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Jane Eyre

The Bronte Sisters

Summary

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and is a form of fictionalised autobiography of its author. It follows the fortunes or lack thereof of the eponymous heroine who begins her life as a girl orphaned without a penny to her name. She is left in the care of her aunt, Mrs Reed, who treats her in an unfriendly and often a cruel manner. This leads to a spirited escape - taking Jane to the charitable Lowood Institution (Charlotte Brontë herself attended the similar Cowan Bridge institute). This alone was enough for the book to be considered unsuitable for young ladies - even though it never veers from the accepted moral codes of the period. After a time with the kind Miss Temple and a fellow orphan, Jane moves to a post teaching the illegitimate child of a Mr Rochester. This unconventional hero figure finds himself drawn to Jane not for her (plain) face but for her intellect and spark. The story follows the difficulties they face as the truth of Rochester's earlier marriage to a mad Creole woman emerge and the new life Jane attempts to make under the false impression that Rochester is an evil and heartless bigamist. The novel inspired the feminist criticism of the 1980s through Gilbert and Gulbar's The Madwoman in the Attic in which unstable female characters in such literature were presented as proof of the suppression of the feminine.

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