Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, an orphan, is brought up by an aunt who hates her and sent to Lowood, a charity school of cold, hunger and disease, where her friend Helen Burns dies. At eighteen she becomes governess at Thornfield Hall to the young ward of its master, Edward Rochester, a moody, sardonic man who is drawn to her plain honesty, as she is to him. But strange laughter is heard at night in the upper floors, a fire breaks out in Rochester's room, and on the morning of their wedding a terrible secret stops the ceremony, forcing Jane to choose between love and her self-respect.

Charlotte Brontë published the novel in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and its passionate first-person voice, insisting that a poor, plain woman has the same soul as anyone, startled readers. Jean Rhys later told the story of Rochester's first wife in Wide Sargasso Sea. This edition is illustrated by F. H. Townsend. It appeared in the same year as her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and wrote tiny books about them. Her two elder sisters died after a harsh boarding school, the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre.

After working as a teacher and governess and studying in Brussels, she published poems with her sisters under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and in 1847 Jane Eyre made her famous. She outlived all her siblings, married in 1854 and died the following year. Her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights.