Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

Since its publication in 1847 Jane Eyre has never ceased to be one of the most widely read of English novels.

Transmuted by the rare Bronte imagination, the romance of Jane and Rochester takes on a strange and unforgettable atmosphere that lifts it above the level of mere melodrama.

But Charlotte Bronte intended more. She portrayed the refusal of a spirited and intelligent woman to accept her appointed place in society with unusual frankness and with a passionate sense of the dignity and needs of her sex.

Q.D. Leavis’s introduction brings out the revolutionary qualities of the book and its author’s creation of something that would ‘be true to the experience of the whole woman and…convey a sense of life’s springs and undercurrents’.