Jane Eyre Resources

Starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, this TV adaptation is up-to-date, well-paced, and has high production values. Definitely our favorite adaptation so far, and pretty good as a study aid, too.

A recent big-budget film version of Jane Eyre, directed by the famous and fantastic Franco Zeffirelli.

This is the "vintage classic" film version, starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Not as snazzy and new as some of the other versions, but charming in its own way, if you like that sort of thing.

Okay: Mia Wasikowska is not plain... and Michael Fassbender isn't ugly. But this movie is still awesome.

This classic horror flick is very, very loosely based on Jane Eyre and set in the West Indies. Weird and wacky, it really explores the theme of "Foreignness and 'The Other'" in an interesting way.

In this scene from the 2006 BBC miniseries adaptation of Jane Eyre, Jane asks to visit her dying aunt and she and Rochester argue over how much he’ll pay her at this point for the work she’s done so far. This is a really useful video because it can be difficult to understand how flirtatious and playful this scene is in the book.

A scene from the 2006 BBC miniseries adaptation of Jane Eyre that does exactly what it says in the title! This ending is a bit more sexed up than we think makes sense for the Victorian period, but hey, whatever.

Complete, unabridged reading of all thirty-eight chapters, available for free online from LibriVox!

CBS Radio Mystery Theater version of the story, recorded in 1977. Caution: this is a very loose adaptation, so it’s a lot of fun but might not help you learn all the details of the plot of the novel.

An 1844 oil painting of a Victorian governess by Richard Redgrave.

Poster from the classic 1944 film adaptation starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

The entire novel online, complete and unabridged, from Project Gutenberg. Read it on screen or download it to your computer.

This is only a preview—you may not be able to read the whole text of the novel here without paying, and we don’t recommend paying, because you can read the novel at Project Gutenberg for free. But! We do recommend that you check this out, because you will be able to read the introduction to the novel by Sally Shuttleworth, which is really useful.

Again, this is only a preview, but you can read the introduction by Michael Mason.

An article from the British newspaper The Guardian that explains Charlotte Brontë’s dark imagination and how her biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, made her seem more prim and proper. Gold rejects the idea that Jane Eyre is repressed and gets deep into its sexual undertones.

A parody article in which Jane Eyre is one of the candidates during the 2008 presidential election. (Can you guess who she represents?)

Full text of Gaskell’s famous 1857 biography of Brontë. This work is interesting because Gaskell was a contemporary of Brontë’s, but it is somewhat whitewashed—make sure you read more recent biographies, too.

Commentary and background on Jane Eyre from a variety of eminent scholars. Part of "The Victorian Web," a large scholarly project devoted to creating online archives of academic material related to nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

This is a website created by Lilia Melani, an Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College. It’s short and to the point, and it has some good information about context.