Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is fiction, but it draws heavily on Brontë's own experience. Lowood School is modeled on the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, which Charlotte and her sisters attended; two of her sisters died there after an illness swept through the school, and the school's founder, William Carus Wilson, is widely seen as the model for the novel's sanctimonious Mr. Brocklehurst. Brontë later said her portrayal of the school's harshness, if anything, understated it.

Charlotte Brontë published the novel in 1847 under the ambiguous pen name Currer Bell, as did her sisters Emily and Anne (Ellis and Acton Bell). Women writers of the period faced strong prejudice, and publishers and reviewers were widely believed to judge a book differently once they knew a woman had written it. Brontë's authorship became public only after the novel's success.

It is usually described as blending three traditions at once: a bildungsroman that follows Jane's moral and emotional development from childhood, a Gothic novel with its mysterious old house and hidden secrets at Thornfield, and a romance in Jane and Rochester's relationship. That mix, rather than any single genre, is a large part of why the novel is still read as a foundational work of English fiction.