Jane Eyre

About this edition

Introduction

Jane Eyre is a first-person novel that refuses to be modest about it. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” it begins, and from the first page the reader is inside a consciousness that reports, judges and argues. Jane tells her own story as an adult looking back at a childhood she survived, and the double perspective — the child who suffers and the woman who understands — is the engine of the whole book.

It is usually described as a Gothic novel, and it has the furniture for it: a locked room, a house with a secret on its third floor, a fire, a night-time cry, a fortune made elsewhere and paid for by someone else. But the Gothic machinery is put to an unusually strict moral use. What terrifies Jane is not the supernatural, which she repeatedly declines to believe in, but the possibility of being owned: by a charitable institution, by a man who loves her, by a God she is told to obey without question. The famous declaration that she is a free human being with an independent will is not a flourish; it is the thesis.

The novel is also a love story, and a deliberately difficult one. Rochester is not a reward; he is a test, and a large part of the book’s continuing power is that it refuses to pretend otherwise. The reader is asked to want a marriage that cannot yet be honestly made, and then to accept the terms on which it finally can be. Whether the ending is a triumph, a compromise or a defeat has been argued over for more than a century.

One thing has changed in how the book is read. The first Mrs Rochester — the woman in the attic, given no voice in the novel until the moment of her death — has become central to any serious discussion of it, and to the question of what the story looks like from the other side of the door. A modern reader will not read past her, and should not.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in thirty-eight chapters. The notes gloss the period institutions and vocabulary that carry the plot; the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply be carried by it.

The author

Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 and died on 31 March 1855, aged thirty-eight. She grew up in Yorkshire, the third of six children of a clergyman, in a household marked early by illness and death: her mother died when Charlotte was five, and her two eldest sisters died in childhood at the school that would later supply the model for Lowood. Of the surviving four, all three who wrote — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — published novels, and all three were dead within eight years.

Her own route to authorship ran through teaching, a spell as a governess, and a period in Brussels as a pupil and then a teacher of languages, an experience that gave her both French and a subject she used twice. The sisters’ first book, a joint volume of poems, appeared in 1846 under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — names chosen, in part, because they were neither obviously male nor obviously female at a time when reviewers were prepared to be unkind to women novelists. Jane Eyre followed in 1847 and was an immediate success and an immediate scandal.

The later books, Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), were written in the aftermath of the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne within a single year. She married in 1854 and died the following spring. Her reputation was fixed by the generation after her, and the readings of her work have been rewritten several times since — as romance, as social protest, as the record of a woman negotiating a world that gave her almost no official power.

Publication history

Jane Eyre was written in 1846 and 1847, while Charlotte Brontë was also nursing her father through a period of illness and helping to place her sisters’ work. The manuscript was offered to more than one publisher before it was accepted by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, who published it in 1847 in three volumes as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, by “Currer Bell”.

The title page’s claim to be an autobiography was not a joke exactly, but it was an invitation to speculate, and the speculation ran for more than a year. Reviewers disliked the book’s passion and its refusal to punish its heroine; some found it coarse, and one influential critic suggested that if the author was a woman she had forfeited her claim to modesty by writing it. When it became widely known that Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë, the reception changed in tone without becoming unanimous — the argument about whether the novel is religious, blasphemous or simply honest began then and has not finished.

The book went through further editions in Brontë’s lifetime and was translated early. It has never been out of print. The text reproduced here follows the first-edition text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word has been changed.

Notes

A short glossary of the institutions and terms that carry most of the plot. Several of them are legal arrangements, and the novel turns on precisely those.

• Governess — a woman employed to teach the children of a household. A genteel position and a socially painful one: paid, but not a servant, and neither a member of the family nor at liberty to behave like one. Jane’s employment at Thornfield is the whole reason she is in the house, and the reason she has no standing in it.
• Living — a parish benefice; the right to appoint its clergyman was property, and could be given away as patronage. Much of the novel’s ending is arranged by the disposal of exactly this kind of appointment.
• Portion — the property a woman brought to a marriage, and by extension her entire negotiating position within it. A woman with no portion, as Jane repeatedly reminds the reader, is offering only herself, which the world does not value.
• Settlement — the legal instrument drawn up before a marriage, allocating property between the families. A marriage without one is, for a woman of property, a form of exposure.
• Charity school — a school for poor children, funded by subscription, in which pupils were boarded, fed poorly and trained mainly for the position of servant or teacher. Lowood is modelled on one.
• Curate — an assistant clergyman employed by a parish incumbent on a small stipend. The profession is respectable, dependent, and a reliable source of genteel poverty.
• Post-chaise — a hired travelling carriage, changed or hired at each stage of a journey. Distance in the novel is measured by how many nights it takes to put between yourself and a house.
• West India fortune — money derived from Caribbean estates, and by extension from slavery. It is the unexamined source of more than one income in the novel, and the book’s most modern readers have found in it a great deal that the nineteenth century was content to leave in the background.
• Gytrash — a spirit of northern English folklore said to appear to travellers in the form of an animal. Jane, walking back from the village, has it in mind when she first hears Rochester’s horse; the novel raises the supernatural in order to replace it with something human.
• Bildungsroman — a novel of formation: the story of how a character’s mind and character are made. Jane Eyre is one, but organised unusually — every stage of Jane’s life is marked by an institution that tries to define her, and the book’s subject is her refusal to be defined.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. Jane narrates her own life as an adult, and tells us what the child did not understand. Where does that double vision clarify, and where does it protect her?
2. The novel uses the Gothic — the locked room, the fire, the cry in the night — and then explains the supernatural away. What is left of the Gothic once the explanation arrives, and why keep it at all?
3. Rochester is judged by the reader long before he is judged by Jane. Does the book think he deserves the ending he gets, or only that Jane deserves hers?
4. Bertha Mason is silenced, described through other people, and given no interior life in the text. Is that an exposure of what the novel’s world does to women, or a repetition of it — and does the book leave us any way to tell?
5. Money arrives at every turning point: the Reed legacy, the Rivers inheritance, the West Indian fortune. What does the novel believe money can and cannot fix?
6. “Reader, I married him.” Almost the whole novel is settled in those four words, and none of the arguments it raises are. Why does the book insist on the pronoun?