Jane Eyre [antikvár]

Introduction Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) is the most famous member of a very unusual family who lived in a village in northern England in the nineteenth century. Their father, an Irishman, was a clergyman; their mother, who came from Cornwall, died when the youngest child was a baby, and the two eldest girls died when they were children. The only boy, whom his family expected to become famous as a great artist or a great writer, was unsuccessful in everything he tried to do and died when he was just over thirty. The three remaining sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — all became writers, and Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre is one of the most important novels in English of the nineteenth century and has been popular ever since it was first published in 1847. As children, the sisters were kept at home for much of the time and had very little contact with other families or people outside the village. They and their brother made up stories for each other of imaginary people living in imaginary countries. They drew maps of these countries, and created characters who did wild, exciting and dangerous things; this imaginary world, which Charlotte called "the place beneath", became a way of escaping from their dull and limited world. Another way of escape was through reading, and because they had few chances of seeing new books, most of the novels and poetry they read had been written in the earlier part of the century when writers put great importance on feelings (especially powerful and dramatic ones) and on nature (especially wild and beautiful nature). Their own novels were influenced by these books and by the stories they had invented as children; they were very different from the other, more "polite" novels being written in the eighteen forties. Many of the first readers of Jane Eyre thought it was very shocking, particularly when they discovered that it had