Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Jane Eyre

Name: Jane Eyre
Author: Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë's novel of a poor, fierce governess, read closely and charted from its own words.

186,163 words in 38 chapters, about 13 h 02 min of reading.

Read it free at Project Gutenberg How we drew the plates

Jane Eyre in six sentences

In our own words, after reading the whole novel, and checked against the text. Spoiler-light: no ending is revealed.

Jane Eyre is the story of an orphan's long fight to be treated as an equal, told in a voice that insists her inner life matters as much as anyone's.
Brontë shapes it as a fictional autobiography in 38 chapters that move through a series of homes, from a cold relative's house and a harsh charity school to a mysterious country hall.
The central tension lies between passion and principle, as Jane falls for her employer, Mr Rochester, while refusing to give up her conscience or her self-respect.
Class, gender and religion press on her at every stage, and the novel keeps asking how a woman with little money can keep both her freedom and her dignity.
Our mention chart traces those separate worlds, with Mrs Reed and Helen Burns fading before Mr Rochester is named at all, and St John Rivers appearing only after the two-thirds mark.
Readers in 1847 met it under the pen name Currer Bell, and it still feels startlingly direct, giving a plain, poor heroine a frank and searching inner voice.

Three plates from the text

Every plate is computed by our scripts from the 186,163-word Project Gutenberg text. None is copied from a study guide.

Plate IThe mood of the wordingAbove the dotted line: brighter

Ch 1–2The red-room punishment
Ch 11A warm welcome at Thornfield
Ch 17The glittering house party
Ch 28The hardest days
Ch 34Christmas at Moor House

We split the novel into 40 equal slices of about 4,700 words and score each by the average VADER sentiment of its sentences, from −1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive); the line is a five-slice moving average, and the dotted line is neutral. The lowest slice of all is the opening at Gateshead. It measures the tone of the words, not what happens.

Source: our count from the Project Gutenberg text (186,163 words), scored with VADER.

Plate IIWho is named whenNames per twentieth of the book

Jane Eyre413
Mr Rochester370
St John Rivers162
Mrs Reed87
Helen Burns75

This chart counts how often five central characters are named in each twentieth of the book, about 9,300 words, including nicknames and titles such as Janet and Miss Eyre for Jane. Jane narrates as I, so her count reflects how often others say her name.

Source: our count from the Gutenberg text, in 20 slices of about 9,300 words.

Plate IIIWho shares a paragraphLine width: paragraphs together

Lines join the eight most-named characters, and a thicker line means more paragraphs that name both of them; pairs named together in fewer than three paragraphs are left out. The Thornfield household forms the densest cluster, while the Gateshead figures sit apart.

Source: our count of paragraph co-occurrence in the Gutenberg text.

Dramatis personae

The eight most-named characters we counted, with how often each is named in the text (names and titles, not pronouns).

Jane Eyrenamed 413 timesOrphaned narrator who grows up to become a governess.
Mr Rochesternamed 370 timesMoody, sardonic master of Thornfield Hall.
St John Riversnamed 162 timesEarnest, ambitious young clergyman.
Adèle Varensnamed 135 timesRochester's young French ward and Jane's pupil.
Bessienamed 131 timesKindly nursemaid at Gateshead, Jane's one friend there.
Mrs Fairfaxnamed 122 timesThornfield's gentle, talkative housekeeper.
Mrs Reednamed 87 timesJane's aunt by marriage, who resents raising her.
Blanche Ingramnamed 77 timesHaughty beauty from a neighboring family.

Key terms

Governess: A woman paid to teach children in a private household, ranked neither as family nor as servant.
Bildungsroman: A novel that follows a character's growth from childhood into adulthood.
Charity school: A school for poor or orphaned children paid for by donors, often run on harsh rules and thin rations.
Gothic: Fiction of dread and hidden secrets, often in old houses; Brontë borrows its mood for Thornfield.
Pseudonym: A pen name; Charlotte Brontë first published the novel as Currer Bell.

What we read to write this

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte BrontëProject Gutenberg
An introduction to the BrontësBrontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum
Jane EyreEncyclopaedia Britannica
Jane Eyre: an autobiography (Bodleian Libraries copy)Great Writers Inspire, University of Oxford

Our own explanation and plates, written with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic) after reading the sources above and checked against the novel’s text. No text or images were copied. Published October 18, 2026.

Jane Eyre is free to read.

It is public domain in the US. Project Gutenberg has the full text as a web page, an ebook and plain text.

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