"The Brontës' gifted biographer provides us with another superlative Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. For the classroom and for the general reader, there's no better way to experience the context in which Jane Eyre was written, illuminating modern commentary, and the novel itself in an authoritative text."—Fred Kaplan, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York This Norton Critical Edition includes: -The third-edition text (1848), the last corrected by Charlotte Brontë, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory footnotes. -"Contexts," highlighting Jane Eyre as a bildungsroman through diary entries and letters by the author about her experiences as a student, teacher, and governess as well as her feelings about friendship, love, and writing. -Five major critical interpretations by Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Susan Meyer, Carla Kaplan, and Kelly A. Marsh. -A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography

"The Brontës' gifted biographer provides us with another superlative Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. For the classroom and for the general reader, there's no better way to experience the context in which Jane Eyre was written, illuminating modern commentary, and the novel itself in an authoritative text."—Fred Kaplan, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York This Norton Critical Edition includes: -The third-edition text (1848), the last corrected by Charlotte Brontë, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory footnotes. -"Contexts," highlighting Jane Eyre as a bildungsroman through diary entries and letters by the author about her experiences as a student, teacher, and governess as well as her feelings about friendship, love, and writing. -Five major critical interpretations by Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Susan Meyer, Carla Kaplan, and Kelly A. Marsh. -A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography

The surprising hidden history behind Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Why did Charlotte Brontë go to such great lengths on the publication of her acclaimed, best-selling novel, Jane Eyre, to conceal its authorship from her family, close friends, and the press? In The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher tells the enthralling story of Brontë’s compulsion to write her masterpiece and why she then turned around and vehemently disavowed it. Few people know how quickly Brontë composed Jane Eyre. Nor do many know that she wrote it during a devastating and anxious period in her life. Thwarted in her passionate, secret, and forbidden love for a married man, she found herself living in a home suddenly imperiled by the fact that her father, a minister, the sole support of the family, was on the brink of blindness. After his hasty operation, as she nursed him in an isolated apartment kept dark to help him heal his eyes, Brontë began writing Jane Eyre, an invigorating romance that, despite her own fears and sorrows, gives voice to a powerfully rebellious and ultimately optimistic woman’s spirit. The Secret History of Jane Eyre expands our understanding of both Jane Eyre and the inner life of its notoriously private author. Pfordresher connects the people Brontë knew and the events she lived to the characters and story in the novel, and he explores how her fecund imagination used her inner life to shape one of the world’s most popular novels. By aligning his insights into Brontë’s life with the timeless characters, harrowing plot, and forbidden romance of Jane Eyre, Pfordresher reveals the remarkable parallels between one of literature’s most beloved heroines and her passionate creator, and arrives at a new understanding of Brontë’s brilliant, immersive genius.

Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyreerupted onto the English literary scene, immediately winning the devotion of many of the world's most renowned writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, who declared it a work "of great genius." Widely regarded as a revolutionary novel, Brontë's masterpiece introduced the world to a radical new type of heroine, one whose defiant virtue and moral courage departed sharply from the more acquiescent and malleable female characters of the day. Passionate, dramatic, and surprisingly modern, Jane Eyre endures as one of the world's most beloved novels.

"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"

“I have used the Norton Critical Editions since graduate school. As a teacher of high-school literature, I find them to be excellent resources for the study of various novels, plays, etc."—Brooke Gifford, Vincent Middle High School This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The annotated text of Kate Chopin’s modernist novel of marital infidelity, set in New Orleans and Grande Isle, Louisiana. • A preface, a critical essay, and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley. • Essays by acclaimed Chopin biographers Per Seyersted and Emily Toth, “An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler” with selections from the conduct books of the period, and contemporary perspectives on womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. • Forty-five reviews and interpretive essays on The Awakening spanning three centuries. • A Chronology of Chopin’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

The text of the novel is based on the first edition of 1847. For the Fourth Edition, the editor collated the 1847 text with the two modern texts (Norton’s William J. Sale collation and the Clarendon), and found a great number of variants, including accidentals. This discovery led to changes in the body of the Norton Critical Edition text that are explained in the preface. New to "Backgrounds and Contexts" are additional letters, a compositional chronology, related prose, and reviews of the 1847 text. "Criticism" collects five important assessments of Wuthering Heights, three of them new to the Fourth Edition, including Lin Haire-Sargeant’s essay on film adaptations of the novel.