THE FOLIO SOCIETY

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Orphaned and rejected by her aunt, Jane Eyre survives the privations of Lowood Charity School to become a governess. At Thornfield Hall she meets Mr Rochester, 'more remarkable for character than beauty', yet fascinating in his direct, unconventional conversation. Despite plot ingredients of suspense, laughs and lost inheritances, Jane Eyre is no Gothic romance. Charlotte Brontë is concerned with Jane's spirit, with her daring claim to Mr Rochester of their equality. 'I have as much soul as you - and full as much heart!' And it is Mr Rochester's desire for that equality which creates one of the greatest love stories ever written.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was born, the third of six children, at Thornton in Yorkshire to Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria Branwell. At the age of five her mother died of cancer. The eight year old Charlotte was sent, with three of her sisters, to Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, the school she later described as Lowood Charity School in Jane Eyre. Charlotte always maintained that the poor conditions at the school hastened the deaths of her two elder sisters, who died of tuberculosis in 1825.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte's second novel, was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym of 'Currer Bell'.

• Quarter-bound in cloth with paper sides printed with a design by Simon Brett
• Set in Bulmer with Bodini display
• Wood engravings by Simon Brett
• 424 pages
• 9" x 5¾"

'I venture to predict that Jane Eyre will be read among English novels when many whose names are now better known shall have been forgotten'
Anthony Trollope