Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and its first edition sold out within three months. The novel follows Jane from her miserable childhood at Gateshead with her hostile aunt, through the harsh conditions of Lowood Institution, to Thornfield Hall, where she takes a position as governess to the ward of Edward Rochester. Rochester is sardonic, physically unprepossessing, and genuinely interested in Jane's opinions, an unusual arrangement that grows into something more. The novel's central crisis comes when Jane discovers, at the altar on her wedding day, that Rochester has a living wife locked in the attic: Bertha Mason, a Jamaican Creole woman he married years earlier and later declared insane.
Brontë constructed Jane's narrating voice with unusual care for a Victorian protagonist. Jane insists, explicitly and repeatedly, on equal treatment. Her famous declaration, "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will", is not simply romantic rhetoric. It reflects a consistent position she maintains even when it costs her the marriage she wants, because the marriage on offer requires her to become Rochester's mistress and therefore dependent on his continued goodwill. The novel's feminist credentials are complicated, however, by the treatment of Bertha Mason, who functions as a plot mechanism rather than a character with her own interiority, a problem that Jean Rhys addressed directly in Wide Sargasso Sea a century later.
Jane Eyre's claim on contemporary readers is strongest in its treatment of the conditions under which genuine relationship is possible. Jane refuses Rochester's first proposal not because she does not love him but because the power differential, he wealthy, she penniless and dependent, makes honest equality impossible. She returns only after he has lost Thornfield, his sight, and his social dominance. What has not dated is the precision with which Brontë traces the difference between love that respects the loved person's autonomy and love that treats possession as its natural conclusion.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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