Twentieth-Century Fox Films hired Orson Welles to star as Rochester in this adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel, opposite Joan Fontaine in the title role. Welles more or less took over the writing of the script and other aspects of the film, and recommended his favorite musical partner, Bernard Herrmann, for the score. It introduced Herrmann to the world of the Brontës, resulting in his opera Wuthering Heights written at about the same time. It is not surprising that the two projects share some of their musical material.

The film concerns a young girl from a harsh orphanage growing into an assured and loving woman. Jane is sent to be governess to Adele, a little French girl who is the ward of Edward Rochester. The action takes place in a prototypical Gothic manor, where Rochester's insane wife is kept hidden away behind a forbidden door.

The score was Herrmann's longest for films; the dark romantic film required nearly constant music. There are three main themes: Jane (in F sharp minor), Rochester (in F major), and their love (F minor, though this expansive theme goes through eight different keys). Herrmann brilliantly develops them, and a host of related subsidiary motives, linking them through motive cells. Herrmann uses a more or less standard symphony orchestra, with all the auxiliary wind instruments and the colorful addition of harps, vibraphone, chimes, organ, celesta, glockenspiel, and piano. Herrmann characteristically stresses the lower winds and brass, with prominent use of clarinets, to make a dark, smooth, brooding sound. In the 1970s the composer prepared a 13-minute orchestral movement from the music. In the 1990s, working with the best surviving version of the score (a blurry, reduced photostat) the conductor Adriano edited it into 21 sections running to nearly 70 minutes.

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