Jane Eyre Reading Order

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, published under the pseudonym Currer Bell, is a first-person Bildungsroman about Jane Eyre, an orphaned girl who grows up in the household of her aunt Mrs. Reed, survives the harsh conditions of Lowood Institution (a charity school), becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, falls in love with her employer Edward Rochester, and discovers that Rochester has a secret that prevents their marriage. The novel is one of the foundational texts of English literature, combining Gothic romance, social criticism, and a sustained first-person account of female interiority that was without precedent in English fiction. Its famous opening — 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day' — leads into one of the most compelling and complete portraits of a woman's inner life in nineteenth-century fiction. Jane Eyre is simultaneously a love story, a novel about class and social mobility, a novel about institutional cruelty to children, a Gothic novel with a madwoman in the attic, and a novel about the relationship between female independence and female desire.