Romance Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre. v1, 30 Oct 2015

[AlexBell]

Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, the third daughter of Revd Patrick and Maria Brontë. A son and two more daughters were born later. Mrs Brontë died in 1821, Charlotte's elder sisters died in 1825, her brother and a sister died in 1848, and her other sister died in 1849, all of tuberculosis. Her father died in 1861.

In 1824 she was sent to Cowan Bridge School with a younger sister to join her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, but after Maria died in 1825 they were sent home where Elizabeth soon died. The remaining children remained at home until 1830 under the supervision of her mother's sister. The four children wrote many short stories and poems for several years. Charlotte went to Roe Head school early in 1831, and left in the middle of 1832. She returned to the school as a teacher in 1835 and left in 1838 to return home. She spent short periods as a governess, went to Mme. Heger's school in Brussels in 1842, and returned there as a teacher the next year. She seems to have become infatuated with M. Hegel, and wrote many intense letters to him after she returned home in 1844.

Her first novel, The Professor, was written in 1846, but not accepted by several publishers. Jane Eyre was published late in 1847 (under a pseudonym) to instant acclaim, and outsold Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. Later gossip claimed that the author of Jane Eyre was the person on whom the character of Becky Sharp was based. Despite being painfully shy she sought and gained the friendship of Harriet Martineau, Thackeray, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Having refused at least three earlier proposals of marriage from other men she accepted a proposal from her father's curate, married him in June 1854, and died during early pregnancy in March 1855.

Jane Eyre is a first person retrospective narrative of a young girl who had been orphaned as an infant, and her relationships with two dominant men. 'I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt.'

The text source was a file from Project Gutenberg Australia, checked against the Penguin Classics edition. The text is replete with archaic and literary words which I have left intact apart from silently changing doating to doting. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, added diacritics, and indented lines of poetry, set off letters and documents as blockquotes, and made changes to hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com. The cover is based on a portrait in the Natonal Portrait Gallery.

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[HarryT]

Thanks, Alex. Great work!

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks, Alex. Great work!

Thanks, Harry. I really appreciate your post.

[GrannyGrump]

Thank you. This is just what I need for my winter reading list.

[Arios]

Alex thank you. A beautiful epub indeed!

I read it the first time (in French though) when I was about 17 years old: I always liked the strange atmosphere that emanated from this narrative.

Have a really nice weekend!

PS A perhaps impertinent question : why not use <h2> (or whatever heading) instead of <p class = "chpthd"> in chapters? Wouldn't it be more "politically semantic"?

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Arios

Alex thank you. A beautiful epub indeed!

I read it the first time (in French though) when I was about 17 years old: I always liked the strange atmosphere that emanated from this narrative.

Have a really nice weekend!

PS A perhaps impertinent question : why not use <h2> (or whatever heading) instead of <p class = "chpthd"> in chapters? Wouldn't it be more "politically semantic"?

Thanks, Arios

Your question is certainly not impertinent; I'm always happy to discuss styling techniques, and hope to keep on learning by sharing opinions and ideas.

Using <p class = "chpthd"> is mainly a matter of taste; I think I can get more variation and specificity by setting chpthd in the CSS. I don't like to use plain H2, or to change the 'standard' H2 in the CSS.

Now I have a question for you if I may: Jane Eyre is written what I think is a rather baroque 19th century English; was the French you read the book in 19th century French? Or a more 'modern' French?

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

Thank you. This is just what I need for my winter reading list.

Thanks, GrannyGrump. The way we do ebooks is quite different, but yours are so good that praise from you is praise indeed.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Using <p class = "chpthd"> is mainly a matter of taste; I think I can get more variation and specificity by setting chpthd in the CSS. I don't like to use plain H2, or to change the 'standard' H2 in the CSS.

Why not <h2 class="chpthd">? You'd get the best of both worlds

(I'd choose h1, though, unless there is some higher division above chapters, and the book title doesn't count).

[Arios]

Hi Alex,

I have not been able to find the book (paper, Collection Le Livre de Poche) I first read. Probably lended to someone who forgot to give it back to me. But it's probably the same we can find here, with an another page cover however: http://www.livredepoche.com/jane-eyr...-9782253004356. By the way you can find the French version here: http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/newsen...19&format=epub

If I remember well, the French style is classic, in the mood of XIX. I think the translation was very good.

Alex with <h2> or whatever you want (h1), you gain a semantic value permitting to create a toc in an epub for example, and of course you can set up <h2> the same way as <p class = "chpthd">. So, you don't lose anything in the presentation (format), and gained something useful for a lot of reading systems.

As you don't have more general sections (Part 1 ou Book 1), Jellby's suggestion (h1 instead of h2) is pertinent.

If you don't mind and I hope I'm not going to vexe you if I were you I would split the nice Frontmatter in 2 separate pages:

1) the first one with the image (with title, author...);
2) the next one with the contents, small toc, about this edition and, at the end of this page, I would put your logo and information about the ebook.

Thus, things are easier to decipher but of course this is just a suggestion: your epub stands out by its own virtues.

[AlexBell]

Thanks for the suggestions, Arios.

I think I'll stay with the what I do now for the time being; at least until I finish the ebook I'm working on.