Study Guide to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre, a story of a young woman who challenged social norms. As a classic novel written in the Victorian era, Jane Eyre is thought to be one of the reasons women equality has progressed to the extent that it has. Moreover, the novel discusses still-relevant social issues such as women’s employment, genteel poverty, marriage, and education. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Brönte’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO CHARLOTTE BRONTË

THE BRONTËS

The four Brontës lived and died in the first part of the nineteenth century. They were born in the years just after the Napoleonic wars - Charlotte the year after Waterloo (1815), the victory of her hero, the Duke of Wellington. Branwell, Emily, and Anne saw the first dozen years of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837-1901). Only Charlotte lived to see the mid-century mark and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the ancestor of our World’s Fair), which celebrated half a century of progress.

These were years of swift and kaleidoscopic change in England. Few periods have seen such changes in the face of a country in such a short time. Though there had long been some industrial centers, England in the early years of the nineteenth century was still predominantly rural. The majority of the people were in some way connected with the land, and the typical community was the village with its parson and squire (local landed proprietor). Land was what counted in terms of power and prestige. Landowning gentry such as Rochester in Jane Eyre, the Lintons in Wuthering Heights, and Darcy and Bingley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, were important socially and politically.

But already by the year of Waterloo, industry was growing rapidly and more and more communities became large slums. Great cotton mills had sprung up in Lancashire and with them coal mines and blast furnaces. Steam-driven machinery was installed in Yorkshire; the traditional wool industry began to feel the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and enterprising mill-owners began to buy the new machinery. Power spinning began to drive out hand spinning. Side by side with mechanized industry came better transportation. Already the roads had been greatly improved and the construction of canals begun. Coaches and barges went everywhere. In 1825, when the Brontës were small children, the first railway was built; by the time they were young people, and had a small legacy to invest, the railways offered them a good return on their money and the great iron web was spreading all over the land, taking new thoughts and new ideas as well as new goods wherever it went.

It is interesting to notice, though, that while Charlotte and Emily Brontë were in advance of their time in their independent habits of mind, they liked to place their stories in the past. The opening chapter of Wuthering Heights is dated 1802, and the main action of the story begins a generation before that. Charlotte’s Shirley deals with the Luddite riots - outbreaks of machine-smashing by unemployed factory workers - which took place during the Napoleonic wars before she was born. Jane Eyre apparently begins just before the turn of the century, or so we would conclude from the reference to Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion in Chapter 32. Marmion, published in 1808, is there described as “a new work,” and Jane is about nineteen when St. John Rivers gives it to her. Thus the action of Jane Eyre takes place in the coaching era, before the advent of the railways. However, in certain respects it also reflects the economic and social changes of a little later period, as will be apparent in the next section.

SOCIAL CHANGES AND EDUCATION

Connected with the improvements in industry and transport was the rise of a new kind of ruling class, the mill-owners and mine-owners of the industrial age. As they gained in financial strength in their communities, they began to demand political power. The Reform Bill of 1832 (of which Charlotte, then a schoolgirl, wrote an enthusiastic account) gave this group the vote. They began to compete with the old landed gentry and went on in their turn to buy land, to build attractive houses, to travel, and to improve themselves generally. We see an old landed family and a member of the nouveau riche side by side in Jane Eyre, for while St. John Rivers is a member of an old family, it is Mr. Oliver, the taciturn needle manufacturer, who has the money. Notice that Oliver would be graciously willing to let his daughter marry into the Rivers family with its fine old traditions. Another example of a manufacturer of the new sort is Robert Moore in Shirley. The novel shows, among other things, the struggles of Moore to keep his mill going in the face of the opposition from workmen who have been thrown out of work by his new machines.

One of the ways in which the mill-owning families strove to improve themselves was by providing a good education for their children. In Yorkshire, as in other industrial areas, many families now had enough money to hire governesses and tutors for their children or to send them to school, if they so desired. At the same time there were many impoverished gentlewomen for whom being a governess was the one respectable career open to them. It was in this economic and social situation that girls of good background began to go out to work; and it was with this situation in mind that the Brontës made their plans for earning their living, which would one day be necessary if they were unmarried when their father died. All the girls were governesses in homes or schools, and Branwell was at one time a tutor. Eventually the girls planned to have a school of their own and so find security and independence. Two of the Brontë novels, Jane Eyre and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, concern the careers of governesses and give a good idea of their circumstances. Their position was indeed often an uncomfortable one, as Charlotte and Anne both felt. They were of a higher class than the servants and yet not on a level with the family, and in consequence the often suffered from loneliness and humiliation. They were also extremely poorly paid. Even later in the century, fifteen pounds a year, Jane’s salary at Lowood, was a not uncommon sum; although it compared unfavorably with the pay received by miners and weavers, who usually earned between forty and sixty pounds a year. When she was a teacher in a boarding school, Charlotte herself wrote that when she had paid her expenses and bought clothes for herself and Anne, she had nothing left. Her heroine, Jane, was certainly one of the very poorest of wage earners.

RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND

The religious situation of the time is complex and ought to be understood, as a knowledge of it is assumed in Jane Eyre and other Brontë novels. The Church of England or Anglican Church (its American branch is called the Protestant Episcopal Church) was the Established Church of England; that is, it received financial support from the state and had essential ties with the Crown and Parliament. Reverend Patrick Brontë, the father of the Brontës, was an Anglican clergyman. Other Protestant bodies, which did not enjoy this connection with the state, were called “nonconformists” or “Dissenters.” They included the Methodists, the Baptists, and ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Charlotte Bronte
• 2) Introduction to Charlotte Bronte Life of Charlotte Bronte
• 3) Background
• 4) Important Features
• 5) Textual Analysis
• 6) Character Analyses
• 7) Survey Of Criticism
• 8) Essay Questions And Answers
• 9) Suggestions For Further Study And Research
• 10) Bibliography