The works listed will allow your students to further explore the theme of Being True to Yourself and other themes related to Jane Eyre:


Fiction
Gissing, George. The Odd Women. Stein, 1968. A remarkable account of the plight of the English spinster. (challenge)

Thackeray, William Makepiece. Vanity Fair. New York: New American Library, 1962. Thackeray's satiric masterpiece about a sharp-witted governess who stops at nothing (neither lying, stealing, fraud, nor adultery) to make a place for herself in an unforgiving world. (challenge)

Scott, Sir Walter. Ivahoe. Scott's most popular historical romance, it is the story of the forbidden love between Ivanhoe and Rowena, against the backdrop of the First Crusade. (average)


Nonfiction
Berg, Maggie. Jane Eyre: Portrait of a Life. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Covers historical context and critical reception, and gives author's own reading. (easy to average)

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1979. A brilliant, feminist reading of Austen, Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. Essays on all four of Brontë's novels. (challenge)

Briggs, Asa. The Nineteenth Century. London: Thames, 1970. Large, encyclopedic work on the period, with 668 illustrations. (easy to average)