Penguin Deluxe Classics / Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey

PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

Three Novels
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 
and 
Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The texts of these novels have been reset from the individual volumes published in Penguin Classics, which are edited from the first editions.

Jane Eyre

CHAPTER I

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it; I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mamma in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group: saying, She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and child-like disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner something lighter, franker, more natural as it were she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children.

What does Bessie say I have done? I asked.

Jane, I don t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner.

Charlotte Bronte lived from 1816 to 1855. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and was followed by Shirley (1848) and Vilette (1853). In 1854 Charlotte Bronte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died during her pregnancy on March 31, 1855 in Haworth, Yorkshire. The Professor was posthumously published in 1857. Emily Bronte lived from 1818 to 1848. She wrote one strikingly innovative novel, Wuthering Heights, and was also a gifted and intense poet. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 30. 

Anne Brontë, youngest of the Bronte sisters, was born in 1820. She worked as a governess between 1840 and 1845, after which she published Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) under the pen-name Acton Bell. Anne Brontë died of tuberculosis in 1849.