Jane Eyre is a classic romance
novel by Charlotte Brontë that was published in
1847 by Smith, Elder & Company, London. It is
Brontë's masterpiece and one of the most famous of British novels. Charlotte Brontë first published the book as Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The novel was an immediate critical and
popular success. Especially effusive in his praises was William Makepeace
Thackeray, to whom Charlotte Brontë dedicated the novel's second edition, which was illustrated by F. H. Townsend.
Plot Introduction
Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the formative years of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent,
and passionate English orphan girl. The plot follows the form of a Bildungsroman, a novel
that tells the story of a child's maturation and focuses on the emotions and experiences that lead to his or her maturity. The
novel goes through five distinct stages: (1) Jane's childhood at Gateshead, where she is abused by her aunt and cousins; (2) her
education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations; (3) her time as governess at
Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; (4)
her time with the Rivers family at Marsh's End (or Moor House) and at Morton, where her cold clergyman-cousin St. John Rivers
proposes to her; and (5) her reunion with and marriage to her beloved Rochester at his house of Ferndean. Partly
autobiographical, the novel abounds with social criticism and sinister Gothic elements.
Jane Eyre is divided into 38 chapters, and most editions are at least 400 pages long (although the pretext and
introduction on some copies can take up another 100)
Plot Summary
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the
morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so
sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
– Excerpt from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, beginning of chapter 1
The novel begins in Gateshead Hall, where a ten-year-old orphan named Jane Eyre
is living with her mother's brother's family. The brother, surnamed Reed, died shortly after adopting Jane. His wife, Mrs. Sarah
Reed, and their three children -- John, Eliza, and Georgiana -- neglect and abuse Jane, for they resent Mr. Reed's preference for
the little orphan in their midst. In addition, they dislike Jane's plain looks and quiet yet passionate character. Thus, the
novel begins with young John Reed bullying Jane, who retaliates with unwonted violence. Jane is blamed for the ensuing fight, and
Mrs. Reed has two of the servants drag her off and lock her up in the red-room, the unused chamber where Mr. Reed had died. Still
locked in that night, Jane sees a light and panics, thinking that her uncle's ghost has come. Her scream rouses the house, but
Mrs Reed just locks up Jane for longer. Then Jane has a fit and passes out. A doctor comes and suggests that Jane should go to
school.
Mr. Brocklehurst, a cold, cruel, self-righteous clergyman, accepts Jane as a pupil. Jane is infuriated, however, when Mrs.
Reed tells him that Jane is a liar. After Brocklehurst departs, Jane bluntly tells Mrs. Reed how she hates and condemns the Reed
family. Mrs. Reed, so shocked that she is incapable of responding, leaves the drawing room in haste.
Jane finds life at Lowood to be grim. Miss Maria Temple, the youthful superintendent, is just and kind, but another teacher,
Miss Scatcherd, is sour and abusive. At one point, Mr. Brocklehurst goes so far as to accuse Jane of being demon-possessed after
she accidentally breaks a slate, although she is later cleared of this charge, and Mr. Brocklehurst is disliked even greater by
the students.
Brocklehurst embezzles the school's funds to support his family's luxurious lifestyle. (Ironically, he preaches to others a
doctrine of privation and poverty.) As a result, Lowood's eighty pupils must make do with cold rooms, poor meals, and thin
garments. Many are sickly. A typhus epidemic strikes the school, and Brocklehurst's neglect and dishonesty are laid bare. Mr.
Brocklehurst is disgraced and stripped of power, and conditions improve dramatically at Lowood under the new regime.
Jane is impressed when one pupil, Helen Burns, accepts Miss Scatcherd's cruelty and the school's deficiencies with passive
dignity, practising the Christian teaching of turning the other cheek. Jane admires and loves the gentle Helen, but cannot bring
herself to emulate her friend's behaviour. While the typhus epidemic is raging, Helen dies of consumption in Jane's arms.
The narrative resumes eight years later. Jane has been a teacher at Lowood for two years, but she thirsts for a better and
brighter future. She advertises for a governess and is hired by Mrs. Alice Fairfax, housekeeper of the Gothic manor of
Thornfield, to teach a lively, rather spoiled French girl named Adèle Varens. A few months after her arrival at Thornfield, Jane
goes for a walk and aids a horseman who takes a fall. On her return to Thornfield, Jane discovers that the horseman is her
employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a muscular, moody, passionate, charismatic, romantic, electrifying, wonderful, intelligent,
perceptive, independent, sensitive, thoughtful, articulate gentleman nearly twenty years older than Jane. Adèle is his ward.
