“An Ideal Lady”: translation reinvents Jane Eyre in over 60 languages

Growing up, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was a favorite: the first book I owned multiple copies of—a thumbed Penguin Classics, an early American reprint, an enlarged version with woodcut illustrations—and one of the first I read multiple times. Often pinned as a romance or compared to Jane Austen, Jane’s coming of age story from orphan to governess to romantic partner is truly a gothic psychological thriller, even a ghost story.

Just three years after Brontë published the novel (under a male pen name(opens in a new tab)) in 1847, people were reading a Russian translation(opens in a new tab) in St. Petersburg and a Spanish one in Havana. In the years since, Jane’s popularity beyond the Anglophone world hasn’t waned. According to the Prismatic Jane Eyre research group(opens in a new tab) based at the University of Oxford, Brontë’s novel has been translated close to 600 times, by hundreds of translators, into more than 60 languages.

In addition to translations, Jane Eyre has been widely adapted into films, tv shows, and plays, and it’s also inspired other novels. The most famous of these, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, reimagines the story of Rochester’s first wife, locked in the attic in Brontë’s version, raised on plantations in the Caribbean. Wide Sargasso Sea also begins to address the colonialism and sexism that haunt the older text.

The number of interactions with Jane Eyre is impressive: just the list of translations far exceeds what we could cover in a blog post! Translations that incorporate a different title—originally Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, in English—are some of the most intriguing. Here’s a selection, presented in no particular order, to spark your curiosity.

When Jane works as governess, her student Adèle speaks French, and the title of the first French translation (Jane Eyre, or the Memoirs of a Governess) emphasizes this period of her life. Just two years after the novel’s publication in England, it was serialized in French by Paul Émile Daurand Forgues. Forgues published his translation, usually referred to as an adaptation, in the Revue de Paris newspaper between April and June 1849.

This cleverly invented Chinese title is composed of two characters that can make a sound similar to Jane Eyre (Jianai) and can be translated as “simple love,” so the title says both these things togethers. It’s been used for almost every translation of Jane Eyre into Chinese since 1954.

This Turkish title can be translated as Jane Eyre: Happiness Comes After Many Years, which eloquently sums up Jane’s long search for a home and love.

Bronte’s portrayal of her protagonist’s intense inner life has earned her recognition as “first historian of the private consciousness.” Jane’s psychology is rarely expressed in words but rather through natural elements like storms and sunlight. Still, the title of the first Portuguese translation (The Passion of Jane Eyre) emphasizes the novel’s passion and anticipates later translations, including Leyguarda Ferreira’s 1951 O Grande Amor de Jane Eyre / The Great Love of Jane Eyre.

Other translation titles highlight the sadder parts of Jane’s story, or gesture at the novel’s feminist themes:

While Jane has travelled widely and into many languages, there are places where she is still scarce. Translations into African languages(opens in a new tab) are few and far between: an Amharic translation, ዤን ዔይር / Žénʻéyer, was published by an unknown translator in 1981, and in 2005 Antoinette Stimie published a translated and abridged version in Afrikaans. Amal Omar Baseem al-Rifayii(opens in a new tab) published the first known translation by a female Arabic translator in 2014.

Still, once Jane arrives in a language, she often finds popularity. Since the novel was first translated in Iran in 1980, 29 more translations have followed. A 1943 Spanish translation by Juan G. de Luaces first published in Barcelona has since been republished in Buenos Aires in 1954, in Madrid in 1967, and in Bogota in 1985. If history is any guide, we’ve got many more acts of translation to look forward to, and Jane will continue to make her way to new readers.