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Jane Eyre

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This article is about the Victorian novel. For other uses, see Jane Eyre (disambiguation).
Jane Eyre
Title page of the first edition of Jane Eyre
AuthorCharlotte Brontë
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherSmith Elder and Co., Cornhill
Publication date
16 October 1847
Publication placeEngland
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, published by Smith, Elder & Company of London in 1847, is one of the most famous of English novels. Brontë first styled it Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under the pseudonym Currer Bell. It was an immediate critical and popular success. Especially effusive in his praise was William Makepeace Thackeray, to whom Brontë dedicated the novel's second edition, which was illustrated by F. H. Townsend.

Plot introduction

Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and passionate English orphan. The novel goes through five distinct stages — Jane's childhood at Gateshead, where she is abused by her aunt and cousin; her education at Lowood Academy, 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 is divided into 38 chapters, most editions at least 400 pages long (although the preface and introduction on certain copies are liable to take up another 100). The original was published in three volumes — Volume One (comprising chapters one to fifteen), Volume Two (sixteen to 26) and Volume Three (27 to 38).

Plot summary

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

— Excerpt from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, beginning of chapter 1

The novel is verry gay ad boring, it also begins in Gateshead Hall, where a gay ten-year-old orphan named Jane Eyre is living with her gay mother's brother's family. The brother,who is gay and surnamed Reed, dies shortly after comming out the closet about being gay and adopting Jane. His wife, Mrs. Sarah Reed, and their three gay children (John, Eliza and Georgiana) neglect and abuse Jane, for she is gay and also they resent Mr. Reed's preference for the little gay orphan in their midst. In addition, they dislike Jane's gay looks and quiet yet passionately gay character. The novel begins with young John Reed bullying Jane (because she is gay), who retaliates with unwanted violence. Jane is blamed for being gay and the ensuing fight, and Mrs. Reed has two of the gay servants drag her off and lock her up in the red-room, the unused chamber in which Mr. Reed had turned gay and died. Still locked in that night, Jane sees a gay light and panics, thinking that her uncle's gay ghost lover has come. Her gay scream rouses the house, but Mrs. Reed just locks her up for longer due to her gayness. Then Jane has a gay fit and passes out. A gay doctor, Mr. Lloyd, comes to Gateshead Hall and suggests that Jane go to gay school.

Mr. Brocklehurst is a cold, cruel, self-righteous, and highly hypocritical clergyman who runs a charity school called Lowood Academy. He accepts Jane as a pupil in his school, but she is infuriated when Mrs. Reed tells him, falsely, that she is a liar. After Brocklehurst departs, Jane bluntly tells Mrs. Reed how she hates the Reed family. Mrs. Reed, so shocked that she is scarcely capable of responding, leaves the drawing room in haste.

Jane finds life at Lowood grim. Miss Maria Temple, the youthful superintendent, is just and kind, but another teacher, Miss Scatcherd, is sour and abusive. Mr. Brocklehurst, visiting the school for an inspection, has Jane placed on a tall stool before the entire assemblage. He then tells them that "...this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut–this girl is–a liar!"

Later that day, Miss Temple allows Jane to speak in her own defense. After Jane does so, Miss Temple writes to Mr. Lloyd. His reply agrees with Jane's, and she is cleared of Mr. Brocklehurst's accusation.

Mr. Brocklehurst embezzles the school's funds to support his family's luxurious lifestyle while hypocritically preaching to others a doctrine of privation and poverty. As a result, Lowood's eighty pupils must make do with cold rooms, poor meals and thin garments whilst his family lives in comfort. The majority become sick from a typhus epidemic that strikes the school.

Jane is impressed with one pupil, Helen Burns, who accepts Miss Scatcherd's cruelty and the school's deficiencies with passive dignity, practicing the Christian teaching of turning the other cheek. Jane admires and loves the gentle Helen and they become best friends, but Jane cannot bring herself to emulate her friend's behaviour. While the typhus epidemic is raging, Helen dies of consumption in Jane's arms.

