Table of Contents

Introduction
A summary of the plot
What is Jane Eyre about? What kind of novel is Jane Eyre?
What kind of heroine is Jane Eyre?
What happens in the red room?
What does Jane learn at Lowood?
What makes Rochester such a distinctive hero?
What is the significance of Jane's role as governess?
Why is Bertha so important?
Where is sex in Jane Eyre?
What is love?
Why does Jane leave Rochester?
Why does Jane return to Rochester?
What does the ending of Jane Eyre mean?

About the Author

Dr Josie Billington is a Victorian Literature specialist in the School of English at University of Liverpool and has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, including Faithful Realism(2002), Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006), Eliot's Middlemarch (2008), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012). In her role as Deputy Director of the Centre for Reading Research at University of Liverpool she is studying the value of serious literature as a power for good in modern life - a pursuit which, she dares to think, George Eliot might have endorsed.