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.
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) Google Books → -
Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings
The Brontes (ed. Christine Alexander) (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes
Terry Eagleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Google Books → -
The Life of Charlotte Bronte
Elizabeth Gaskell (ed. Angus Easson) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books → -
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale University Press, 2000) Google Books → -
Charlotte Bronte: The Imagination in History
Heather Glen (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Jane Eyre: Contemporary Critical Essays
Heather Glen (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to the Brontes
Heather Glen (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Google Books → -
Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
Lyndall Gordon (Virago, 2008) Google Books → -
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) Google Books → -
Charlotte Bronte and Sexuality
John Maynard (Cambridge University Press, 1984) Google Books → -
The Bronte Myth
Lucasta Miller (Vintage, 2002) Google Books → -
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys (Penguin Classics, 2000) Google Books → -
Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology
Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Charlotte Bronte: Writers and their Work
Patsy Stoneman (Northcote House, 2013) Google Books → -
The Brontes in Context
Marianne Thormahlen (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →
Related episodes
-
Wuthering Heights
23 Apr, 2020 820 English and Old English literatures -
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
30 Sep, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures -
Emma
19 Nov, 2015 820 English and Old English literatures -
Persuasion
22 Dec, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures -
Gothic
4 Jan, 2001 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
Julian of Norwich
19 Oct, 2023 270 History of Christianity -
Fanny Burney
23 Apr, 2015 820 English and Old English literatures -
Middlemarch
19 Apr, 2018 820 English and Old English literatures -
North and South
9 Mar, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures -
Edith Wharton
4 Oct, 2018 810 American literature in English
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.