Rochester seems quite taken with Jane. He repeatedly summons her to his presence and talks with her. Adèle, he says, is the
illegitimate daughter of a French opera singer, Celine, who was his mistress for a time, though he doubts Adèle is his daughter.
That same night, Jane hears eerie laughter coming from the hallway, and opening the door sees smoke coming from Rochester's door.
Rushing into his room, she finds his bed curtains ablaze and douses them with water, saving Rochester's life. Rochester says a
matronly servant named Grace Poole is responsible, yet does not fire her, and Grace Poole shows no signs of remorse or guilt.
Jane is amazed and perplexed. But by this time, Rochester and Jane are in love with each other, though they do not show it.
Soon after the fire incident, Mr. Rochester departs Thornfield, reportedly to the Continent. He returns unexpectedly with a
party of high-class ladies and gentlemen, including Miss Blanche Ingram, a beautiful but shallow socialite whom he seems to be
courting. The party is interrupted when a strange old gypsy woman arrives and insists on telling everyone's fortunes. When Jane's
turn comes, the gypsy tells her a great deal about her life and feelings, much to Jane's surprise. Then the gypsy reveals
"herself" to be Rochester in disguise.
That night, after a piercing scream wakes everyone in the house, Mr. Rochester comes to Jane for help in attending to a
wounded guest, a certain Mr. Richard Mason, a queer Englishman from the West Indies. Mr. Mason has been stabbed and bitten in the
arm, and a surgeon comes and secretly whisks the wounded man away. Again, Rochester hints that Grace Poole is responsible.
Jane receives word that Mrs. Reed, upon hearing of her son John's apparent suicide after leading a life of dissipation and
debt, has suffered a near-fatal stroke and is asking for her. So Jane returns to Gateshead, where she encounters her cousins
Eliza and Georgiana Reed. Eliza has become a self-righteous puritan, while the plump and pretty Georgiana has become vapid,
always moaning about her love affairs. Although she rejects Jane's efforts at reconciliation, Mrs. Reed gives Jane a letter that
she had previously withheld out of spite. The letter is from Jane's father's brother, John Eyre, notifying her of his intent to
leave her his fortune upon his death. Mrs. Reed dies in the night, and no one mourns her. Eliza enters a convent in France, and
Georgiana travels to London.
After Jane returns to Thornfield, she and Rochester gradually reveal their love for each other. Though Jane accepts
Rochester's proposal of marriage, she is plagued by doubts about it. She feels she is Rochester's inferior and continues to
address him as "master" even after they are engaged. Her forebodings deepen when a strange, savage-looking woman sneaks into her
room one night and rips her wedding veil in two. Yet again, Rochester attributes the incident to Grace Poole.
The wedding goes ahead nevertheless. But during the ceremony in the church, the mysterious Mr. Mason and a lawyer step forth
and declare that Rochester cannot marry Jane because his own wife is still alive. Rochester bitterly admits this fact, explaining
that his wife is a violent madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic, where Grace Poole looks after her. But Grace Poole
imbibes gin immoderately, occasionally giving the madwoman an opportunity to escape. It is Rochester's mad wife who is
responsible for the strange events at Thornfield. Rochester nearly committed bigamy, and kept this fact from Jane. The wedding is
cancelled.
Back at the manorhouse, Rochester explains further. Under pressure from his father to make an advantageous marriage, and lured
by Bertha's vast inheritance and personal beauty, Rochester had as a young man married Bertha. When Bertha became openly insane,
Rochester locked her up in Thornfield and departed for a life of sensuality in Europe.
Rochester then asks Jane to accompany him to the south of France, where they will live as husband and wife, even though they
cannot be married. But Jane refuses to give up her self-respect by becoming a rich man's mistress, even though she loves him
still.
