Jane Eyre instantly became a best seller and has remained one ever since. Charlotte Brontë did not only write one of the most popular and widely read novels ever, she also created a new type of female character who did not follow the conventions of the time. She transformed the heroine in fiction and made Jane Eyre different in many ways from the characters in the popular Gothic novels. The character Jane Eyre strives through the course of the novel to become as independent as possible, and she does so through her hunger which is one of the important ways in which Brontë challenges conventions. Transforming the heroine was not completely safe to do in the mid-nineteenth century when women’s roles were set and did not allow any further questioning. Even so, Jane Eyre’s reception was overwhelmingly positive. In this essay I will argue that it is hunger together with other unusual traits that signals Brontë’s transformation of the heroine. Here I will examine Jane Eyre’s hunger for knowledge, love, equality, freedom and independence in the context of, but also in contrast to, the female heroine in Gothic novels and in the context of the expectations on a Victorian woman.