Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was published in London on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co., in three volumes, as “an Autobiography” edited by “Currer Bell”. The pseudonym concealed Charlotte Brontë, then thirty-one, a clergyman’s daughter from Haworth in Yorkshire who had worked as a governess and had, with her sisters Emily and Anne, published a volume of poems the year before that sold two copies. Smith, Elder had turned down her first novel, The Professor, but asked to see something else; she sent Jane Eyre, finished in August, and the firm published it within two months. It was an immediate success. A second edition in January 1848 carried a dedication to Thackeray that the author, not knowing Thackeray’s own wife was confined for insanity, came to regret; a third edition followed in April with a short note disclaiming the other “Bell” novels. The text followed here includes both the preface to the second edition and the note to the third.

What was new about the book in 1847 is still new. It is narrated in the first person by a plain, poor, clever woman who addresses the reader directly, who is angry and says so, and whose story runs from a childhood of institutional cruelty through employment, love, renunciation and an inheritance to an ending she chooses. The gothic apparatus — the laugh in the attic, the fire, the voice across the moor — is real enough to frighten and is also a machine for moral argument: about the marriage law, about the claims of conscience against passion, about how a woman without money is to live. According to her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë had told her sisters she would show them a heroine as plain and as small as herself; the decision looks, in retrospect, like the founding of a genre.

Readers who know the book from adaptations will find the first ten chapters, at Gateshead and Lowood, longer and harder than they expect, and the St John Rivers chapters at the end stranger. Both are the point. This is a novel about a whole life, and it earns its famous last chapter by refusing to hurry toward it.

We present the complete text, with the author’s preface to the second edition and her note to the third, set anew for this edition; spelling and punctuation are the author’s.