Before You Begin

Orphaned and unloved, a small, plain, fierce girl is raised by an aunt who cannot bear her. From that cold beginning, Charlotte Brontë follows Jane Eyre through a cruel charity school, a great house full of secrets, a wild flight across the moors, and a love that will not let her be anything less than an equal. Told entirely in Jane's own voice, it is one of the most passionate and independent stories ever written.

When Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, its plain heroine astonished readers: here was a woman, poor and unbeautiful, who insisted on her own worth and her own conscience against every pressure to yield them. “I am no bird,” she says, “and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” That fierce, quiet self-respect is the beating heart of the book.

Behind the love story runs something darker and gothic — the brooding master of Thornfield, the wild laugh in the night, the locked door at the top of the house — and a moral question the novel never lets go of: what is a person worth, and what will they refuse to sell of themselves, even for love?

This edition presents the complete novel, gathered into six movements — from Gateshead to Lowood, Thornfield, the moors, and Ferndean — with an illustrated companion to Jane's world, its houses and its people. Turn the page and hear her tell it herself.