Abstract
Although literary scholarship of the second half of the 20th century was always aiming at a definitive separation of the "real" world and and the fictional world of literature, readers' reception of canonical works has never really abandoned the view of literary texts as documents of the time of their creation. On the example of 150 years of readerly reception of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, we can see ideally, how important the supposed "authenticity" of the text was for the growing popularity of the novel, which was always based on the assumption of an authentic representation of certain major problems of the 19th-century society in the novel, as well as on the famous "dramatic" life story of the author, which itself soon became a "text" constantly revisited, reworked and remembered.
It is a paradox that the emphasis on the reading of the novel and of the life of the author as a document of its time allowed for the gradual mythization of both, which anchored Jane Eyre in the canon of world literature.