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NOTE: This edition has a linked “Table of Contents” and has been beautifully formatted (searchable and interlinked) to work on your Amazon e-book reader or iPod e-book reader.

Includes fifteen beautiful, full-page watercolor illustrations.

Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan.

The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane’s childhood at Gateshead, where she is abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations; her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her time with the Rivers family at Marsh’s End (or Moor House) and Morton, where her cold clergyman-cousin St John Rivers proposes to her; and her reunion with and marriage to her beloved Rochester at his house of Ferndean.

Partly autobiographical, the novel abounds with social criticism and sinister gothic elements.

Jane Eyre uses many motifs from Gothic fiction, such as the Gothic manor (Thornfield), the Byronic hero (Rochester and Jane herself) and The Madwoman in the Attic (Bertha), whom Jane perceives as resembling “the foul German spectre—the vampire” (Chapter XXV) and who attacks her own brother in a distinctly vampiric way: “She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart” (Chapter XX).

Also, besides gothicism, Jane Eyre displays romanticism to create a unique Victorian novel.

Literary allusions from the Bible, fairy tales, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, and the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott are also much in evidence.

Active Table of Contents

Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
The Scarlet Letter
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Early responses to Jane Eyre, first published in 1847, were mixed. Some held the book to be anti-Christian, others were disturbed by a heroine so proud, self-willed, and essentially unfeminine. The modern reader may well have trouble understanding what all the fuss was about. On the surface a fairly conventional Gothic romance (poor orphan governess is hired by rich, brooding Byronic hero-type), Jane Eyre hardly seems the stuff from which revolutions are made. But the story is very much about the nature of human freedom and equality, and if Jane was seen as something of a renegade in nineteenth-century England, it is because her story is that of a woman who struggles for self-definition and determination in a society that too often denies her that right. But self-determination does not mean untrammeled freedom for men or women. Rochester, that thorny masculine beast whom Jane eventually falls for, is a man who sets his own laws and manipulates the lives of those around him; before he can enter into a marriage of equals with Jane he must undergo a spiritual transformation. Should the lesson sound dry, it’s not. Jane Eyre is full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a mad wife conveniently stashed away in the attic. This is very sexy stuff – another reason Victorian critics weren’t quite sure what to make of it. – For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. — From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Chris Kellett

I go back to [Jane Eyre] so often and it was one of the first books that made me think, ‘This is me, in some deep way.’ (Suzanne Vega)