Literary Devices in Jane Eyre
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
The red-room, once the bedroom of Jane’s Uncle Reed, was (we’re sure you remember) the chamber in which he died. Locked in the red-room, believing that her uncle’s ghost is manife...
Setting
Most of the place names we get in Jane Eyre are totally made up: they’re the names of houses (Gateshead Hall, where the Reeds live; Thornfield Hall and Ferndean Manor, Mr. Rochester’s places; a...
Narrator Point of View
The narrative point-of-view seems pretty straightforward here: our protagonist, Jane Eyre, tells us her own story in a novel called, um, Jane Eyre. That's our first hint that it's all Jane, all...
Genre
We know that’s four genres, but Jane Eyre is a super-complex book. First of all, there’s the whole following-Jane-from-her-sad-childhood-as-an-orphan-to-her-happy-marriage thing, which definite...
Tone
It's easy to forget that the full title of Jane Eyre is Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. But that "autobiography" bit is super-important when it comes to understanding the tone of this tome.Because the...
Writing Style
It ain't Hemingway, but hey—it's about as clear and concise as a nineteenth-century Gothic novel can be.You don’t have to read very far in Jane Eyre to notice that the syntax and style of the s...
What's Up With the Ending?
Strangely, Jane Eyre doesn’t end with Jane Eyre herself. Oh, sure, at the beginning of the last chapter, we get that famous line, "Reader, I married him" (3.12.1), and we’re excited that we fin...
Plot Analysis
Jane is a poor orphan girl with nothing to help her in the world but a few nasty relatives and her education as a teacher of music, drawing, and French. Jane is a poor orphan girl with nothing to...
Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis
After a horrible childhood living with her aunt and cousins, Jane gets some solid education at Lowood Institute and becomes a teacher.Jane starts out living at Gateshead Hall as the lowest of t...
Three Act Plot Analysis
After a thorough but somewhat lonely education at Lowood Institute, Jane becomes the governess at Thornfield and quickly falls in love with her master, Mr. Edward Rochester.Jane and Rochester try t...
Trivia
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym "Currer Bell" because there was a lot of prejudice against women writers in the Victorian period. It’s not that women weren’t writingâ€...
Steaminess Rating
Jane Eyre is a Victorian novel, and so it does have a kinda-sorta repressed feel. Even though one major strand of the plot is the passionate romance between Jane and Rochester, we don’t get too m...
Allusions
Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds (1.1, 2.6)Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1.1)Oliver Goldsmith, History of Rome (1.1)Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1.3, 2.6)John Milton, Paradise Lost (...