Jane Eyre

Perspectives on Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre

It could be said that a great deal of mythology attaches both to Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) and her best-known novel, Jane Eyre, published in 1847.

Romanticised attitudes towards the Brontë family

Many biographers have emphasised the supposedly lonely lives led by Charlotte, her father, brother and sisters in their parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire. Much has been made of Haworth’s proximity to wild moorland and its alleged remoteness from the worlds of business, industry and politics, and it has therefore been seen as extraordinary that young women who knew so little of life and lived at such a distance from the centres of literature and culture should be able to write such accomplished novels.

Another element in this myth is the sense of doom that seemed to pursue the family: a mother who died young, two sisters who died in childhood, and the deaths of three of the siblings in less than a year between September 1848 and May 1849, leaving Charlotte alone.

Romanticised biographies published in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of them written by novelists, and often based on speculation or partial evidence, encouraged this image of an isolated, almost magical family of writers.

Modern attitudes

More recent biographical work, however, has given us a much clearer sense of the social and intellectual world inhabited by the family, which shows that they were well-read and well-informed young women with a strong sense of both the social and political issues of their time, and a wide-ranging knowledge and sophisticated understanding of literature.

The novel as fairy tale

The other kind of mythology arises from the novel itself:

• Jane Eyre is a version of the Cinderella story, in which a poor and disregarded young woman, neglected and rejected by her own family, wins the love of a prince or some other man apparently far removed from her in wealth and / or social class
• It is a story that has been told and retold in various forms and can be found in the modern versions of fairy-stories by contemporary feminist writer Angela Carter (1940-92), or even in popular films such as Pretty Woman (1990)
• Orphaned children have often been the starting-point of folk-tales, fairy stories and novels – comparable books from the nineteenth century would be Oliver Twist (1837-8) and Great Expectations (1860-1), both by Charles Dickens (1812-70)
• Jane Eyre has been adapted many times for film and television and has also given rise to both sequels and alternative versions, the best-known of which is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890-1979).

Youth appeal

Jane Eyre has always been popular with young readers. As you read the novel you may find it interesting to think about how this story of a young person growing up and finding her way in the world differs – as it certainly will – from your own experience. If you do this, it will help you to understand the forces and situations that influence Jane as she tries to deal with opportunities, challenges and other twists of fortune that mark her path through life.

About this study guide

The aim of this guide is to enhance and support your reading; that is to say that it hopes to increase your enjoyment of the novel and to extend your knowledge and understanding of its content, the context in which it was conceived, written and published, and the ways in which it may be interpreted.

These aims aren’t always easy to separate, so you will find that the guide offers you many opportunities to move between its various sections as you pursue a particular reference or theme. Literary texts aren’t like Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of various parts with visible joins: they are organic wholes, so it is important that you should realise that topics such as themes, symbols and structure only fully make sense if they are considered together rather than separately.

Using the guide

Websites aren’t like books, beginning at page 1 and ending on the last page: they are flexible and enable you to move around as you choose. Nonetheless, you may find it helpful to have some guidance on the order in which this guide has been constructed, and how you might find it most helpful to use it.

1. A good place to start would be with the Author section, which contains information about the author’s life and the circumstances in which the book was written.

2. Then, as you work through the text, you will find it best to refer to the Synopses section, which offers much more than the title suggests:

• A summary of the text – which, by the way, is intended as a reminder, and not as a substitute for reading the novel!
• An explanation of any words, phrases or references you might find difficult or obscure
• Many cross-references to other parts of the guide
• Various task and exercises allowing you work further on the text on your own behalf.

3. From this section you will have been referred to the other parts of the Contexts section:

• Social / political context: indicates some of the key issues of the period during which Jane Eyre was written and first published
• Educational context: offers background information about this important theme in the novel
• Religious / philosophical context: another important theme which needs to be seen in the contexts of its time and of Charlotte Brontë’s own ideas and beliefs
• As part of that, there is the Charlotte Brontë and childhood section, which enables you to set Jane’s experiences in the context of ideas about childhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Literary context: a section which enables you to understand how the novel fits into the development of English writing, especially fiction, at the time it was published.

4. There are also a number of sections devoted to the literary dimensions of the novel: Narrative, Characterisation, Themes and significant ideas, Imagery, metaphor and symbolism in Jane Eyre and Structure. These sections are frequently cross-referenced, both from the Synopses section and between one another.

5. The section on Critical approaches to Jane Eyre looks at the different ways in which the novel has been read since its publication and especially over the past twenty or thirty years. It also contains an example of textual analysis.

6. The section on Approaching exams and essays offers general advice on how to deal with these means of testing your knowledge and understanding of the novel. There are specimen essays and exam questions.

7. The remaining section, Resources and further reading, offers advice on where to go if you want to undertake further reading about the novel and its author, in books, articles and on websites. There is also a section listing Jane Eyre on film and television, which includes further tasks and exercises for those who are interested.