Marianne Moore’s copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., ca. 1906); Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (MML 0166). Studio portrait of Marianne Moore by Alice Boughton (1866–1943), 1920; Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (2006.5017; Moore XII:02:35a).
When the American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972) picked up this copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the cover must have caught her eye. A robust beauty gazes at the reader. Her bouffant is exuberant, her bodice barely there. Her cheeks are rouged, eyelids shaded, her lips tinted cherry red. Was this really our “Quakerlike” Jane, whose greatest fashion extravagance was a “sober black satin and pearl-grey silk” number she consented to receive as a gift from her betrothed? Surely Moore herself, as depicted in a 1920 photographic portrait by Alice Boughton, bore a closer resemblance to Brontë’s description of Jane Eyre than the woman on the novel’s cover?
I was delighted (and surprised) when librarian Nancy Loi first handed me the book in the reading room of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, which holds Moore’s surviving library. I wanted to believe that the cover illustrator had taken the bold, deliberate step of recasting Jane Eyre as an Edwardian beauty rather than a plain Victorian governess. After all, doesn’t each generation of readers discover Brontë’s creation anew and interpret her through its own cultural lens? But that’s not how this 1906 bombshell ended up on the cover of Moore’s copy of Jane Eyre.
That governess look
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Modern Authors’ Library, no. 5 (Chicago: Donohue, Henneberry & Co., 27 January 1896). Collection of Christine Nelson. Shown with John Everett Millais’s frontispiece to Anthony Trollope’s Kept in the Dark (1882).
First published in London in 1847, Brontë’s novel was still a reliable seller on both sides of the Atlantic in 1896, when the Chicago firm Donohue, Henneberry & Co. issued it as number 5 in its Modern Authors’ Library series. Printed on cheap paper and bound in yellow paper covers (with an advertisement for Schlitz beer on the back), the book could be purchased from a newsdealer or by mail order for 25 cents. A striking cover image was needed to catch the shopper’s eye. The publisher chose a portrait of a modestly attired woman seated at a Victorian writing desk—much like other nineteenth-century male artists’ depictions of distraught women cowering over distressing letters. (See, for example, John Everett Millais’s frontispiece to Anthony Trollope’s 1882 novel Kept in the Dark.)
After Donohue and Henneberry dissolved their partnership around 1901, the newly established firm M. A. Donohue & Co. continued to publish Jane Eyre in various reprint series of “popular and standard” works. Charlotte Brontë’s novel was now firmly canonical, with some forty different editions available in the United States alone by 1905. Donohue classed it among titles by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Sir Walter Scott as one with a “lasting reputation for literary merit and excellence.” It was in 1906, a decade after Victorian Jane sat fretting with head in hand, that Donohue & Co. gave her a glow-up appropriate to the Gibson Girl era.
A parade of Janes

Covers of reprints published by M. A. Donohue & Co., Chicago, ca. 1906–1910, all featuring the same lithograph that appears on the cover of Marianne Moore’s copy of Jane Eyre. Collection of Christine Nelson.
To illustrate the covers of several of its early twentieth-century reprint series, M. A. Donohue & Co. turned to the Boston-based Forbes Lithograph Manufacturing Company, a major supplier of color prints for use on package labels, window display novelties, and more. Forbes delivered several twelve-color lithographs (by an uncredited artist) that Donohue would use again and again. Much like a stock image on a late nineteenth-century trade card, which might promote anything from cigars to sewing machines, the same auburn-haired cover girl began to pop up on any number of Donohue’s titles. What a surprise to see the woman I had “met” as Jane Eyre slapped onto the cloth bindings of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Ishmael, Timothy Shay Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There, and even Dickens’s Oliver Twist!
Covers of M. A. Donohue & Co. titles, ca. 1906–1910, featuring what the publisher called “charming female heads.” Collection of Christine Nelson.
As I unearthed and acquired more and more examples, I also encountered some of Jane Eyre’s “sisters.” Their fetching portraits graced the covers of the unlikeliest of titles, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Alexandre Dumas’s Corsican Brothers. Those bound in green cloth with white cover lettering, including Jane Eyre, were part of Donohue’s Adelphi Library of Popular Works of Fiction, which the publisher hyped as “undoubtedly the most startling, attractive series of 12mos ever made to sell at a popular price.” At 50 cents each, they were twice the price of the cheap Modern Authors’ Library titles Donohue and Henneberry had published a decade earlier, but in line with many similar cloth-bound reprints available on the American market in 1906.
No doubt Donohue controlled production costs in part by repurposing the same few “charming female heads.” Never mind if those heads matched the authors’ character descriptions or bore any relation to the novels’ content. Cover images were just advertising tools. It turns out that the woman I had first encountered on Marianne Moore’s copy of Jane Eyre wasn’t Jane at all. She wasn’t the “heterogeneous thing” Brontë had conjured. She was, instead, very much a homogeneous thing—a commercial artist’s vision of ideal white womanhood, a glammed-up version of countless similar images that were in circulation in Europe and the United States at the time.
Moore marks the book
Marianne Moore’s notes on the rear free endpaper of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., ca. 1906), and her underlinings on page 16. Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia (MML 0166).
When did Marianne Moore acquire this copy of Jane Eyre? Although the edition is undated, the cover lithograph bears a copyright date of 1906. Moore was eighteen that year and an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. We know she had read the novel by January 1907 because she referenced it in a letter to her family, describing a classmate’s antics: “It reminds me of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre somehow.” Moore likely studied Brontë in her sophomore class Lectures on the History of English Literature from the Restoration to the Present Time. But was this the copy she read in college?
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The date is right. But there is a tiny (adorable) bookseller’s label on the front pastedown from F. Loeser & Co., a major Brooklyn department store with an active book department. Moore didn’t move to Manhattan until 1918; she relocated to Brooklyn in 1929. Perhaps she picked up a used copy at Loeser’s in 1932, when she was preparing a review of E. F. Benson’s biography of Charlotte Brontë for The Criterion? |
On the rear free endpaper of the book, Moore made a few notes in pencil. She listed a handful of phrases that must have intrigued her or delighted her ear, keyed to the page numbers on which they appear. (This was her typical practice; many of her books, now in the Rosenbach’s collection, bear similar lists.) She jotted down two phrases from page 16—“a week’s quiet dust” and “darkly-polished old mahogany”—and underlined them on that page of the novel. She also underlined the phrase “falling fircones” on page 41, though she didn’t list it on the endpaper. These are the very phrases from Jane Eyre that Moore would quote in her review of the Benson biography, so it seems likely she had this particular copy of the book in hand in 1932.
Did Moore choose this copy because of its beguiling cover? Probably not. She may have just picked up whichever copy was available. But she certainly gazed at the cover image, as I have done countless times as I’ve studied this book. I love the sentence on page 62 that Moore chose to highlight in her brief handwritten list—it is the young Jane Eyre’s acknowledgment of her frank and fiery temperament: “Bitter and truculent when excited, I spoke as I felt, without reserve or softening.” When I look at Moore’s copy of Jane Eyre, I like to imagine the woman on the cover gazing at the reader and boldly uttering those words.
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Christine Nelson is the guest host of the Rosenbach’s 2024–25 Behind the Bookcase tour “‘I Have an Inward Treasure’: Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre.” She curated the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum and authored the companion volume The Brontës: A Family Writes (Scala Arts Publishers). She is grateful to Rosenbach librarians Elizabeth Fuller and Nancy Loi; the special collections library staff at Bryn Mawr College and Temple University; and to Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Visual Culture Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia.