Charlotte Brontë has been hailed as “the first historian of private consciousness” because of her gothic, torrid Jane Eyre. The novel tells the tale of a mousy governess and her brooding employer: wills clash, sparks fly, a mysterious arsonist starts to wreak havoc in the halls of Thornfield Hall, and nothing is what it seems.
Jane Eyre has held a tight grip on the reading public’s imagination and heart since it was first published in 1847. Perhaps because it’s tremendously romantic: two homely misfits find solace, chemistry, and laughter with one another. Or it might be because of how dark and twisted the novel becomes, exposing intense depths of human cruelty. Or because of its shockingly modern takes on feminism, class, and sexuality. Or because it addresses the brutality of colonialism, a theme brought to the forefront in Jean Rhys’s brilliant Jane Eyre-inspired novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Or because Jane Eyre, whose voice helms this bildungsroman, is defiant, furious, hilarious, impassioned, deluded: a deeply complex and original character.
In this group we’ll pay attention to both the language and plot that make Jane Eyre so unique and look at the ways it inspired—and continues to inspire—literary fiction, films (including Jane Eyre adaptations), cultural ideas of romance, and Gothic horror tropes.
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