First published in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, Jane Eyre still feels surprisingly current. It reads with a kind of immediacy that cuts through its period setting. Through Jane’s voice, Brontë moves across love, power, class, religion, and the limits placed on women, without softening any of it.

When it was first published, the novel unsettled people. A woman at the centre of the story who refuses to stay in place, questions authority, and insists on her own judgement was not easily accepted. Even today, almost 180 years later, that tension remains. Jane is often held up as a feminist icon, ahead of her times, yet the book is also challenged for its treatment of race and its uneasy relationship with morality and religion. It resists a clean reading . It forces readers to hold more than two, often uncomfortable truths at once, something that today is rarer than ever, which is part of why it still matters.

The novel straddles several genres: the Gothic Romance, psychological thriller, and bildungsroman. Jane’s spiritual and psychological growth is linked to the five main settings in which she finds herself and the novel shifts in tone as Jane moves through these stages of her life: Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, and Ferndean each mark a change in her thinking as much as her circumstances. What looks like a sequence of places is really a record of her becoming.

This edition will be issued in two states: Lettered and Numbered. We are still in pre-production and designs for both the letered and numbered are well underway, with samples expected mid-2026 and pre-orders to follow. The Lettered state is limited to 26 copies, the Numbered to 260.

Both states will be letterpress printed by Hand and Eye, and fully hand-bound in leather by Ludlow bookbinders, with different treatments evoking the presence of Thornton.

Both editions take Thornfield as a starting point, with a sense of enclosure imagined slightly differently for each state.

Both editions will include original illustrations by UK-based artist Nom Kinnear King. Her ethereal and haunting style perfectly complements the atmosphere of the novel and inner journey of Jane.

All orders will ship from the UK.