Published under the pen me "Currer Bell",Jane Eyre (origilly published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Hailed by William Makepeace Thackeray as "the masterwork of great genius," Jane Eyre is still regarded, over a century later, as one of the finest novels in English literature. The book contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, and is considered by many to be ahead of its time because of Jane's individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism.