Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre
1847 · 318 pages
- Author
- Charlotte Brontë
- Edition
- First edition, in three volumes; this file is Volume I
- Published
- London, Smith, Elder, and Co., Cornhill (printed by Stewart and Murray, Old Bailey), 1847
- Pages
- 318
- File
- DjVu, 7.3 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
Reading on an iPhone or iPad?
4.2 on the App Store4.2 · Read offline, with bookmarks and Read Aloud.
About the book
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is the first published novel of Charlotte Brontë. It appeared in October 1847 as the work of “Currer Bell”, who was named on the title page only as its editor, and it was an immediate success.
Jane tells her own story: an orphan raised unkindly by her aunt Mrs Reed at Gateshead Hall, she is sent to Lowood, a harsh charity school, where she loses her friend Helen Burns. After eight years there she becomes governess at Thornfield Hall to the ward of its brooding master, Edward Rochester. This first volume ends at Thornfield, on the night Jane saves Rochester from a fire in his room.
The novel was striking for its passionate first-person voice and its heroine, a plain, poor woman who insists on her own feelings and her own judgment. It remains one of the central works of Victorian fiction.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Volume I of the first edition, published by Smith, Elder and Co. in London in 1847 and printed by Stewart and Murray; the title page names Currer Bell as editor, not author. The volume holds chapters I to XV, with no preface (one was added in the second edition). The scan has a text layer and starts with the binding and blank leaves.
How to read it
- The book opens right in your browser, on a phone or a computer: nothing to install, no sign-up.
- Search works across the whole book.
- In the reader you can jump between chapters, zoom, switch to a night page and save the book as a PDF.
Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.