Jane Eyre
An orphan, a governess, a locked room and a house with a secret. Charlotte Brontë gave the Gothic machinery a narrator who insists on being treated as a person, and that insistence is what makes the book feel so unusual for 1847. Jane argues with her employer, with her conscience and with the reader.
The novel is often reduced to its romance. Its more interesting subject is independence: Jane repeatedly chooses a harder life over a comfortable one that would cost her self-respect. Watch for the moments when she refuses something she badly wants.
Public-domain status
First published in 1847. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, so this work has been free to republish there since 1926.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1260 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847
- David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848
- Haworth — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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