Charlotte: A Novel of Jane Eyre

Summary

An enchanting, historically grounded, literary debut inspired by a critical year in the life of Charlotte Brontë and the writing of Jane Eyre.

1846 is no time for a woman to pursue her dream of being a novelist. A responsible young woman ought to pack away her ambition and follow society’s expectations. If she is to write, she must do so under a man’s name and about scholarly, masculine things. Certainly not a book about an orphan governess, a madwoman, and a transgressive romance.

But Charlotte Brontë is no ordinary woman.

Charlotte is secretive, difficult, and restless. She is blind to the tender interest of a local curate, yet she writes obsessively to a married man. She is brilliant, impassioned, and sensitive: as a schoolgirl, Charlotte is just as likely to entertain her classmates with recitations of Byron as she is to weep from shyness. More than anything, Charlotte is desperate to be seen and read, to be reckoned with for her true self.

With every London publisher rejecting her first novel, her family's savings dwindling, and her brother drinking away what little remains, Charlotte is running out of time. As the eldest daughter, it’s up to Charlotte to save her family. The only sensible thing to do is return to teaching.

Instead, she picks up her pen one last time. What she writes is not the respectable, measured book a London publisher might want, but a novel with all of herself in it. Her rage. Her loneliness. Her daring.

That novel is Jane Eyre.

Drawing on Charlotte’s letters and the rich, strange world of a village parsonage—three brilliant sisters, a dissolute brother, and an ailing father—Elizabeth Ferris’s Charlotte imagines the emotional depths beneath the placid exterior of a country spinster and examines the cost of insisting, against all obstacles, that her inner life is worth something.