If You Loved Jane Eyre, Read These 8 Books Next

There’s a particular problem with finishing Jane Eyre. Nothing quite fits afterwards.

You go looking for the same thing and you get told to read something gothic, or something Victorian, or something with a big house in it — and none of that is really what you wanted. What you wanted was a narrator who refuses to be made small. A voice that says I am a free human being with an independent will and means it, in 1847, out loud, to a man with money.

So this list is organised around what specifically you might have loved, because Jane Eyre is doing about four things at once and most readers fall for one of them hardest.

A note first: the newest book on this list came out in 1966, and six of the eight are out of copyright. You can read those six free and legally on Project Gutenberg — ebook numbers included below, so you don’t have to go hunting.

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First, the thing about Jane Eyre worth knowing

It was published in October 1847 under the name Currer Bell, with the subtitle An Autobiography — as though Charlotte Brontë were merely the editor of someone else’s life story.

All three sisters used Bell pseudonyms — Currer, Ellis and Acton. And Charlotte later explained the choice more precisely than it usually gets repeated: the names were meant to be ambiguous, because the sisters had “a sort of conscientious scruple” about taking names that were positively masculine, but didn’t want to declare themselves women either.

It worked. Reviewers spent a good while arguing over whether the author was a man or a woman — and the most notorious review, in the Quarterly Review in December 1848, decided she was a woman and said that if so, she had forfeited the company of her own sex.

Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this list. Four of these eight books first went out into the world under a name that wasn’t their author’s.

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If you loved the voice — the I will not be moved of it

1. Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)

The last novel Brontë published in her lifetime, and the one her serious readers tend to argue is her best.

Lucy Snowe goes alone to a foreign city with no money and no plan and teaches at a girls’ school. She is guarded, unreliable about her own feelings, and withholds things from the reader on purpose — which makes her a stranger, more difficult companion than Jane.

It’s colder than Jane Eyre and it does not hand you the ending. But the loneliness in it is written by someone who knew exactly what she was describing, and it is remarkable.

2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)

The Brontë novel that got quietly buried, and the one that’s aged best.

A woman arrives in a village with a small son and no husband, and refuses to explain herself. What follows — through her own diary — is an unsparing account of a marriage to a charming alcoholic, and her decision to take her child and leave.

In 1848 this was close to scandalous. After Anne died, Charlotte was asked to prepare new editions of her sisters’ work — she agreed for Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, and refused for this one. “The choice of subject in that work is a mistake,” she wrote.

Read it and you’ll see it isn’t a lesser Brontë novel at all. It’s a furious, clear-eyed one about a woman’s legal right to her own life.

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If you loved the gothic — the house, the secret, the sense of being watched

3. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)

The most direct descendant, and du Maurier knew it.

A young woman with no name of her own marries a wealthy widower and comes home to his enormous house, where his first wife is dead and somehow still entirely in charge. Swap the attic for the west wing and you can see the family resemblance.

What du Maurier adds is a narrator who can’t stop comparing herself to a woman she never met, and a housekeeper who is genuinely one of the great unsettling characters in English fiction.

4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Published the same year, by the sister, and utterly unlike it.

If Jane Eyre is about a woman holding her own shape against a man who wants to consume her, Wuthering Heights is about two people who make no such attempt. It is not romantic in the way it gets sold. It’s a book about obsession, cruelty and the damage that travels down a family for two generations.

Also worth reading for the structure. Most of it reaches you through a tenant repeating what the housekeeper told him — and buried inside her account are more voices again, a letter here, someone else’s version there. You never get any of it straight, and that is the design.

5. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (serialised 1859–60)

If what you liked was the withheld secret — the sense that this house is running on something nobody will say aloud — this is the book.

A drawing master meets a woman dressed all in white on a road at midnight. What unfolds involves a stolen identity, a locked asylum and one of literature’s most cheerfully appalling villains. Collins tells it through multiple documents and witnesses, like evidence in a trial.

It’s long, and it moves faster than you expect.

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If you loved the social anger — the governess with nothing and no standing

6. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (1847)

Short, plain, and the most accurate account of what being a governess was actually like, because Anne had done it.

There is no madwoman and no burning house. There is a young woman with no money working for families who treat her as neither servant nor guest, watching children be ruined by indulgence, having no authority to stop it.

Read it beside Jane Eyre and you can see what Charlotte heightened and what Anne simply reported.

7. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854–55)

A southern clergyman’s daughter is uprooted to a northern mill town and finds it loud, grim and full of people she has been taught to look down on. She changes her mind — slowly, and not comfortably.

It carries the Jane Eyre engine of a woman meeting a difficult man as an equal, but it also does something Brontë doesn’t: it takes the workers seriously, as people with a case to make.

Gaskell, incidentally, wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. They knew each other.

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If you loved it but it left you uneasy

8. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

You know the scene in the attic. This is the book that asks who she was.

Rhys gives Bertha Mason a childhood, a name — Antoinette — a home in Jamaica, and a slow, appalling account of how she became the woman locked upstairs at Thornfield. It is not a rebuttal of Jane Eyre so much as a question posed to it: what did this novel need you not to look at?

Short, strange, and it will permanently change how you read the original. Save it for last.

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Where to start

If you only take one:

• For the voice: Villette
• For the atmosphere: Rebecca
• For the anger: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• To be unsettled: Wide Sargasso Sea

And if cost is the thing standing between you and the next one, six of these eight are free and legal on Project Gutenberg right now:

Book	Gutenberg ebook
The Woman in White	#583
Agnes Grey	#767
Wuthering Heights	#768
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall	#969
North and South	#4276
Villette	#9182

Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea are still in copyright, so those two need a library card or a bookshop — hardly a hardship.

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Which one are you starting with? And if you’ve already read Wide Sargasso Sea — did it change the original for you, or did you manage to keep them separate?

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We’ve also collected Charlotte Brontë’s best lines, each one traced to the book and year it came from, and a longer list of timeless books worth reading at least once.