Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
Table of Contents
Charlotte Bronte
When Charlotte Bronte died in 1854, she left behind a husband of one year, the curate A. B. Nicholls, whose offers of matrimony she had resisted for nearly a decade before finally accepting him in her 37th year. She also left behind a substantial body of literary work, the most popular of which is Jane Eyre. Unlike her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, a fantastical gothic romance, Jane Eyre blends strict realism and character analysis with autobiographical detail and imagination. It contains elements of the gothic: the madwoman in the attic; the dark secret of Mr. Rochester; his passionate romance with Jane. Yet Jane Eyre is not constrained by the genre and very often stretches beyond it to reflect the reality of the rural side of Victorian England in the first half of the 19th century.
Others, however, saw in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre a dangerous indulgence of fancy and imagination. One critic wrote to Charlotte suggesting that she base her future works on models supplied by Jane Austen. Charlotte answered that to do as much would be to stifle her imagination, which, she asserted, was worthy and deserving of attention. In this sense, Jane Eyre may be considered an antidote to Victorian Puritanism. Jane does, after all, flee the well-intentioned but strict Calvinism of St. John Rivers and take comfort in the much more human, somewhat reformed, ever noble, abrupt and gently rakish Mr. Rochester. Fans of the novel have been grateful ever since.
