内容简介
The Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles.
In this work the plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, but possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order which circumscribes her life and position.
From AudioFile
For a fan of Gothic romances, the opportunity to listen to a new recording of JANE EYRE is not to be passed up. British actress Juliet Stevenson gives a simply splendid narration. She gives clear voice to the spirited, intelligent, fiercely independent Jane and communicates the heroine's full range of emotions. Stevenson reads at a smooth, even pace, adding just the right amount of drama. If the new release of JANE EYRE at the movies moves many to take another look at the novel, Stevenson's masterful narration would be an excellent choice. C.R.A An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner.
Midwest Book Review
This tie-in edition of a classic joins a major motion picture from Miramax Films, which should appeal to a wider audience than normal due to its inclusion of feature art from the film. In this new contemporary edition the classic story comes alive.
About Author
Charlotte Bronte was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on April 21, 1816. Her father, Patrick Bronte, became curate for life of the moorland parish of Haworth, Yorkshire, in 1820, and her mother, Maria Bronte, died the following year, leaving behind five daughters and a son who were cared for in the parsonage by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1825 from tuberculosis contracted at the religious boarding school to which they (along with Charlotte and her younger sister Emily) had been sent. (All the Bronte children ultimately suffered from lung disease.)
Raised at home thereafter, Charlotte, Emily, their youngest sister, Anne, and brother, Branwell, lived in a fantasy world of their own making, drawing on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and gothic fiction, and writing elaborate poetic and dramatic cycles involving the histories of imaginary countries. Charlotte's early writings revolved around the kingdom of Angria, about which she wrote melodramatic tales of passion and revenge. She spent a year studying at Miss Wooler's school in Roe Head (later relocated to Dewsbury Moor), and went back there to teach from 1835 to 1838; subsequently she worked as a governess.
With Emily, Charlotte traveled in 1842 to study languages at a boarding school in Brussels; her close emotional attachment to her instructor, M. Heger, a married man, would later figure in her fiction. Charlotte and Emily went home after a year because of their aunt's death; Charlotte subsequently returned to Brussels for a year of teaching, 1843 to 1844. A joint collection of poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—published pseudonymously as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell—appeared in 1846. The three sisters had in the meantime each written a novel, of which Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were accepted in 1847 for publication the following year. Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, based on her experiences in Brussels, was rejected by a series of publishers (it finally appeared posthumously in 1857).
Jane Eyre was published under Charlotte's pseudonym, Currer Bell, in 1847 and achieved commercial and critical success; it had gone through four editions by the time of Charlotte's death. Jane Eyre won high praises; William Makepeace Thackeray (who later became a friend) declared himself 'exceedingly moved and pleased,' and George Henry Lewes applauded its 'deep significant reality'; it was also criticized by some for the rebelliousness of its heroine and for what the Quarterly Review called 'coarseness of language and laxity of tone.'
During this period the Brontes underwent repeated tragedies. Branwell, despite his early promise, had been ravaged by the effects of drink and drugs, and when he found work as a tutor in the same household where Anne was a governess, his involvement with his employer's wife led to his dismissal; he died in September of 1848, followed three months later by Emily and the following year by Anne. Charlotte, the sole survivor, published two more novels, Shirley (1849), a novel of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic period, and Villette (1853), a further fictional exploration of her Brussels experiences. In 1850 she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a close friendship; Gaskell later wrote the classic biography of her friend, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854, and died on March 31, 1855.
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专业书评
In conjunction with the New York Public Library, Doubleday is proud to introduce a very special collector's series of literary masterpieces. Lavishly illustrated with rare archival material from the library's extensive resources, including the renowned Berg collection, these editions will bring the classics to life for a new generation of readers. In addition to original artwork, each volume contains a fascinating selection of unique materials such as handwritten diaries, letters, manuscripts, and notebooks. Simply put, this series presents the work of our most beloved authors in what may well be their most beautiful editions, perfect to own or to give. Published on the occasion of Doubleday's 100th birthday, the New York Public Library Collector's Editions are sure to become an essential part of the modern book lover's private library.
Our edition of Madame Bovary, which Vladimir Nabokov called "one of the most perfect pieces of poetical fiction known", features etchings from a rare 1905 French edition and a sampling of Nabokov's handwritten commentary on Flaubert's work. These rare materials from the archives of the New York Public Library will make our edition stand out from all other available versions. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
The Modern Library of the World's Best Books
"So we open Jane Eyre....The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte....It is the red and fitful glow of the heart's fire which illumi- nates her page." --Virginia Woolf --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
媒体推荐
1. Midwest Book Review
This tie-in edition of a classic joins a major motion picture from Miramax Films, which should appeal to a wider audience than normal due to its inclusion of feature art from the film. In this new contemporary edition the classic story comes alive.
2. Micael M. Clarke, Loyola University Chicago
Joining fiction to history, this edition of Jane Eyre illustrates the way literature addresses important moral and political issues...
3. Mary Ellis Gibson, University of North Carolina - Greensboro
An excellent introduction to Jane Eyre in its time.
4. Sunday Telegraph
"Cover to Cover's unabridged readings of classic novels are in a class of their own."
5. Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY, December 3, 1998
"These Cover to Cover tapes offer up a delectable feast for fans of the spoken word. We're talking class act here - from the elegant covers to the accomplished readers."
6. The Times of London
"Maureen O'Brien reads [Jane Eyre] with charm and much intelligence."
