Jane Eyre

Fifteenth Printing of this Penguin Classics edition. Small 8vo. Pp. xxxvi, 533. Illustrated wraps with cover art of Lady in Grey, (1859), by Sir Daniel Macnee. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Mason.

Originally published as a three-decker in 1847 under her pen name "Currer Bell", by Smith, Elder & Co., and in a print run of approx. 500 copies, the novel is a bildungsroman set in the north of England. It follows its eponymous heroine's passage into adulthood, as she rails against prevailing societal attitudes towards class, sexuality, and religion and gravitates towards an incipient 'proto-feminism'. Its intimate first-person narrative revolutionised prose fiction with Brontë being called the "first historian of the private consciousness", and the literary ancestor of modernists like Proust and Joyce. An immediate commercial success, its highlighting of domestic drudgery, the limitations faced by governesses and the striking exposé of poor living conditions for charity school pupils, all sparked controversy and social debate.

[Daniel S. Burt, The Literature 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time, (2008).]