Jane Eyre

When Fritz Eichenberg (1901–1990) was commissioned to illustrate Jane Eyre for Random House in 1943, he had never read the novel or been to Britain. Working from New York during World War II, he approached Charlotte Brontë’s story through Jane’s own sharp and honest perspective.

Eichenberg, a German-born artist who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933, brought to his engravings a deep sense of exile, endurance, and moral struggle. His dark, carved lines echo both the Gothic atmosphere of Brontë’s novel and his own experience of displacement. The result is a series of images that feel at once intimate and monumental — portraits of conscience rendered in wood.

Printed for the Book-of-the-Month Club, this edition remains one of the most striking visual interpretations of Jane Eyre. Each engraving seems to inhabit the same stark, spiritual landscape as the text — austere, emotional, and alive with quiet resistance.