I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Bronte, published on 16 October 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood, and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall.

In its internalisation of the action - the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane’s moral and spiritual sensibility and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain of poetry - Jane Eyre revolutionized the art of fiction. Charlotte Bronte has been called the ‘first historian of the private consciousness’ and the literary ancestor of writers like Joyce and Proust.

The novel contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of morality at its core, but is nonetheless a novel many consider ahead of its time given the individualistic character of Jane and the novel’s exploration of classism, sexuality, religion, and proto-feminism.

Charlotte Bronte was a British novelist, the eldest out of the three famous Bronte sisters whose novels have become standards of English literature.

Charlotte Bronte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the third of six children, to Patrick Bronte (formerly Patrick Brunty ), an Irish Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Maria Branwell. In April 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate. This is where the Bronte children would spend most of their lives. Maria Branwell Bronte died from what was thought to be cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of her spinster sister Elizabeth Branwell, who moved to Yorkshire to help the family.