Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

The results are in! The winner of our poll – and the book we will discuss on April 8, 2026 – is Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. We used STAR Voting again this month, and twenty-four members voted in the poll. Of our four book choices, Howards End and Jane Eyre received the most stars in the scoring round and advanced to the runoff round. In the runoff round, three people ranked the finalists equally, Howards End received seven votes, and Jane Eyre received fourteen votes. Thank you to everyone who voted!

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Jane Eyre was the first published novel of nineteenth-century novelist Charlotte Brontë, writing under the (male) pseudonym of Currer Bell. Written in the first person, and based partly on her own experience of being a governess, with elements of the popular gothic genre, the novel was an immediate commercial success. Its critical reception was mixed, some praising the work highly, others criticising it for being immoral and unchristian. Today the novel is one of English literature's most popular romances. —description from Royal Collection Trust

One of the great literary love stories of all time, Jane Eyre is also the story of a woman who speaks her truth even when this means risking everything. The orphan Jane endures a cruel aunt, harsh schooling, and the severe limitations placed on her gender to eventually find herself in love with her employer, the dashing and mysterious Mr. Rochester. A secret in his past forces Jane to choose between compromising her integrity or giving up on him, until her courageous choices and gripping events alter her fate. —description from publisher Warbler Press

Selected critical responses to Jane Eyre over time:

“…we wept over Jane Eyre. This indeed, is a book after our own heart; and, if its merits have not forced it into notice by the time this paper comes before our readers, let us, in all earnestness, bid them lose not a day in sending for it. The writer is evidently a woman, and unless we are deceived, new in the world of literature. But man or woman, young or old, be that as it may, no such book has gladdened our eyes for a long while.” —George Henry Lewes, Fraser’s Magazine (December 1847)

“...Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition…the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine.… Still we say again this is a very remarkable book. We are painfully alive to the moral, religious, and literary deficiencies of the picture, and such passages of beauty and power as we have quoted cannot redeem it, but it is impossible not to be spell-bound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it ‘fine writing.’ It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct, which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too….” **—Elizabeth Rigby, Vanity Fair (December 1848). Full review available at https://www.quarterly-review.org/classic-qr-the-original-1848-review-of-jane-eyre/**

“Fundamental to all [Brontë’s] novels is the pupil-master relationship, which is her rationalization, based on her own limited experience of life outside Haworth, of one of the commonest sexual dreams of women: the desire to be mastered, but to be mastered by a man so lofty in his scorn for women as to make the very fact of being mastered a powerful adjunct to the woman’s self-esteem.” —Walter Allen, The English Novel (1954)

“Jane Eyre is still, after a century and a half, ‘wild, wonderful and thrilling’. It remains the most durable of melodramas, angry, sexy, a little crazy, a perennial bestseller – one of the oddest novels ever written, a delirious romance replete with elements of pure fairytale, given its extraordinary edge by the emotional intelligence of the writer and the exceptional sophistication of her heart.” —Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted (1992)

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Available in local libraries:

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