“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:
- The Bible
- 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, Ivanhoe, and 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
- Multiple Shakespeare plays: 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
