Jane Eyre

Brontë’s coming-of-age novel offers an intimate view into the moral consciousness of Jane Eyre, a young, poor Victorian woman who refuses to bend her will to the rampages of the world around her. Finding herself at the mercy of a punishing family, Jane is sent to the Lowood School, depicted as an indictment of this kind of institution for orphaned and poor girls, where she suffers grave loss before gaining a position as a governess in the household of Mr. Rochester of Thornfield Hall. There, in the isolating Peak District landscape Brontë knew well, Jane first matches wits with a man who far outclasses her in experience but is deeply overshadowed by her own inner courage. What happens—why it happens, how it can be understood and processed—drives Jane onward, out into a world full of coincidences and snares, and inward to the bulwark of her character and the power of her sense of self.