Jane Eyre

Heather Glen

Romantic melodrama or feminist classic, Jane Eyre is one of the most enduringly popular and compelling novels in the literary canon. Overlooked or dismissed by critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it first began to attract serious critical attention in the 1970s as New Critical, formalist and feminist critics began to re-evaluate Charlotte Bronte's achievement. This New Casebook brings together essays by leading scholars over the past twenty years, mapping Jane Eyre's progress through the literary and theoretical establishment and encouraging the student to consider these different critical approaches and how they shape the novel and our reading of it.