Reading Groups

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre with Rebecca Rukeyser

Once a week Sundays, 12:00 pm EDT - 1:30 pm EDT February 2 to February 23, 2025

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Book’ option includes the title required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
2/2, 2/9, 2/16, 2/23
Online via Zoom

Charlotte Brontë has been hailed as “the first historian of private consciousness” because of her gothic, torrid Jane Eyre. The novel tells the tale of a mousy governess and her brooding employer: wills clash, sparks fly, a mysterious arsonist starts to wreak havoc in the halls of Thornfield Hall, and nothing is what it seems.

Jane Eyre has held a tight grip on the reading public’s imagination and heart since it was first published in 1847. Perhaps because it’s tremendously romantic: two homely misfits find solace, chemistry, and laughter with one another. Or it might be because of how dark and twisted the novel becomes, exposing intense depths of human cruelty. Or because of its shockingly modern takes on feminism, class, and sexuality. Or because it addresses the brutality of colonialism, a theme brought to the forefront in Jean Rhys’s brilliant Jane Eyre-inspired novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Or because Jane Eyre, whose voice helms this bildungsroman, is defiant, furious, hilarious, impassioned, deluded: a deeply complex and original character.

In this group we’ll pay attention to both the language and plot that make Jane Eyre so unique and look at the ways it inspired—and continues to inspire—literary fiction, films (including Jane Eyre adaptations), cultural ideas of romance, and Gothic horror tropes.

What to read before the first meeting: Read through Chapter 9 before the first session.

What to expect from this reading group: This class will be primarily conversational and participant-driven, but will also include supplemental material provided by the instructor.

Reading List:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Rebecca Rukeyser

Rebecca Rukeyser

Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK, 2022). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Believer, Granta, the Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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