But she does not trust herself to refuse a second time. In the dead of night, Jane slips out of Thornfield and takes a coach
far away to the north of England. When her money gives out, she sleeps outdoors on the moor and reluctantly begs for food. One
night, freezing and starving, she comes to Moor House (or Marsh End) and begs for help. St. John Rivers, the young clergyman who
lives in the house, admits her.
Jane, who gives the false surname of Elliott, quickly recovers under the care of St. John and his two kind sisters, Diana and
Mary. St. John arranges for Jane to teach a charity school for girls in the village of Morton. At the school, Jane observes the
interactions of St. John, a cold and stern man but a truly devout Christian, and Rosamond Oliver, a beautiful but silly young
heiress. Jane comes to believe that the two are in love, and boldly says so to St. John. St. John confesses his love but says
that Rosamond would make a most unsuitable wife for a missionary, which he intends to become.
One snowy night, St. John unexpectedly arrives at Jane's cottage. Suspecting Jane's true identity, he relates Jane's
experiences at Thornfield and says that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left Jane his fortune of 20,000 pounds. After
confessing her true identity, Jane arranges to share her inheritance with the Riverses, who turn out to be her cousins.
Not long afterwards, St. John decides to travel to India and devote his life to missionary work. He asks Jane to accompany him
-- as his wife. Jane consents to go to India but adamantly refuses to marry him because they are not in love. St. John is not
cruel or hypocritical like Mr. Brocklehurst, but he does not respect other people's feelings when they conflict with his own. He
continues to pressure Jane to marry him, and his forceful personality almost causes her to capitulate. But at that moment she
hears what she thinks is Rochester's voice calling her name, and this gives her the strength to reject St. John completely.
The next day, Jane takes a coach to Thornfield. But only blackened ruins lie where the manorhouse once stood. An innkeeper
tells Jane that Rochester's mad wife set the fire and then committed suicide by jumping from the roof. Rochester rescued the
servants from the burning mansion but lost a hand and his eyesight in the process. He now lives in an isolated manor house called
Ferndean. Going to Ferndean, Jane reunites with Rochester. At first, he fears that she will refuse to marry a blind cripple, but
Jane accepts him without hesitation.
Speaking from the vantage point of ten years, Jane describes their married life as blissful.
"I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what
language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever
more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any
more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be
together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each
other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me;
we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result." (Chapter XXXVIII)
Meanwhile, St. John has gone to India as a missionary and dies there.
Rochester eventually recovers sight in one eye, and can see their first-born son when the baby is born.
Character List
Jane Eyre: The protagonist and title character, a plain-featured and
reserved but talented, empathetic, hard-working, honest (not to say blunt), and passionate girl. Skilled at studying, drawing,
and teaching, she works as a governess at Thornfield Manor and falls in love with her wealthy employer, Edward Rochester. But her
strong sense of conscience does not permit her to become his mistress, and she does not return to him until his insane wife is
dead and she herself has come into an inheritance. Then their marriage is blissful because it is between equals.
Edward Rochester: The owner of Thornfield Manor, and Jane's lover and eventual husband. He possesses a strong physique
and great wealth, but his face is ugly and his moods mutable. Impetuous and sensual, he falls in love with Jane because her
simplicity, bluntness, and plainness contrast so much with those of the shallow society women he is accustomed to. But his
unfortunate marriage to the maniacal Bertha Mason postpones his union with Jane, and he loses a hand and his eyesight while
trying to rescue his mad wife after she sets a fire that burns down Thornfield. He is what is referred to as a Byronic hero.
St. John Eyre Rivers: A clergyman who is Jane Eyre's cousin on her father's side. He is a devout, almost fanatical
Christian of Calvinistic leanings. He is charitable, honest, patient, forgiving, scrupulous, austere, and deeply moral; with
these qualities, he would have made a saint. Unfortunately, he is also proud, cold, exacting, controlling, unwilling to listen to
dissenting opinions, and lacking the milk of human kindness. Jane venerates him and likes him, regarding him as a brother, but
she refuses to marry him because he doesn't love her and is incapable of being in love.
Bertha Mason: The violently insane secret wife of Edward Rochester. From the West
Indies and of Creole extraction, her family possesses a strong strain of madness, which Rochester did not know until after he,
lured by her wealth and beauty, had married her. Her insanity manifested itself in a few years, and Rochester resorted to
imprisoning her in the attic of Thornfield Manor. But she escapes four times during the novel, and on each occasion wreaks havoc
in the house, the fourth time actually burning it down and taking her own life in the process.
