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"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 Brontė's Jane Eyre.
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- Brontė, 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.
- Brontė, Charlotte. Jane
Eyre (World's Classics). Oxford University Press,
1987.
- Brontė, Charlotte. Jane
Eyre (Norton Critical Edition; Richard J. Dunn, Ed.).
Norton, 1988.
- Gaskell, Elizabeth. The
Life of Charlotte Brontė (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
Brontė 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
Brontė: 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
Brontė 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
Brontė 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.
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