Many die in the typhus epidemic, and Mr. Brocklehurst's neglect and dishonesty are laid bare. Several rich and kindly people donate to put up a new school building in a more healthful location. New rules are made, and improvements in diet and clothing are introduced. Though Mr. Brocklehurst cannot be overlooked, due to his wealth and family connections, new people are brought in to share his duties of treasurer and inspector, and conditions improve dramatically at the school.

The narrative resumes eight years later. Jane has been a teacher at Lowood for two years, but she thirsts for a better and brighter future. She advertises as a governess and is hired by Mrs Alice Fairfax, housekeeper of the Gothic manor of Thornfield, to teach a rather spoiled but amiable little French girl named Adèle Varens. A few months after her arrival at Thornfield, Jane goes for a walk and aids a horseman who takes a fall. He is rude to her and calls her a "witch", but she helps him back on the horse anyway. On her return to Thornfield, Jane discovers that the horseman is her employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a moody, charismatic gentleman nearly twenty years older than her. Adèle is his ward.

Rochester seems quite taken with Jane. He repeatedly summons her to his presence and talks with her. Adèle, he says, is the illegitimate daughter of a French opera singer, Celine, who was his mistress for a time, though he doubts Adèle is his daughter. That same night, Jane hears eerie laughter coming from the hallway and, upon opening the door, sees smoke coming from Rochester's chamber. Rushing into his room, she finds his bed curtains ablaze and douses them with water, saving Rochester's life. Rochester says a matronly servant named Grace Poole is responsible but does not fire her, and she shows no signs of remorse or guilt. Jane is amazed and perplexed. But by this time, Rochester and Jane are in love with each other, although they do not show it.

Soon after the fire incident, Mr. Rochester departs Thornfield, reportedly to the Continent. He returns expectedly with a party of high-class ladies and gentlemen, including Miss Blanche Ingram, a beautiful but shallow socialite whom he seems to be courting. The party is interrupted when a strange old gypsy woman arrives and insists on telling everyone's fortunes. When Jane's turn comes, the gypsy tells her a great deal about her life and feelings, much to Jane's surprise. Then the gypsy reveals "herself" to be Rochester in disguise.

That night, after a piercing scream wakes everyone in the house, Mr. Rochester comes to Jane for help in attending to a wounded guest, a certain Mr. Richard Mason, a queer Englishman from the West Indies. Mr. Mason has been stabbed and bitten in the arm, and a surgeon comes and secretly whisks him away. Again, Rochester hints that Grace Poole is responsible.

Jane receives word that Mrs Reed, upon hearing of her son John's apparent suicide after leading a life of dissipation and debt, has suffered a near-fatal stroke and is asking for her. So Jane returns to Gateshead, where she encounters her cousins Eliza and Georgiana Reed. Eliza has become a self-righteous puritan. Georgiana, much admired for her beauty in London a season or two ago, has become plump and vapid, always moaning about her love affair with Lord Edwin Vere. Eliza, out of envy, had prevented their marriage. The two sisters despise each other and are barely on speaking terms.

Although she rejects Jane's efforts at reconciliation, Mrs. Reed gives Jane a letter that she had previously withheld out of spite. The letter is from Jane's father's brother, John Eyre, notifying her of his intent to leave her his fortune upon his death. Mrs Reed dies in the night, and no one mourns her. Eliza enters a convent in France, and Georgiana travels to London, eventually marrying a wealthy but worn-out society man.

After Jane returns to Thornfield, she and Rochester gradually reveal their love for each other. Though Jane accepts Rochester's proposal of marriage, she is plagued by doubts about it. She feels she is Rochester's inferior and continues to address him as "master" even after they are engaged. Her forebodings deepen when a strange, savage-looking woman sneaks into her room one night and rips her wedding veil in two. Yet again, Rochester attributes the incident to Grace Poole.

The wedding goes ahead nevertheless. But during the ceremony in the church, the mysterious Mr. Mason and a lawyer step forth and declare that Rochester cannot marry Jane because his own wife is still alive. Rochester bitterly admits this fact, explaining that his wife is a violent madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic, where Grace Poole looks after her. But Grace Poole imbibes gin immoderately, occasionally giving the madwoman an opportunity to escape. It is Rochester's mad wife who is responsible for the strange events at Thornfield. Rochester nearly committed bigamy, and kept this fact from Jane. The wedding is cancelled, and Jane is heartbroken.