Helen Burns: An angelic fellow-student and best friend of Jane's at Lowood School. Several years older than the
ten-year-old Jane, she stoically accepts all the cruelties of the teachers and the deficiencies of the school's room and board.
She refuses to hate the tyrannical Mr. Brocklehurst or the vicious Miss Scatcherd, or to complain, believing in the New Testament
teaching that one should love one's enemies and turn the other cheek. Jane reveres her for her profound Christianity, even though
she herself believes that resisting evil is necessary to prevent evil from taking over. Helen, uncomplaining as ever, dies of
consumption in Jane's arms.
Mrs. Sarah Reed: Jane's aunt, who resides at Gateshead. Although she raises Jane as per her late husband's request,
Jane receives nothing but neglect and abuse at her hands. At the age of ten, Jane is sent away to school. Years later, Jane
attempts to reconcile with her aunt, but Mrs. Reed spurns her, still resenting that her husband loved Jane more than his own
children.
Mr. Brocklehurst: The arrogant, hypocritical clergyman who serves as headmaster and treasurer of Lowood School. He
embezzles the school's funds in order to pay for his family's opulent lifestyle. At the same time, he preaches a doctrine of
Christian austerity and self-sacrifice to everyone in hearing. When his dishonesty is brought to light, he is publicly disgraced
and stripped of power.
Adèle Varens: A naive, vivacious, rather spoiled French child whom Jane is governess to at Thornfield. She is
Rochester's ward because her mother, Celine Varens, an opportunistic French opera dancer and singer, was Rochester's mistress.
However, Rochester does not believe himself to be Adèle's father. Although not particularly fond of her, he nonetheless extends
the little girl the best of care. In time, she grows up to be a very pleasant and well-mannered young woman.
Mrs. Alice Fairfax: An elderly widow and housekeeper of Thornfield Manor. She treats Jane kindly and respectfully, but
she disapproves of Jane's engagement to Mr. Rochester. She believes that marriages should be limited to within one's own
class.
Miss Maria Temple: The kind, attractive young superintendent of Lowood School. She recognizes Mr. Brocklehurst for the
cruel hypocrite he is, and treats Jane and Helen with respect and compassion. She helps clear Jane of Mrs. Reed's false
accusation of deceit.
Richard Mason: A strangely blank-eyed but handsome Englishman from the West Indies, he stops Jane and Rochester's
wedding with the proclamation that Rochester is still married -- to Bertha Mason, his sister.
Diana and Mary Rivers: St. John's sisters and Jane's cousins, they are kind and intellectual young women who contrive
to lead an independent life while retaining their intelligence, purity, and sense of meaning in life. Diana warns Jane against
marrying her icy brother.
Grace Poole: Bertha Mason's keeper, a dowdy woman verging on middle age. She drinks gin immoderately, occasionally
giving her maniacal charge a chance to escape. Rochester and Mrs. Fairfax attribute all of Bertha's misdeeds to Grace Poole.
Rosamond Oliver: The beautiful but rather shallow and coquettish daughter of Morton's richest man. She donates the
funds to launch the village school because she is in love with St. John. In time, however, she becomes engaged to the wealthy Mr.
Granby.
Georgiana Reed: One of Mrs. Reed's daughters and Jane's cousin. Plump, pretty, and vapid, she seems to spend most of
her time either having love affairs or talking about them. After Mrs. Reed's death, she marries a wealthy but worn-out society
man.
Eliza Reed: Mrs. Reed's other daughter and Jane's cousin. Bitter because she is not as attractive as her sister, she
devotes herself self-righteously to the Catholicism. After her mother's death, she enters a French convent, where she eventually
becomes the Mother Superior.
Blanche Ingram: A beautiful but shallow socialite whom Rochester courts in order to make Jane jealous. She despises the
rather dowdy Jane and hopes to marry Rochester for his money.
Bessie Lee: The maid at Gateshead. She is the only person in the house to treat Jane kindly, telling her stories and
singing her songs. Later she marries Robert Leaven, the coachman, who brings Jane the news of Mrs. Reed's stroke.
