Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is an 1847 novel by Charlotte Bronte, published under the pen name Currer Bell. Following an orphaned governess who demands to be both loved and free, it fuses the bildungsroman with the Gothic and is studied in HSC English Advanced Module B: Critical Study of Literature.

Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in 1847 under the male pen name "Currer Bell", in a Britain where the law of marriage placed a wife and almost everything she owned under her husband's control. Bronte had worked as a governess, the precise in-between position she gives Jane: an educated woman doing paid work in a wealthy household, treated as neither servant nor equal.

The novel is structured as a journey through five houses, each a different test of the same question: can Jane be both loved and free? At Gateshead the orphaned child is bullied by her wealthy aunt Mrs Reed and locked in the terrifying red-room, but finds her first open rebellion. At Lowood, a charity school where cold and disease kill many of the girls, she meets Helen Burns, whose patient Christian endurance is a foil to her own fierce sense of justice. At Thornfield Hall she becomes governess for the brooding Edward Rochester and the two fall in love across the gulf of class and wealth - until her wedding morning exposes his secret: he is already married to Bertha Mason, the "madwoman" locked in the attic. Refusing to become his mistress, Jane flees with nothing. At Moor House she discovers cousins, inherits a fortune, and refuses the cold clergyman St John Rivers, who offers duty entirely without love. Hearing Rochester's voice call across the miles, she returns to find Thornfield burned, Bertha dead, and Rochester blinded and maimed. Now his equal in fortune, she marries him freely: "Reader, I married him."

The novel's argument is a woman's right to be valued as a moral equal, and Bronte builds it into the texture of the writing. Jane seizes Rochester's own image of the captured bird and turns it back on him - "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you." - making autonomy the precondition of love rather than its casualty, and her great speech, "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?", forces him to answer her as a soul rather than a dependant. In 1847 the claim that "women feel just as men feel" was not a truism but a provocation.

Self-respect is charted in the diction itself. The child's instinctive vow at Gateshead, "I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live.", sharpens by the novel's centre into the adult's argued anaphora: "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

The novel also tests three versions of Christianity and lets Jane keep faith while refusing all three: Brocklehurst's cruelty, Helen Burns's saintly endurance ("Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."), and St John Rivers's cold ambition, whose proposal, "God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. ... you are formed for labour, not for love.", dresses his own will as providence.

Finally, Bronte welds Gothic symbolism to social realism. Bertha Mason, granted no voice at all and described in dehumanising language, is at once the plot's obstacle and, for feminist and postcolonial critics, Jane's dark double: the imprisoned rage of a wife reduced entirely to her husband's management. The closing declaration "Reader, I married him." makes Jane the subject of the verb - marrying rather than being given away - a union the novel insists on as reciprocity, not rescue.