Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."

Orphaned, plain, and raised on the cold charity of an aunt who never wanted her, Charlotte Brontë's fieriest heroine refuses, at every turn, to be grateful for less than she deserves. 

When she arrives at Thornfield Hall as governess after a grueling Lowood education, she meets Mr. Rochester — brooding, rich, magnificently rude and unpredictable — and finds herself, against all good sense, wanting more. But Thornfield Hall has a secret. Bumps in the night. Curtains set ablaze. Injured guests.

Brontë's 1847 gothic masterpiece essentially invented the modern self in literature. It is a novel about a young woman who insists on her own worth even when granted everything she could seemingly wish for. When published under the pen name Currer Bell, one reviewer noted: “No woman in all the annals of feminine celebrity ever wrote such a style, terse yet eloquent, and filled with energy bordering sometimes almost on rudeness: no woman ever conceived such masculine characters as those portrayed here." 

Reader, a woman did. 

In conversation with

Jessica Ferri is a writer and critic based in Northern California. She is the founder of Womb House Books. 

Moira Donegan is a prominent writer, columnist for The Guardian, and researcher focusing on gender, politics, and the law. She is a writer-in-residence at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research and hosts the podcast In Bed with the Right. She is best known for creating the "Media Men" spreadsheet in 2017.