7. The Daily Telegraph
"Maureen O'Brien develops almost uncannily through her reading of Jane Eyre from cowering girl to resolute woman."
作者简介
夏洛蒂·勃朗特出生在约克郡的索顿，双亲为帕特里克·勃朗特（Patrick Brontë，1777年—1861年）与玛丽亚·布伦威尔（Maria Branwell），在勃朗特夫妇6个小孩中排行第3，也是勃朗特三姐妹中年纪最大的。1820年4月因为父亲帕特里克在哈沃斯担任副牧师的缘故，所以全家搬到了哈沃斯（Haworth）。母亲玛丽亚于1821年9月15日因癌症病逝，所以夏洛蒂与其他5个兄弟姊妹于是由阿姨伊丽莎白·布伦威尔（Elizabeth Branwell）来照顾。在1824年8月，夏洛蒂与姊妹艾米莉、玛丽亚与伊丽莎白一起被送到位于兰开夏（Lancashire）科恩桥（Cowan Bridge）的女子教会学校（后来夏洛蒂在《简·爱》中将它描述为罗伍德学校）。学校的状况是相当恶劣的，这也对夏洛蒂的健康造成了永久的影响，可能也导致了夏洛蒂的两个姊姊玛丽亚（1815年—1825年）与伊丽莎白（1814年—1825年）的死亡。她们在1825年离开学校不久之后就死于肺结核。
文摘
From Susan Ostrov Weisser’s Introduction to Jane Eyre
Matthew Arnold famously characterized Charlotte Brontë’s writing as full of “rebellion and rage,” yet that description does not easily square with the most famous line of her best-known novel, Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Coming as it does at the conclusion of a tempestuous series of ordeals in the romance of the governess Jane Eyre and her wealthy employer, Rochester, it implies a conventional happy ending for a heroine, her domestic reward for virtue. Between these two differing accounts of Jane Eyre as subversive and conservative lies a complex and challenging novel full of paradoxes, not least of which is that it appears regularly on lists of classics, yet has had enduring mass appeal as a romance as well.
In Jane Eyre we have that unusual monument in the history of literature, a novel considered from the first a work of high literary merit that is also an immediate and enormous popular success. Indeed, it continues to be widely read both in and out of the academic setting. While it is often “required” reading in secondary schools and universities, it has also been adapted into numerous films, television productions, theatrical plays, and at least one Broadway musical. The first of these productions took place in London less than four months after the novel’s publication, much to the dismay of its author, who feared, like most authors, that the play would misrepresent her work. In fact, it is not surprising that most adaptations of Jane Eyre have selectively emphasized the melodramatic Gothic and romantic elements of the novel at the expense of less easily dramatized aspects, such as its passages about religion or the condition of women. Yet these are just as integral to its meaning as the melodrama for which it is remembered, if not more so.
In some ways it is difficult to account for the continued stature and popular appeal of a work that has been read as both feminist and antifeminist, radical and conservative, highly original and highly derivative, Romantic and Victorian. Certainly many readers, beginning with George Eliot in the nineteenth century, have been disturbed by the way the plot hinges on a moral dilemma involving antiquated divorce laws and nineteenth-century notions of women’s sexual purity. Some critics, such as Virginia Woolf, have seen the novel as too angry for its own literary good; others, notably some modern feminist critics, as not explicitly angry enough. Why does this novel about the moral trials of an impoverished and orphaned governess continue to hold such fascination for a modern audience? Is it the passionate romance, the Cinderella ending, the incipient feminism of its views about the suppression of women?
Most readers who respond to the novel agree that the appeal of Jane Eyre lies in its intensity of feeling, richness of language, and forceful representation of passion in a decidedly dramatic plot. Even at its publication in 1847, critics and the public recognized that, for better or worse, Jane Eyre was something different: a novel about a woman written with a man’s freedom, the freedom to portray the indecorum of a heroine who has outbursts of anger as a child and uncontrollable passion as an adult, who confesses her desire openly when she thinks it is hopeless and refuses the passive and dependent role in romance. All these violated deeply entrenched social codes of femininity and respectability, and shocked some of Brontë’s early critics. Miss Eyre is “rather a brazen Miss,” cried one contemporary reader (letter from John Gibson Lockhart, 1847); another called the novel “dangerous,” filled with “outrages on decorum.” “[The author] cannot appreciate the hold which a daily round of simple duties and pure pleasures has on those who are content to practice and enjoy them,” sniffed another reviewer (Anne Mozley, The Christian Remembrancer, April 1853).
Fearing (with justification) that female authors would not be taken seriously, the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, published their first novels in 1847 under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. A great deal of speculation followed in the press about the identities of the pseudonymous authors, including controversy as to their gender. The exciting revelation that eventually followed—that the writers were not only females, but the humble, reserved, unfashionable, and religious daughters of a clergyman living in a remote village on the moors of Yorkshire—only stimulated more curiosity, this time about the nature of the women who could produce such disturbing works about passion while leading reclusive and virginal lives.
Many modern readers are aware that Charlotte Brontë was one of four remarkable children, three of whom, including Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, became famous authors themselves, and the other of whom, Branwell, the only brother, died at age thirty-one in miserable and ignoble circumstances. One important aspect of Jane Eyre’s remarkable success has surely been the literary mystery that has grown to the proportions of myth about the entire Brontë family: How could the modest, unworldly authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have understood and depicted fervent, obsessive, sometimes violent love?