Back at the manorhouse, Rochester explains further. Under pressure from his father to make an advantageous marriage, and lured by Bertha's vast inheritance and personal beauty, Rochester had as a young man married Bertha. However, he was not aware that the members of Bertha's family carry a heriditary vein of madness in their genes, with women in particular succumbing to it. Rochester assumed that Bertha's mother was dead when really she was locked away in an asylum due to her madness. The same illness affected her grandmother, and a younger brother who was all but mentally retarded. When Bertha became openly insane, Rochester locked her up in Thornfield and departed for a life of sensuality in Europe.

Rochester then asks Jane to accompany him to the south of France, where they will live as husband and wife, even though they cannot be married. But Jane refuses to give up her self-respect by becoming a rich man's mistress, even though she loves him still.

But she does not trust herself to refuse a second time. In the dead of night, she slips out of Thornfield and takes a coach far away to the north of England. When her money gives out, she sleeps outdoors on the moor and reluctantly begs for food. One night, freezing and starving, she comes to Moor House (or Marsh End) and begs for help. St. John Rivers, the young clergyman who lives in the house, admits her.

Jane, who gives the false surname of Elliott, quickly recovers under the care of St. John and his two kind sisters, Diana and Mary. St. John arranges for Jane to teach a charity school for girls in the village of Morton. At the school, Jane observes the interactions of St. John, a cold and stern man but a truly devout Christian, and Rosamond Oliver, a beautiful but silly young heiress. Jane comes to believe that the two are in love, and boldly says so to St John. St. John confesses his love but says that Rosamond would make a most unsuitable wife for a missionary, which he intends to become.

One snowy night, St. John unexpectedly arrives at Jane's cottage. Suspecting Jane's true identity, he relates Jane's experiences at Thornfield and says that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left Jane his fortune of 20,000 pounds. After confessing her true identity, Jane arranges to share her inheritance with the Riverses, who turn out to be her cousins.

Not long afterwards, St. John decides to travel to India and devote his life to missionary work. He asks Jane to accompany him as his wife. Jane consents to go to India but adamantly refuses to marry him because they are not in love. St. John is not cruel or hypocritical like Mr. Brocklehurst, but he does not respect other people's feelings when they conflict with his own. He continues to pressure Jane to marry him, and his forceful personality almost causes her to capitulate. But at that moment she hears what she thinks is Rochester's voice calling her name, and this gives her the strength to reject St. John completely.

The next day, Jane takes a coach to Thornfield. But only blackened ruins lie where the manorhouse once stood. An innkeeper tells Jane that Rochester's mad wife set the fire and then committed suicide by jumping from the roof. Rochester rescued the servants from the burning mansion but lost a hand and his eyesight in the process. He now lives in an isolated manor house called Ferndean. Going to Ferndean, Jane reunites with Rochester. At first, he fears that she will refuse to marry a blind cripple, but Jane accepts him without hesitation.

Speaking from the vantage point of ten years, Jane describes their married life as blissful.

I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result. (Chapter XXXVIII)

Meanwhile, St. John has gone to India as a missionary and dies there. However, some claim St. John does not die in the scope of the book. Jane writes, "I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord." (Chapter XXXVIII). While his death may be implied, it is never clearly stated.

Rochester eventually recovers sight in one eye, and can see their first-born son when the baby is born.

Character list

Jane Eyre: The protagonist and title character, orphaned as a gay baby. She is a plain-featured and reserved for gays but talented, empathetic, hard-working, honest (not to say blunt), and passionate girl who is gay. Skilled at studying, drawing, and teaching, she works as a governess at Thornfield Manor and falls in love with her wealthy, gay employer, Edwarda Rochester. But her strong sense of gay conscience does not permit her to become gay and also his mistress, and she does not return to being gay with her until her gay, insane wife is dead and she herself has come into an inheritance.

Mr. Reed: Jane's insane uncle. He adopts Jane when her parents die and makes her eat beans. Before his own death, he makes his wife promise to kill Jane.

