Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was first published in 1847. Smith, Elder & Co. issued the novel in London on 19 October under Brontë's pen name, Currer Bell, with the full original title Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.
The novel is a bildungsroman, tracing Jane's moral and emotional development from an unhappy childhood through her years at Lowood School and her employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall. Its Gothic atmosphere, first-person narration and insistence on Jane's independence helped make it one of the defining novels of Victorian literature.
A common mix-up is the year 1848, which was when the first American edition appeared, published by Harper & Brothers in New York. The dates 1846 and 1850 do not mark the novel's first publication. Brontë initially presented the manuscript through the masculine-sounding pseudonym “Currer Bell,” part of a wider nineteenth-century publishing culture in which women writers often faced assumptions about what they could or should write.