Jane Eyre

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Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Bronte, published under the pen name “Currer Bell”. The novel revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative.
The novel goes through five distinct stages:
Jane’s childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers oppression her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. Throughout these sections, the novel provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.
Charlotte Bronte was an English novelist and poet, whose novels became classics of English literature.
 
Charlotte Bronte was born on 21 April 1816 in Market Street Thornton, west of Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third of the six children of Maria and Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. In 1820,her family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth, where her father had been appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church.
At home in Haworth Parsonage, Bronte acted as “the motherly friend and guardian of her younger sisters”. Brontë wrote her first known poem at the age of 13 in 1829, and went on to write more than 200 poems in the course of her life. Many of her poems were “published” in their homemade magazine. She and her surviving siblings created their own fictional worlds, and began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms.

INTRODUCTION

It is amazing that from a life, as eventless and gloomy as that of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), there should have sprung so passionate and realistic a novel as “Jane Eyre.” This was a story which indeed took the world by storm from the moment of its appearance in 1847. Nothing she wrote before or after could compare with it, and even today there are few literary masterpieces which paint so forceful a picture of a woman’s powerful struggle with the adversities of her day. The book is the more remarkable when we realize that Charlotte Bronte was reared in a household where reserve and restraint were the bywords. Her father was a clergyman in Yorkshire, England. Charlotte was the eldest of the four Bronte sisters, all of whom possessed a certain unusual indomitability of spirit.
For a while, in their childhood, Charlotte and her sister Emily attended a school which both of them despised. It was of her days in this school that Charlotte wrote so scathingly in “Jane Eyre.” After spending a few years at that institution, their education was continued elsewhere. Then Charlotte taught and acted as a governess for a while, until she and Emily went, in 1842, to Brussels, hoping to learn to speak French and German. Shortly afterwards, however, duty called her home and she realized that she could never again leave her family. Her father was losing his sight, her brother killing himself with drink, and her sisters gravely ill. To support themselves the sisters first published a volume of poems under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; however, having little success with this, they returned to fiction, and each produced a novel. Charlotte’s first book, “The Professor,” was refused by the publishers. However, her next novel, “Jane Eyre,” had a different fate, and was, as we have seen, jubilantly received. Two subsequent novels of little fame were then produced. an impenetrable gloom to settle over Charlotte’s life. Finally Meanwhile, the death of her sister and brother caused in 1854, she married her father’s curate, the Reverend Arthur Nicholls, and experienced a few happy months with him before she died, worn out by her dreary home, the bleakness of the climate, and the violence of her struggle against her LEONARD S. DAVIDOW lot in life.
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