Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Bronte, published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell, narrated in the first person by its orphaned title character across her childhood, her time as a governess at Thornfield Hall, and her eventual marriage. Jane's harsh upbringing at Gateshead Hall and the punitive Lowood School gives way to her employment by the brooding Edward Rochester, whose secret, the concealed existence of his mentally ill first wife Bertha Mason confined in the attic, derails their planned wedding and drives Jane to flee before the novel resolves their relationship on more equal terms. Told with unusual psychological interiority for its time and combining elements of the Gothic novel, the coming-of-age novel and social critique of women's constrained position and of institutional cruelty, the novel was an immediate popular success and provoked controversy for its passionate, morally independent heroine. Jane Eyre is generally regarded as a landmark in English fiction for its first-person narrative intimacy and its influence on the development of the novel of female interior consciousness.