Acknowledgements

As you can see from the title page, this book is a collaborative publication, the fruit of a populous and intensely conversational project. It was funded from 2016 to 2020 by the AHRC as part of the Open World Research Initiative programme in Creative Multilingualism (led by Katrin Kohl), and hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), which is itself sustained by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and St Anne’s College, and by a generous benefaction from Jane and Peter Aitken. I am very grateful for all this support.

Sowon S. Park, as co-investigator, helped define the project from its inception, as well as researching material relating to Korean. Alessandro Grilli, Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Adriana X. Jacobs, Magda Szpindler and Kasia Szymanska participated in the workshops, contributing ideas, as well as information on (respectively) Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Mongolian and Polish. Emrah Serdan provided data on the Turkish translations; Hongtao Wang, and a team of students at Beijing Foreign Studies University, on the Chinese translations; Karolina Gurevich on the vast numbers of re-editions of translations in Russian; Sasha Mile Rudan on translations in Serbian and Croatian; Eunjin Choi on aspects of the reception of Jane Eyre in Korea; Vincent Thiery on aspects of the reception in France. The project has also benefited from the intellectual generosity of people not directly connected to it: Patricia González Bermúdez and Marta Ortega Sáez, who shared their expertise in the Spanish translations, Tom Cheesman, who contributed knowledge of the early German translations, Simone Landucci, who brought crucial know-how to the construction of the digital Time Map, and the rare-book expert Jay Dillon, who alerted us to several, otherwise-unknown early editions. I explored the Italian translations with a group of postdocs and postgraduate students in Pisa: Caterina Cappelli, Anna Ferrari, Martina Pastorini, Valeria Ferrà, Benedetta Dini, Chiara Andreoni, Maria Scarmato, Chiara Polimeni, Federica Marsili, Fabio Bassani, Marilena Martucci; I am grateful to them for their enthusiastic participation, and to Alessandro Grilli and the Università di Pisa for hosting me. I am also grateful to my lovely colleagues in the Creative Multilingualism programme for generating a heartening context in which to discuss the progress of the research.

Giovanni Pietro Vitali (the co-author of this volume who created the interactive digital maps) also had a crucial broader role, building the website through which our work was disseminated as it progressed: I am intensely recognizant of his verve and expertise.

The project, and this volume, have benefitted from much able research assistance. Rachel Dryden, postdoctoral research assistant in 2016–17, began the large task of assembling the list of Jane Eyre translations; Eleni Philippou (also a co-author of this volume) then stepped into the role and extended the research. Chelsea Haith, Valeria Taddei and Paul Raueiser helped clean publication data and digital texts; Erin Reynolds reconfigured the data for the digital Covers Maps; Michael Reynolds provided some key assistance with coding. Joseph Hankinson did more work on the list of translations, and gave careful editorial attention to the manuscript of this volume. Open Book Publishers called in no less than 19 peer reviewers, and the book has benefitted significantly from their attention, as also from that of Tania Demetriou who read parts of it at a yet later stage. I am enormously grateful to Alessandra Tosi for supporting the idea of this volume from its first glimmer onwards, and to everyone at Open Book for their work on its realisation, especially Jeremy Bowman, who dealt expertly with the many challenges posed by the typesettng.