By Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre:

Published in 1847, Jane Eyre, with its unglamorous and independent-minded heroine was to change the English novel forever. It was an immediate commercial and literary success, although Charlotte Brontë’s uncompromisingly tough and direct literary style was at first widely described as coarse. Brontë’s use of the pseudonym Currer Bell in its first publication added to the mystery surrounding this most different of novels, with literary society vying to discover whether it was a male or a female writer who could treat such subjects as attraction, desire and indeed sex itself with such candour.

Much of Brontë’s own experience went into the novel of Jane Eyre. The brutal school Jane is sent to as a child echoes the Clergymens Daughters’ School to which Brontë and her three sisters were sent, with fatal consequences for the elder two Brontës, a misery agonisingly described in the novel. Brontë spent many years as a governess like Jane and, like Jane, was considered unattractive, small and too clever for her own good. Where the novel departs from Brontë’s reality is with the arrival of the Byronic and now iconic Mr Rochester. Just as Brontë had brought a new type of heroine to the novel so Mr Rochester allowed the hero to do such things as enter the book cursing heavily (having fallen unheroically from his horse in front of the slightly amused Jane).

Jane Eyre although it deals with the growth of a great and passionate love is an anti-romantic romance. The forces of nature which blast the moors of Yorkshire and sweep through this book tether its heroine firmly to the ground. As Brontë herself later wrote to her readers “Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.” The result - Brontë’s cool and solid creation - is one of the best loved and greatest works of the English Language.