The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Jane Eyre

ReadingRate edition

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë, 1847

742 pages · 185,475 words · about 13 hours · regard 88 of 100

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Jane Eyre is orphaned at ten, handed to a hostile aunt, then sent to Lowood, a charity school where the children eat burned porridge and sleep in unheated rooms. By the time she arrives at Thornfield Hall as a governess, she has already survived more than most adults will face in a lifetime. Her employer, Edward Rochester, is moody, unconventional, and hiding something behind a locked door on the third floor. Jane notices, asks questions he deflects, and falls in love anyway. Brontë writes Jane's interiority with a directness unusual for 1847. Jane tells you exactly what she thinks of every person she meets, and she is usually right. The novel turns on a single scene in a church — a revelation that forces Jane to choose between desire and conscience. She chooses conscience, walks out onto the moor, and nearly starves. The ending resolves everything cleanly, perhaps too cleanly, but earns it through the long accumulation of Jane's stubbornness. What persists is not the Gothic atmosphere or the romance but the voice: first-person, urgent, addressed directly to the reader. Published under the pseudonym Currer Bell, it reads like someone finally being allowed to speak.

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