The plot of Jane Eyre contains many elements that we now regard as conventional. The heroine is an orphaned child, equally ill-treated by her relatives and the school to which she is sent, whose life then improves through education, employment and love, only for that love to become complicated by unexplained details in her lover’s past. But when the book was first published in 1847, (under the pseudonym Currer Bell) it aroused intense controversy as well as provoking profound admiration. One contemporary reviewer described the heroine as the ‘personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit’, although another said the novel was ‘a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears’. We now value Jane Eyre as a landmark both in the development of women being treated as serious authors and in its frank discussions of a woman’s place in society. The novel’s narrative power, timeless style and vivid characterisation, have helped it to endure and be regarded as a true classic.