Mr. Lloyd: A compassionate apothecary who recommends that Jane be sent to school. Later, he writes a letter to Miss
Temple confirming Jane's account of her childhood and thereby clearing Jane of Mrs. Reed's charge of lying.
Miss Scatcherd: A sour and vicious teacher at Lowood. She behaves with particular cruelty toward Helen.
Uncle Reed: Mrs. Reed's late husband, he made his wife promise to raise the orphaned baby Jane as her own child.
John Eyre: Jane's uncle, who leaves her his vast fortune of 20,000 pounds. He never appears as a character.
Themes
Morality: Jane refuses to become Rochester's paramour because of her "impassioned self-respect and moral conviction."
[1] She rejects St. John Rivers's puritanism as much as
Rochester's libertinism. Instead, she works out a morality expressed in love, independence, and forgiveness. [2] Specifically, she forgives her cruel aunt and loves her husband, but never
surrenders her independence to him, even after they are married. For he is blind, more dependent on her than she on him.
Religion: Throughout the novel, Jane endeavours to attain an equilibrium between
moral duty and earthly happiness. She despises the hypocritical puritanism of Mr. Brocklehurst and rejects St. John Rivers's cold
devotion to his perceived Christian duty, but neither can she bring herself to emulate Helen Burns's turning the other cheek,
although she admires Helen for it. Ultimately, she rejects these three extremes and finds a middle ground in which religion
serves to curb her immoderate passions but does not repress her true self.
Social Class: Jane's ambiguous social position -- a penniless yet learned orphan from a good family -- leads her to criticize discrimination based on class. Although she is
educated, well-mannered, and relatively sophisticated, she is still a governess, a paid servant of low social standing, and
therefore powerless. This is why she hesitates to marry Rochester; it is not a marriage of equals but of master and servant.
Nevertheless, Charlotte Brontë possesses certain class prejudices herself, as is made clear when Jane has to remind herself that
her unsophisticated village pupils at Morton "are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy."
Gender Relations: A particularly important theme in the novel is patriarchalism and Jane's efforts to assert her own
identity within a male-dominated society. The three main male characters, Brocklehurst, Rochester, and St. John, try to keep Jane
in a subordinate position and prevent her from expressing her own thoughts and feelings. Jane escapes Brocklehurst and rejects
St. John, and she only marries Rochester once she is sure that theirs is a marriage between equals. Through Jane, Brontë refutes
Victorian stereotypes about women, articulating what was for her time a radical feminist philosophy:
"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a
field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to
confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to
condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."
(Chapter XII)
Context
The early sequences, in which Jane is sent to Lowood, a harsh boarding school, are derived from the author's own experiences.
Helen Burns's death from consumption recalls the deaths of Charlotte Brontë's
sisters Maria and Elizabeth, who died of tuberculosis in childhood as a result of the conditions at their school, the Clergy
Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall in
Lancashire. Mr. Brocklehurst is based on Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791-1859), the
Evangelical minister who ran the school, and Helen Burns is likely modelled on Charlotte's sister Maria. Additionally, John
Reed's decline into alcoholism and dissolution recalls the life of Charlotte's brother Branwell, who became an opium and alcohol
addict in the years preceding his death. Finally, like Charlotte, Jane becomes a governess. These facts were revealed to the
public in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Charlotte's friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. [3]
The Gothic manor of Thornfield was probably inspired by North Lees Hall, near Hathersage
in the Peak District. This was visited by Charlotte
Brontë and her friend Ellen Nussey in the summer of 1845 and described by Ellen Nussey in a letter dated 22 July 1845. It was the residence of the Eyre family and its first owner Agnes
Ashurst was reputedly confined as a lunatic in a padded second floor room. [4]
Literary Motifs and Allusions
Jane Eyre uses many motifs from Gothic
fiction, such as the Gothic manor (Thornfield), the Byronic hero (Rochester) and
The Madwoman in the Attic (Bertha), who Jane perceives as resembling "the foul
German spectre - the vampire" (Chapter XXV) and who attacks her brother in a distinctly vampiric way: "She sucked the blood: she
said she'd drain my heart" (Chapter XX).
Literary allusions from the Bible, fairy tales, The Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and the
novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott are also much in evidence. [5] The novel also deliberately avoids some conventions of Victorian fiction, e.g.,
not contriving a deathbed reconciliation between Aunt Reed and Jane Eyre and avoiding the portrayal of a fallen woman.