Mrs. Sarah Reed: Jane's aunt by marriage, who resides at Gateshead. Because her husband insists, Mrs. Reed adopts Jane. Jane, however, receives nothing but neglect and abuse at her hands. At the age of ten, Jane is sent away to school. Years later, Jane attempts to reconcile with her aunt, but Mrs. Reed spurns her, still resenting that her husband loved Jane more than his own children. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Reed dies of a stroke.

John Reed: Mrs. Reed's son, and Jane's cousin. He is Mrs. Reed's "own darling," though he bullies Jane constantly, sometimes in his mother's presence. He goes to college, ruining himself and Gateshead through gambling. Word comes of his death; his decision to commit suicide.

Eliza Reed: Mrs. Reed's elder daughter, and Jane's cousin is gay. Bitter because she is not as attractive as her sister, Georgiana Reed, she devotes herself self-righteously to Catholicism. After her mother's death, she enters a French convent, where she eventually becomes the Mother Superior.

Georgiana Reed: Mrs. Reed's younger daughter, and Jane's cousin. Though spiteful and insolent, she is indulged by everyone at Gateshead because of her beauty. In London, Lord Edwin Vere falls in love with her, but his relations are against their marriage. Lord Vere and Georgiana decide to elope, but Eliza finds them out. Georgiana returns to Gateshead, where she grows plump and vapid, spending most of her time talking of her love affair. After Mrs. Reed's death, she marries a wealthy but worn-out society man.

Bessie Lee: The nursemaid at Gateshead. She sometimes treats Jane kindly, telling her stories and singing her songs. Later she marries Robert Leaven.

Robert Leaven: The coachman at Gateshead, who sometimes gives Jane a ride on Georgiana's bay pony. He brings Jane to Lowood Institution. Months after she goes to Thornfield Hall, he brings her the news of John Reed's death, which had brought on Mrs. Reed's stroke.

Mr. Lloyd: A compassionate apothecary who recommends that Jane be sent to school. Later, he writes a letter to Miss Temple confirming Jane's account of her childhood and thereby clearing Jane of Mrs. Reed's charge of lying.

Mr. Brocklehurst: The arrogant, hypocritical clergyman who serves as headmaster and treasurer of Lowood School. He embezzles the school's funds in order to pay for his family's opulent lifestyle. At the same time, he preaches a doctrine of Christian austerity and self-sacrifice to everyone in hearing. When his dishonesty is brought to light, he is made to share his office of inspector and treasurer with more kindly people, who greatly improve the school.

Miss Maria Temple: The kind, attractive young superintendent of Lowood School. She recognizes Mr. Brocklehurst for the cruel hypocrite he is, and treats Jane and Helen with respect and compassion. She helps clear Jane of Mrs. Reed's false accusation of deceit.

Miss Scatcherd: A sour and vicious teacher at Lowood. She behaves with particular cruelty toward Helen, using her as a scapegoat for anything and everything.

Helen Burns: An angelic fellow-student and best friend of Jane's at Lowood School. Several years older than the ten-year-old Jane, she stoically accepts all the cruelties of the teachers and the deficiencies of the school's room and board. She refuses to hate the tyrannical Mr. Brocklehurst or the vicious Miss Scatcherd, or to complain, believing in the New Testament teaching that one should love one's enemies and turn the other cheek. Jane reveres her for her profound Christianity, even though she herself believes that returning hate for hate is necessary to prevent evil from taking over. Helen, uncomplaining as ever, dies of consumption in Jane's arms. In the book it is noted that she was buried in an unmarked grave until some years later, when a marble gravestone with her name and the word 'Resurgam' inscribed on it appears. The possible inference is that this was provided by Jane.

Edward Fairfax Rochester: The owner of Thornfield Manor, and Jane's lover and eventual husband. He possesses a strong physique and great wealth, but his face is very plain and his moods prone to frequent change. Impetuous and sensual, he falls madly in love with Jane because her simplicity, bluntness, intellectual capacity and plainness contrast so much with those of the shallow society women to whom he is accustomed. But his unfortunate marriage to the maniacal Bertha Mason postpones his union with Jane, and he loses a hand and his eyesight while trying to rescue his mad wife after she sets a fire that burns down Thornfield. He is a Byronic hero.

