Jane Eyre

The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gateshead Hall and then at Lowood School. She leaves the school for Thornfield Hall, to become governess to the French ward of Mr Rochester. She and Rochester fall in love but, at their wedding, it is revealed he is married already and his wife, insane, is kept in Thornfield’s attic. When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it was a great success and brought fame to Charlotte Bronte. Combined with Gothic mystery and horror, the book explores many themes, including the treatment of children, relations between men and women, religious faith and hypocrisy, individuality, morality, equality and the nature of true love.

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Guests

• Dinah Birch 13 episodes
  Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Liverpool
• Karen O'Brien 16 episodes
  Vice Principal and Professor of English Literature at King's College London
• Sara Lyons No other episodes
  Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent

Reading list

• The Brontes
  Juliet Barker (Abacus, 2010)
• Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings
  The Brontes (ed. Christine Alexander) (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes
  Terry Eagleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
• The Life of Charlotte Bronte
  Elizabeth Gaskell (ed. Angus Easson) (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination
  Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale University Press, 2000)
• Charlotte Bronte: The Imagination in History
  Heather Glen (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Jane Eyre: Contemporary Critical Essays
  Heather Glen (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)
• The Cambridge Companion to the Brontes
  Heather Glen (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
  Lyndall Gordon (Virago, 2008)
• Oxford History of the Novel in English vol 3: The Nineteenth-century Novel, 1820-1880
  John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Charlotte Bronte and Sexuality
  John Maynard (Cambridge University Press, 1984)
• The Bronte Myth
  Lucasta Miller (Vintage, 2002)
• Wide Sargasso Sea
  Jean Rhys (Penguin Classics, 2000)
• Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology
  Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• Charlotte Bronte: Writers and their Work
  Patsy Stoneman (Northcote House, 2013)
• The Brontes in Context
  Marianne Thormahlen (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

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Programme ID: b05y11v8

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05y11v8

Auto-category: 823.8 (English fiction–19th century)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1847, Jane Eyre was published, with the author's name given as Currer Bell.