“You were a reader before you were a writer.” J.D. Salinger
The events of Charlotte Bronte’s own life provided material for Jane Eyre, but the novel is also full of references and allusions to literature. Thanks to the limit on copyright, most can be read online for free:
- The Bible
- Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)
- Sacred Songs and Lalla Rookh, “Paradise and the Peri” by Thomas Moore
- The Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke
- The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
- “Marmion” by Sir Walter Scott
- “Die Braut von Korinth (The Bride of Corinth)” by Goethe
- Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
- Paradise Lost by Milton
- The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
- Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra
- “The Bonnie Wee Thing” by Robert Burns
- Greek Mythology
- Blackwood’s Magazine: “The Demoniac”, “The Burning of Indian Widows”, and “The Spectral Dog — An Illusion”
- Bluebeard, the pirate folk tale
- The League of the Rats by Jean de la Fontaine
- The Bride of Abydos by George Gordon Byron
- The Iron Shroud by William Mudford
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “To a Skylark” by By Percy Bysshe Shelley