Bertha Mason: The violently insane secret wife of Edward Rochester. From the West Indies and of Creole extraction, her family possesses a strong strain of madness, of which Rochester did not know until, lured by her wealth and beauty, he had married her. Her insanity manifests itself in a few years, and Rochester resorts to imprisoning her in the attic of Thornfield Manor. But she escapes four times during the novel and wreaks havoc in the house, the fourth time actually burning it down and taking her own life in the process.

Adèle Varens: A naive, vivacious and rather spoiled French child to whom Jane is governess at Thornfield. She is Rochester's ward because her mother, Celine Varens, an opportunistic French opera dancer and singer, was Rochester's mistress. Rochester does not believe himself to be Adèle's father. Although not particularly fond of her, he nonetheless extends the little girl the best of care. In time, she grows up to be a very pleasant and well-mannered young woman.

Mrs. Alice Fairfax: An elderly widow and housekeeper of Thornfield Manor. She treats Jane kindly and respectfully, but disapproves of her engagement to Mr Rochester. She believes that marriages should be limited to one's own class.

Blanche Ingram: A beautiful but very shallow socialite whom Mr. Rochester appears to court in order to make Jane jealous. Blanche despises the rather dowdy protagonist because she is a governess. Later Jane discovers Blanche Ingram did not love Mr. Rochester but rather his fortune.

Richard Mason: A strangely blank-eyed but handsome Englishman from the West Indies, he stops Jane and Rochester's wedding with the proclamation that Rochester is still married to Bertha Mason, his sister.

St. John Eyre Rivers: A clergyman who is Jane Eyre's cousin on her father's side. He is a devout, almost fanatical Christian of Calvinistic leanings. He is charitable, honest, patient, forgiving, scrupulous, austere and deeply moral; with these qualities alone, he would have made a saint. But he is also proud, cold, exacting, controlling and unwilling to listen to dissenting opinions. He was in love with Rosamond Oliver, but did not propose to her because he felt that she would not make a "suitable" wife. Jane venerates him and likes him, regarding him as a brother, but she refuses to marry him because he doesn't love her and is incapable of real kindness.

Diana and Mary Rivers: St. John's sisters and Jane's cousins, they are kind and intellectual young women who contrive to lead an independent life while retaining their intelligence, purity and sense of meaning in life. Diana warns Jane against marrying her icy brother.

Grace Poole: Bertha Mason's keeper, a frumpish woman verging on middle age. She drinks gin immoderately, occasionally giving her maniacal charge a chance to escape. Rochester and Mrs. Fairfax attribute all of Bertha's misdeeds to her.

Rosamond Oliver: The rather shallow and coquettish, but beautiful and good-natured daughter of Morton's richest man. She donates the funds to launch the village school because she is in love with St. John. However, as St.John refuses to let himself love her, she in time becomes engaged to the wealthy Mr. Granby.

John Eyre: Jane's paternal uncle, who leaves her his vast fortune of 20,000 pounds. He never appears as a character. Has distant relations with St. John. Leaves him and his sisters 31 pounds and 10 shillings (i.e. 30 guineas) as a result. Jane divides her 20,000 pounds amongst the four of them (St. John, Mary, Diana and herself) leaving each with 5,000 pounds.

Themes

Morality: Jane refuses to become Rochester's paramour because of her "impassioned self-respect and moral conviction." She rejects St. John Rivers's puritanism as much as Rochester's libertinism. Instead, she works out a morality expressed in love, independence, and forgiveness.[1] Specifically, she forgives her cruel aunt and loves her husband, but never surrenders her independence to him, even after they are married. For he is blind, more dependent on her than she on him.

Religion: Throughout the novel, Jane endeavours to attain an equilibrium between moral duty and earthly happiness. She despises the hypocritical puritanism of Mr. Brocklehurst, and rejects St. John Rivers' cold devotion to his perceived Christian duty, but neither can she bring herself to emulate Helen Burns' turning the other cheek, although she admires Helen for it. Ultimately, she rejects these three extremes and finds a middle ground in which religion serves to curb her immoderate passions but does not repress her true self.

Social Class: Jane's ambiguous social position—a penniless yet learned orphan from a good family—leads her to criticise discrimination based on class. Although she is educated, well-mannered, and relatively sophisticated, she is still a governess, a paid servant of low social standing, and therefore powerless. Nevertheless, Brontë possesses certain class prejudices herself,[citation needed] as is made clear when Jane has to remind herself that her unsophisticated village pupils at Morton "are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy."

