester was a refusal of self-compromise; her refusal of St John is a refusal of self-annihilation, of a marriage whose terms would require her to extinguish everything she recognises as her own. She almost yields, nonetheless, because his authority is that powerful. Then she hears Rochester's voice calling her name across the moors — hears it physically, cannot explain it — and the spell breaks.
She returns to Thornfield to find it burned. Bertha Mason set the fire some months earlier and then threw herself from the roof; she is dead. Rochester is alive but badly injured — blinded, one hand gone — and is living at Ferndean, a small and damp house in the woods a few miles away, reduced in every way from the man who had courted her. She goes to him. They marry, quietly, without ceremony. The final chapter famously begins "Reader, I married him," and closes the novel with an image of Rochester's partial recovery of sight in one eye, the birth of their son, and the continuing lives of the other characters — Diana and Mary Rivers married to men who are worthy of them, St John continuing his mission in India, Adèle at a kinder school.
Bertha's death is the enabling condition of Jane's happiness. Brontë does not quite acknowledge this — the fire is presented as Bertha's own act, her final violence — but Jean Rhys spent three years of her life making the acknowledgement visible. Bertha Mason is Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, a Jamaican Creole woman from a family ruined by the post-emancipation collapse of the plantation economy, effectively pushed into marriage by her stepfamily to a young Englishman who did not want her, brought to England, imprisoned, driven into the madness that is partly her own psychology and partly what England and imprisonment and Rochester's contempt have produced in her. Rhys makes the colonial transaction legible: Rochester's fortune, Rochester's Thornfield, Rochester's availability to Jane all depend on the wealth and then the disposal of a West Indian woman whose own interior life Charlotte Brontë had no means of imagining. The empire, in Jane Eyre, is not background; it is the financial and structural precondition of the entire novel. Jane's uncle John Eyre, the Madeira merchant whose death supplies the inheritance that makes her independent of both Rochester and St John, is himself a figure of the Atlantic trading economy whose fortunes were entangled with the Caribbean sugar islands and the long afterlives of the slave trade. The twenty thousand pounds that allows Jane to return to Rochester as something other than a dependent is, traced backwards, a participation in the same economic order that produced Bertha.
This is not what Brontë was writing about. Brontë was writing about female interiority, female endurance, the anger and intelligence and longing of a woman trapped in social powerlessness who finds her way to dignity and love through the force of her own character. That story is genuine; its emotional power is genuine; the reading life of generations of women who have found in Jane a first image of a female self worth defending is a reality that no amount of subsequent postcolonial reading can cancel. But the story is built on a foundation that treats the Caribbean, and the woman from the Caribbean, as resources to be spent rather than lives to be acknowledged. The novel cannot see its own complicity — which is exactly what makes it so valuable as a document of how the empire structured English life and English feeling from the inside, how a woman of Charlotte Brontë's political sympathies could write about a small English governess's moral struggle without registering the far larger moral struggle that was underwriting the English economy in which she lived. Jane Eyre is, in the end, two books in one: the book of Jane's self-creation and the book of Bertha's erasure, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have taught us to read them both at once. That doubled reading is what keeps the novel permanently alive, permanently contested, and permanently at the centre of any honest account of what the Victorian novel did and did not know about the world that produced it.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Penguin Classics edition, edited by Stevie Davies, is the best widely available text with a strong scholarly introduction. The Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by Margaret Smith, is the standard scholarly text based on the first edition of 1847.
Edited by Stevie Davies. The Penguin Classics standard edition with a first-rate scholarly introduction.
Edited by Margaret Smith. The standard scholarly text, based on the first edition of 1847.
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