Jane Eyre in the context of "Brontë family"

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⭐ Core Definition: Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre (/ɛər/ AIR; originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published in January 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.

The novel revolutionised prose fiction, being the first to focus on the moral and spiritual development of its protagonist through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the "first historian of the private consciousness" and the literary ancestor of writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

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Jane Eyre in the context of First-person narrative

A first-person narrative (also known as a first-person perspective, voice, point of view, etc.) is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself" (also, in plural form, "we", "us", etc.). It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist (or other focal character), re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium (such as video, television, or film), the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.

A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), in which the title character is telling the story in which she herself is also the protagonist: "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me". Srikanta by Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is another first-person perspective novel which is often called a "masterpiece". Srikanta, the title character and protagonist of the novel, tells his own story: "What memories and thoughts crowd into my mind, as, at the threshold of the afternoon of my wandering life, I sit down to write the story of its morning hours!"

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Jane Eyre in the context of Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Nicholls (née Brontë; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855), commonly known by her maiden name Charlotte Brontë (/ˈʃɑːrlət ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-t/), was an English novelist and poet, and was the elder sister of Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which was first published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Jane Eyre was a great success on publication, and has since become known as a classic of English literature.

Charlotte was the third of six siblings born to Maria Branwell, the daughter of a Cornish merchant, and Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Maria died when Charlotte was only five years old, and three years later, Charlotte was sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, along with her three sisters, Maria, Elizabeth and Emily. Conditions at the school were appalling, with frequent outbreaks of disease. Charlotte's two elder sisters fell ill there and died shortly afterwards at home; Charlotte attributed her own lifelong ill-health to her time at Cowan Bridge, and later used it as the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

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Jane Eyre in the context of Romance (literary fiction)

Romance is "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", a narrative method that contrasts with the modern, main tradition of the novel, which realistically depicts life. Walter Scott describes romance as a "kindred term" to the novel, and many European languages do not distinguish between them (e.g., "le roman, der Roman, il romanzo" in French, German, and Italian, respectively).

There is a second type of romance: love romances in genre fiction, where the primary focus is on love and marriage. The term "romance" is now mainly used to refer to this type, and for other fiction it is "now chiefly archaic and historical" (OED). Works of fiction such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre combine elements from both types.

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Jane Eyre in the context of Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two landowning families living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' ethnically uncertain foster son, Heathcliff. Driven by themes of love, possession and revenge, the novel, influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction, is considered a classic of English literature.

Wuthering Heights was accepted by publisher Thomas Newby along with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey before the success of their sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, but they were published later. The first American edition was published in April 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York. After Emily's death, Charlotte edited a second edition of Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1850.

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Jane Eyre in the context of Jane Eyre (character)

Jane Eyre is the fictional heroine and the titular protagonist in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel of the same name. The story follows Jane's infancy and childhood as an orphan, her employment first as a teacher and then as a governess, and her romantic involvement with her employer, the mysterious and moody Edward Rochester. Jane is noted by critics for her dependability, strong mindedness, and individualism. The author deliberately created Jane as an unglamorous figure, in contrast to conventional heroines of fiction, and possibly part-autobiographical.

Jane is a popular literary figure due to critical acclaim by readers for the impact she held on romantic and feminist writing. The novel has been adapted into a number of other forms, including theatre, film and television.

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Jane Eyre in the context of Mr Rochester

Edward Fairfax Rochester (often referred to as Mr Rochester) is a character in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. The brooding master of Thornfield Hall, Rochester is the employer and eventual husband of the novel's titular protagonist, Jane Eyre. He is regarded as an archetypal Byronic hero.

Actors who have portrayed Rochester on screen include Orson Welles (1943), Stanley Baker (1956), Timothy Dalton (1983), William Hurt (1996), Ciarán Hinds (1997), Toby Stephens (2006) and Michael Fassbender (2011).

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Jane Eyre in the context of Thornfield Hall

Thornfield Hall is a location in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It is the home of the male romantic lead, Edward Fairfax Rochester, where much of the action takes place.

Brontë uses the depiction of Thornfield in a manner consistent with the gothic tone of the novel as a whole. An isolated mansion of unspecified size, the house has a number of apparently unused rooms that become important to the narrative during the Bertha Mason passages. The Hall's gloomy character also expresses and amplifies the sense of Mr. Rochester's depression and malaise before he falls in love with Jane.

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Jane Eyre in the context of History of British Birds

A History of British Birds is a natural history book by Thomas Bewick, published in two volumes. Volume 1, Land Birds, appeared in 1797. Volume 2, Water Birds, appeared in 1804. A supplement was published in 1821. The text in Land Birds was written by Ralph Beilby, while Bewick took over the text for the second volume. The book is admired mainly for the beauty and clarity of Bewick's wood-engravings, which are widely considered his finest work, and among the finest in that medium.

British Birds has been compared to works of poetry and literature. It plays a recurring role in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre. William Wordsworth praised Bewick in the first lines of his poem "The Two Thieves": "Oh now that the genius of Bewick were mine, And the skill which he learned on the banks of the Tyne."

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