Author

Charlotte Bronte

Author's books

Jane Eyre

£14.99

Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre was immediately recognised as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847. Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.

The Professor

£3.99

The Professor, eventually published in 1857, was actually Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, completed as early as 1846. The deliberately unromantic hero is William Crimsworth – the only time the author used a male narrator – in a story based on her own experiences as a language student in Belgium. The theme was reworked with a woman as the leading character in Villette (1853) and it has always been an interesting point of comparison for keen readers of Charlotte Bronte’s work. ‘… as good as I can write. It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre.’