Adaptations
Jane Eyre has engendered numerous adaptations and related works inspired by the novel:
- Three adaptations entitled Jane Eyre were released; one in 1910, two in 1914.
- 1915: Jane Eyre starring Louise Vale [1]
- 1915: A version was released called The Castle of Thornfield.
- 1918: A version was released called Woman and Wife.
- 1921: Jane Eyre starring Mabel Ballin [2]
- 1926: A version was made in Germany called Orphan of Lowood.
- 1934: This film featured Colin Clive and Virginia
Bruce. [3]
- 1940: Rebecca, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock and based upon the novel of the same name which was influenced by Jane Eyre. [4]Joan Fontaine, who starred in this film, would also be cast in the 1944
version of Jane Eyre to reinforce the connection. [5]
- 1943: I Walked with a Zombie is a horror movie based upon Jane
Eyre.
- 1944: Jane Eyre, with a screenplay by John Houseman and Aldous Huxley. It features Orson Welles as Rochester, Joan Fontaine as Jane, and
Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns.
- 1956: A version was made in Hong Kong called The Orphan Girl.
- 1963: A version was released in Mexico called El Secreto (English: "The Secret").
- 1970: Jane Eyre, starring George C.
Scott as Rochester and Susannah York as Jane.
- 1972: An adaptation in Telugu, Shanti Nilayam, directed by C. Vaikuntarama
Sastry, starring Anjali Devi.
- 1978: A version was released in Mexico called Ardiente Secreto (English: "Ardent Secret").
- 1996: Jane Eyre, directed by Franco
Zeffirelli and starring William Hurt as Rochester, Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane, supermodel Elle Macpherson as Blanche Ingram, Anna Paquin as the young Jane,
and Geraldine Chaplin as Miss Scatcherd.
- 1997: Jane Eyre, directed by Robert
Young and starring Ciarán Hinds as Rochester, Samantha Morton as Jane, Laura Harling as young Jane, Timia Berthome as Adele, Gemma Jones as Mrs. Fairfax.
Musical versions
- A musical version with a book by John Caird and music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, with Marla Schaffel as Jane and James Stacy Barbour
as Rochester, opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on December 10 2000. It closed on June 10
2001.
- An opera version was written in 2000 by English composer Michael Berkeley, with a libretto by David Malouf. It was given
its premiere by Music Theater Wales at the Cheltenham Festival.
- Jane Eyre was played for the first time in Europe in Beveren, Belgium. It was given its premiere at the cultural centre "Ter Vesten".
- The ballet "Jane," based on the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, was created in 2007, a Bullard/Tye production with music
by Max Reger. Its world premiere was scheduled at the Civic Auditorium, Kalamazoo, Michigan, June 29 and 30, performed by the
Kalamazoo Ballet Company, Therese Bullard, Director.
Television versions
Literature
- 1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
was partially inspired by Jane Eyre. [8], [9]
- 1966: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
The character, Bertha Mason, serves as the main protagonist for this novel which acts as a "prequel" to Jane Eyre. It
describes the meeting and marriage of Antoinette (later renamed Bertha by Rochester) and Rochester. In its reshaping of events
related to Jane Eyre, the novel suggests that Bertha's madness is the result of Rochester's rejection of her and her
Creole heritage. It was also adapted into film
twice.
- 1997: by Hilary
Bailey
- 2000: by Emma
Tennant
- 2001 novel The Eyre Affair by Jasper
Fforde revolves around the plot of Jane Eyre.
- 2002: Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn, a science
fiction novel based upon Jane Eyre
- 2002: Jane Rochester by Kimberly A. Bennett
- 2006: The French Dancer's Bastard: The Story of Adele From Jane Eyre by Emma Tennant.
This is a slightly modified version of Tennant's 2000 novel.
- 2007: by Emma Tennant. This is another
version of Jane Eyre.
References
- ^ "Brontë, Charlotte." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1987. pp. 546.
- ^ Ibid
- ^ Stevie Davies, Introduction and
Notes to Jane Eyre. Penguin Classics ed., 2006.
- ^ Ibid
- ^ Ibid
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
The novel online
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