Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the title character and first-person narrator of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel of the same name. Orphaned young and raised first by an unloving aunt and then at Lowood, a harsh charity school where she loses her closest friend to illness, Jane grows into a plain, poor but fiercely principled young woman who becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall. There she falls in love with her employer, the brooding Edward Rochester, only to discover on their wedding day that he is already secretly married to a woman he keeps confined in the attic. Jane leaves rather than remain as his mistress, and the novel follows her subsequent hardship, an inheritance that grants her independence, and her eventual return to a now-blinded and widowed Rochester on her own terms. Jane Eyre is widely regarded as an early and influential feminist figure in English literature for her insistence on moral autonomy, self-respect and equality despite her poverty and lack of social standing.