Gender Relations: A particularly important theme in the novel is patriarchalism and Jane's efforts to assert her own identity within male-dominated society. Three of the main male characters, Brocklehurst, Rochester and St. John, try to keep Jane in a subordinate position and prevent her from expressing her own thoughts and feelings. Jane escapes Brocklehurst and rejects St. John, and she only marries Rochester once she is sure that theirs is a marriage between equals. Through Jane, Brontë refutes Victorian stereotypes about women, articulating what was for her time a radical feminist philosophy:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (Chapter XII)

Context

The early sequences, in which Jane is sent to Lowood, a harsh boarding school, are derived from the author's own experiences. Helen Burns's death from consumption recalls the deaths of Charlotte Brontë's sisters Elizabeth and Maria, who died of tuberculosis in childhood as a result of the conditions at their school, the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall in Lancashire. Mr. Brocklehurst is based on Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791-1859), the Evangelical minister who ran the school, and Helen Burns is likely modelled on Charlotte's sister Maria. Additionally, John Reed's decline into alcoholism and dissolution recalls the life of Charlotte's brother Branwell, who became an opium and alcohol addict in the years preceding his death. Finally, like Charlotte, Jane becomes a governess. These facts were revealed to the public in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Charlotte's friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.[2]

The Gothic manor of Thornfield was probably inspired by North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in the Peak District. This was visited by Charlotte Brontë and her friend Ellen Nussey in the summer of 1845 and described by Ellen Nussey in a letter dated 22 July 1845. It was the residence of the Eyre family and its first owner Agnes Ashurst was reputedly confined as a lunatic in a padded second floor room.[2]

Literary motifs and allusions

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 brother in a distinctly vampiric way: "She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart" (Chapter XX). There is also reference to the unexplained phenomenon called telepathy. "I heard your voice calling me through the wind".

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.[2] The novel deliberately avoids some conventions of Victorian fiction, not contriving a deathbed reconciliation between Aunt Reed and Jane Eyre and avoiding the portrayal of a fallen woman.

Adaptations

Jane Eyre has engendered numerous adaptations and related works inspired by the novel:

Silent film versions

  • Three adaptations entitled Jane Eyre were released; one in 1910, two in 1914.
  • 1915: Jane Eyre starring Louise Vale.[1]
  • 1915: A version was released called The Castle of Thornfield.
  • 1918: A version was released called Woman and Wife.
  • 1921: Jane Eyre starring Mabel Ballin.[2]
  • 1926: A version was made in Germany called Orphan of Lowood.

Sound film versions

Musical versions

  • A two-act ballet of Jane Eyre was created for the first time by the London Children's Ballet in 1994, with an original score by composer Julia Gomelskaya and choreography by Polyanna Buckingham. The run was a sell-out success.
  • A musical version with a book by John Caird and music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, with Marla Schaffel as Jane and James Stacy Barbour as Rochester, opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on December 10 2000. It closed on June 10 2001.
  • An opera version was written in 2000 by English composer Michael Berkeley, with a libretto by David Malouf. It was given its premiere by Music Theater Wales at the Cheltenham Festival.
  • Jane Eyre was played for the first time in Europe in Beveren, Belgium. It was given its premiere at the cultural centred.
  • The ballet "Jane," based on the book was created in 2007, a Bullard/Tye production with music by Max Reger. Its world premiere was scheduled at the Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo, Michigan, June 29 and 30, performed by the Kalamazoo Ballet Company, Therese Bullard, Director.
  • A musical production directed by Debby Race, book by Jana Smith and Wayne R. Scott, with a musical score by Jana Smith and Brad Roseborough, premiered in 2008 at the Lifehouse Theatre in Redlands, California[3]

Television versions

Literature

References

  1. ^ "Brontë, Charlotte." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1987. p. 546.
  2. ^ a b c Stevie Davies, Introduction and Notes to Jane Eyre. Penguin Classics ed., 2006.
  3. ^ Lifehouse Theatre presents Jane Eyre - accessed May 10th, 2008
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