Charlotte Brontë was a 20-year-old schoolteacher — impatient, dreamy, long-suffering, unpublished — when, in 1836, she sent a sample of her writing to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate. Although ...

After surviving the cruel regime of a harsh charity school, orphan Jane Eyre takes a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall. Here, she finds herself increasingly attracted to her enigmatic master, Mr ...