Jane

It was borne by 3 queens of England: Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII and mother of Edward VI, who died in 1537; Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Days’ Queen” executed in 1554; and Jane Shore, mistress of Edward IV and subject of Thomas Heywood’s

Edward IV.

The name’s royal associations cemented its standing across the early modern English naming pool.

Few names have been so thoroughly shaped by literature.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) gave English letters 1 of its most enduring first-person narrators, while the novels of Jane Austen, published between 1811 and 1817, forever linked the name with wit and social observation.

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady features Isabel Archer’s cousin Jane, and the 20th century added Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s village sleuth introduced in 1927.

Across the United States, Jane appeared continuously in SSA records from 1880 onward, reaching its peak in the late 1940s when it ranked among the top 40 girl names.

It receded in the 1970s and 1980s but never fell out of the top 1000, and a notable revival began after 2010 as parents rediscovered vintage monosyllables.

The name remains common throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Contemporary bearers include primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, actresses Jane Fonda and Jane Lynch, and novelist Jane Smiley, whose A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.