If there is a message from tonight's result, it's this: the prime minister called the election because she wanted a mandate.
Ms May attracted 37,718 votes to her Labour counterpart's 11,261 votes cast, addressing her supporters saying the United Kingdom now "needs a period of stability".
A high turnout is seen as Labour's best hope of eroding some of the Conservative majority in the House of Commons.
As party leader, Corbyn unenthusiastically campaigned for Britain to remain in the bloc, but has said that Labour would deliver Brexit if in power, albeit with very different priorities from those stated by May.
Or, either the Conservatives or Labour could attempt to govern as a minority administration, seeking to win support in the Commons for their programme on a vote-by-vote basis.
Will she stay or will she go?
Below is a running total for how many seats each party holds. Though the biggest single victor, they failed to reach the 326-mark they would need to command a parliamentary majority.
The projected loss for the Conservatives is 17 seats, with a gain of 34 seats for Labour.
With the counting for the U.K. General Election still ongoing, analysts are contemplating what the result means for Brexit negotiations, as Prime Minister Theresa May appeared in danger of losing her parliamentary majority.
"Earlier in the night, Corbyn said his campaign had upended the country's political landscape".
Pound dives on fears UK election may produce no clear winner
May experienced a gradual slide during the campaign period, in which a wide gap between the Conservatives and Labour narrowed. Brown remained in post for five days with an offer to talk to Cameron and the leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg .
Any delay in Brexit talks would reduce the time available for what are expected to be the most complex negotiations in post-World War Two European history. She gave few policy details and appeared mostly at tightly controlled events. Theresa May was selected by her party a year ago to replace David Cameron as prime minister after Britain's unexpected Brexit vote to leave the European Union.
The exit poll pointed to an extraordinary failure for May, who was enjoying opinion poll leads of 20 points and more when she called the election. That was in part because votes that had previously gone to UKIP were splitting evenly between the two major parties instead of going overwhelmingly to the Conservatives as pundits had expected.
"It is early days".
"If the poll is anything like accurate, this is completely catastrophic for the Conservatives and for Theresa May", former Conservative Treasury chief George Osborne said on ITV. They've more than doubled their returns in some places where the party was previously unelectable.
The results confounded those who said Labour's left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was electorally toxic.
An exit poll following Britain's general election on Thursday suggested the country could be heading for a "hung parliament", in which no party has an overall majority.
She is regarded as having performed well during the campaign, which was marred by deadly attacks in Manchester and London.
That said, security was far from the only issue.
German conservative Markus Ferber, an European Union lawmaker involved in discussions on access to European Union markets for Britain's financial sector, was scathing: "This is the second time within a year that a huge gamble taken by a British prime minister backfired spectacularly", he said.
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