The Gothic Lineage
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Works · Novel · 1847

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

First appeared Oct 1847

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Jane Eyre, an orphan, is bullied at Gateshead by her aunt and cousins, packed off to the charity school at Lowood, and at eighteen takes a post as governess at Thornfield Hall. Her employer, the sardonic Edward Rochester, is drawn to her plainness and directness, and she to him. But the house has a laugh in its upper storey, a fire in the night and a guest who is bitten. Jane must decide what she owes to love, to conscience and to her own self-respect when the secret behind the locked door is finally laid open.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

Chapter 23. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #1260 (Gutenberg #1260 (text includes the second-edition preface and the Thackeray dedication))

Attribution and scope

Published as ‘Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, edited by Currer Bell’; Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym, and the sisters were widely thought to be one person until her 1850 notice.

Facts

  1. Charlotte Brontë recalled that she sent the manuscript to Smith, Elder and Co. ‘in three weeks’ after finishing it, in the commencement of September 1847, and that the book ‘came out before the close of October following’, while her sisters’ Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, already in the press for months, still waited. George Smith had read the manuscript through on a single Sunday, and the firm rushed it into print in about six weeks for the Christmas trade.[2][4]
  2. The first edition was a three-volume set, ‘Complete in Three Volumes’ from Smith, Elder & Co., with Currer Bell named as editor of ‘An Autobiography’; Charlotte Brontë insisted on the pseudonym.[1][4]
  3. The second edition carried a preface dated 21 December 1847, about two months after first publication, and a dedication to W. M. Thackeray; a note to the third edition is dated 13 April 1848.[5][6]
  4. In chapter 25 Jane describes the madwoman she saw in her room as looking like ‘the foul German spectre—the Vampyre’.[5]

Setting

Not dated in the text; set in the English north and midlands, generations before the 1847 publication[5]

  • Gateshead Hall
  • Lowood School
  • Thornfield Hall
  • Marsh End
  • Ferndean Manor

Themes

Notes on dates 1 note on disputed dates and attribution
  1. Day of first publication: Gaskell says ‘printed and published by October 16th’; Wikipedia’s infobox gives 19 October 1847 citing a Daily News advertisement of 13 October (‘On Tuesday next will be published’). No British Library, Brontë Society or Smith, Elder record could be retrieved to settle it, so October 1847 is shown.

Threads

Threads in

  • In the tradition of The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794

    In the Radcliffean tradition rather than a documented borrowing: an Oxford lecture series places Thornfield’s guilty secret in the Victorian Gothic revival that was ‘often modelled on the Medieval Gothic of Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott’; it does not name Udolpho.[7]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1847, and the other writers alive when Jane Eyre appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).

Thumbnails: Nocturne plates · illustration (AI-generated, 2026).

Alive at first appearance (Oct 1847)

Where a date is known only to the month or year, an age is given as the two values it could be.

Sources

  1. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847), first edition in three volumes, Smith, Elder & Co., scan. Internet Archive (Victorian Vault). Accessed 2026-10-09.
  2. Charlotte Bronte, 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' (1850), in Biographical Notes on the Pseudonymous Bells (Project Gutenberg ebook 771). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  3. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, vol. 2 (1857; Project Gutenberg ebook 1700). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  4. Scottish Publishers and English Literature: Smith, Elder & Co. (on George Smith and Jane Eyre). The Victorian Web. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  5. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (Project Gutenberg ebook 1260; includes dedication to Thackeray and preface to the second edition dated 21 December 1847). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  6. Preface from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (second edition, 21 December 1847). The Victorian Web. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  7. Julian Thompson, 'Victorian Gothic: An Introduction', Great Writers Inspire (University of Oxford). University of Oxford. Accessed 2026-10-09.