Counting words in Jane Eyre

(Updated 7/6)

You can discern a lot of information about a novel’s themes by counting word repetitions. How many times does the word “eyes” appear in Jane Eyre? How about the word “read”?

If you download the etext of Jane Eyre and open it in your word processing program of choice, you can count the number of instances of any word in the entire novel. (In Microsoft Word, use Edit → Find… → Highlight all items found.)

Some words to look up:

• eye / look / gaze / see
• read / reads / reading / reader
• book / books
• picture / illustration

Here are the Gutenberg etexts for the other works we are reading this semester:

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Tags: 2008, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Charlotte Brontë, Frederick Douglass, Sonnets, William Shakespeare