Jane Eyre (61)

Ranks 61st on The Fictional 100

Safe Shopping Options

"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and

little, I am soulless and heartless?--You think wrong!--

I have as much soul as you and full as much heart!"

The following books will introduce you to Jane Eyre, who said these words in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

To order a book, or for more information, visit Amazon.com, or return home to browse other characters.

• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (Michael Mason, Ed.). Penguin USA, 1996.
  • Jane can be considered the first feminist in literature. She has remained influential because of her assertion of autonomy in exactly those situations that denied women control over their lives. Despite the "happy" ending when she is reunited with a diminished Rochester, it is not love but courage that defines her character.
    
• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (World's Classics). Oxford University Press, 1987.
  
• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (Norton Critical Edition; Richard J. Dunn, Ed.). Norton, 1988.
  
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (World's Classics). Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Gaskell's sensitive 1857 biography of her friend Charlotte has remained an indispensable resource for those wishing to know how the life of the Brontë household, so often visited by illness, shaped the writer. Gaskell herself was a novelist of some note, author of Cranford, Mary Barton, and Wives and Daughters.
    
• Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
  • Moglen shows how Jane, the antithesis of the traditional romantic heroine, was thereby freed to test the limits of a woman's power in Victorian society.
    
• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton University Press, 1978.
  • Showalter's analysis of Jane Eyre reveals why she was such a pathbreaking character, and her comprehensive treatment of women novelists from Brontë through Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook, The Four-Gated City) documents the novel's persistent influence.
    
• Figes, Eva. Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850. Persea Books;Macmillan, 1982.
  • Discusses sexual symbolism in Jane Eyre, especially the incident of her punishment by being locked in the "red room."
    
• Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton, 1996.
  • Prequel to Jane Eyre, showing Rochester's marriage to Antoinette (Bertha Mason) in the West Indies and her subsequent deterioration: the madwoman in the attic has her say.

Top | Browse More Characters | Home