Summary

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was an immediate success when it was published in October 1847. The tale of the "poor, obscure, plain, and little" governess, her brooding employer, Edward Rochester, and the madwoman secreted in the attic made Jane Eyre a staple of Gothic and Victorian literature. Important critical essays deftly place Brontë's book in context and assess its continuing popularity. Interpretive essays include an exploration of private realms as social constructions, the assertion that the novel seeks to achieve a private morality, an examination of Jane's sexuality, a study of the ambiguity of the St. John River character, and an analysis of the novel's religious conclusion as a reflection of Brontë's own era.

Essays include:

• Jane Eyre: Lurid Hieroglyphics by Sally Shuttleworth
• "Indian Ink": Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre by Susan Meyer
• Thornfield and 'The Dream to Repose on': Jane Eyre by Susan Ostrov Weisser
• Jane Eyre and the Secrets of Furious Lovemaking by Sandra M. Gilbert
• The Enigma of St John Rivers by Marianne Thormählen
• St. John's Way and the Wayward Reader by Jerome Beaty
• Triumph and Jeopardy: The Shape of Jane Eyre by Heather Glen
• Fairies and Feminism: Recurrent Patterns in Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and Brontë's Jane Eyre by Warren Edminster
• The Wild English Girl: Jane Eyre by James Buzard.

Specifications

Chronology. Bibliography. Index.

About the Author(s)

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. Educated at Cornell and Yale universities, he is the author of 30 books, including Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake's Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom's provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In addition, he is the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, and editorial introductions. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.