Nonetheless, this conversation with Helen forms the basis for perhaps the most influential of Jane’s female friendships. Helen passes over the volume, and Jane confesses that the book “looked dull to my trifling tastes” because of the absence of fairies, genii, and bright variety. “I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.”

Jane confesses that she cares little for the letterpress, but she is enthralled by the introductory pages, which allow her to form ideas of her own: “shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.” The book’s illustrations alternately delight and distress her: “two ships becalmed on a torpid sea” are transformed into “marine phantoms” to Jane, and the image of a black-horned thing surveying a gallows becomes “an object of terror.” Her reading of choice is Bewick’s A History of British Birds. The novel’s opening episode sees Jane attempting to elude John by veiling herself in a window recess, escaping into a fantasy world through books. Jane is treated as an outsider by her cold Aunt Reed, and is often tormented by her cruel cousin, John. The first, and perhaps most memorable, mention of another book in the novel appears at the very beginning, when the ten-year-old orphan Jane is living with distant relatives. This blog aims to highlight the wealth of material referenced in Jane Eyre which is available at the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections.

As Jane is an avid reader, books appear frequently throughout the novel, often at formative moments. The book follows Jane’s life from childhood, from her period at an inhospitable aunt’s house through her crucial years at school, on to Thornfield Hall as a governess where she meets her volatile employer Mr Rochester. Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre continues to enchant modern readers for various reasons: its intriguing blend of realism and Gothic elements the tumultuous central romance its keen critiques of unfair social institutions and the eponymous narrator’s original voice, which veers between submission and rebellion, passion and restraint.

Jane eyre book original