Never fails to reconnect me to the spirit of real romance… Timeless story… Every page throbs with passion.

After all these years, it’s the emotions we most respond to in Jane Eyre… This is also a novel about intellectual growth, written by a fiercely intelligent writer… She has a formidable brain as well as a strongly beating heart, and so it will still seem another 100 years from now.

Wonderful, teasing… That her great novel of wish-fulfilment is still widely devoured is the supreme happy ending.

Marred only by the fact that Charlotte clearly liked Mr Rochester too much; but we can forgive her that. Often given to schoolchildren to read, but you have to be a grown-up to really get it. One of the most perfectly structured novels of all time

At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre's suspense-laden, melodramatic plot - featuring child cruelty and attempted bigamy, as well as the celebrated madwoman - explains much of its appeal... Jane Eyre is a book into which generations of readers have escaped. And yet it seems to provide something far more sustaining than the escapist fantasy... Her technical skill at writing the self in a first-person narrative is supreme, her words carefully chosen

Charlotte Bronte was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of one novel [JE], and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work, I should be inclined to put Miss Bronte very high indeed. I know of no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the second volume of Jane Eyre

Great genius

Passionately independent orphan falls for the perfect romantic anti-hero. But then she discovers what he keeps in his attic...