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The Jane Eyre of most readers' memories is not the subjugated child of the evangelical tracts, or the ‘relative creature’ of whom the moralists of womanhood speak, but a figure of a very different kind. If Jane's realist ‘autobiography’ is disrupted by intuitions of self as jeopardized object it is disrupted also, as we have seen, by a figuring of self-assertive power. By the end of her story, Jane has magically assumed a position of unchallenged ‘ascendancy’. Indeed, if that narrative of jeopardy is articulated through the language of evangelicalism, so partly — but almost blasphemously — is this opposing narrative of power. Jane Eyre, with its central emphasis on absolute, primary need, more directly, more urgently questions the notion that self is or could be an autonomous entity. This, rather than its ‘unfeminine’ demand that women should have ‘exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts’, or its ‘improper’ depiction of female sexuality, is its real offence: not merely against the ‘proprieties' of early nineteenth-century English society, but even, arguably, against our own’.

Bulwer–Lytton's Lucretia is the grim story of a woman's downward spiral from immorality into insanity. Lucretia Clavering, a clever but corrupt English girl, is disinherited by her uncle when he is alerted to her unfilial behaviour. At the same time she is rejected by the man she loves. The dual reflection scars her, emotionally and morally, for life. In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the instability of the madwoman's meaning for mid-nineteenth-century English fiction is more firmly held in view and turned to effect. For Charlotte Brontë, identity consists in mastering the past, acknowledging it as part of one's history, but a history whose meaning is under control. Though it will always leave its scars, the wounds eventually heal. Brontë's rewriting of Romantic insanity has all the confidence and yet all the anxiety of the mid-Victorian period.

For Jane Eyre's fairy-tale shapings, its archetypal themes of the search for love and escape from danger, above all, perhaps, its representation of childhood suffering, do seem to point away from its specific historical moment, and towards areas of experience which all can readily understand. ‘Who that remembers early childhood, can read without emotion the little Jane Eyre's night journey to Lowood?’ asked Sydney Dobell, in an early review. ‘Passages read like a page out of one's own life’, G. H. Lewes declared. Generations of girls have thrilled, with similar empathy, to Jane's story of passionate love. The meanings its critics have traced in it may have changed with changing mores, but in its evocation of vulnerable childhood, its representation of desire, Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre has seemed to speak less of historical difference than of its readers' most intimate concerns.

After the expansive social landscape and the flexible third-person narrative of Shirley, Villette seems oppressively constricted. Here, more extremely than in any of Charlotte Brontë's previous novels, the viewpoint is confined to that of an individual sensibility — a sensibility more eccentric than William Crimsworth's, less expressive than Jane Eyre's. Like Jane Eyre, Villette explores the plight of a woman who is ‘insignificant, poor and plain’. But it offers a far darker view of the possibilities for such a one. Lucy Snowe, like Jane, is an orphan; her family is hinted at only in images of disaster and loss. She finds no congenial kinsfolk: at her story's end, she is alone. However, Villette has none of the melodramatic darkness of Jane Eyre. Instead of those images of elemental nature that gave Jane's story cosmic urgency, here there are images of banal, domesticated space.

Longer narratives in prose and fiction elaborated on the communities that annuals constructed, depicting viable gift economies for women. Revising traditional readings of Jane Eyre (1847) and Aurora Leigh (1856) as tales of individual development, I argue that progress in these works depends upon trajectories of interpersonal exchange that demonstrate their heroines’ growing abilities to give and receive. By embracing models of reciprocity, novel and epic use financial gifts of patriarchal inheritance and shared income to challenge the dictates of common law, to reconstitute relationships, and to provide practical subsistence for intimate female alliances.

Charlotte Brontë's account of what her first novel was not could serve as a description of her second. Those ‘sudden turns’ denied to William Crimsworth — unearned wealth, a transformative marriage, excessive happiness — are central to Jane Eyre's story. This is no chilly narrative of self-help, but a much more compelling tale of the ‘wild wonderful and thrilling’, the ‘strange, startling and harrowing’; of starvation and destitution, and the glamour of aristocratic life. The awkward abrasiveness of The Professor is here replaced by a passionate directness, ‘more imaginative and poetical’. Indeed, Jane Eyre seems hardly to question its narrator's point of view. It appears that in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë is deliberately choosing to emphasize the dark underside of that gospel of self-sufficiency which Crimsworth sought to celebrate in his tale of successful self-help.

This chapter discusses the different criticisms of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It uses Sigmund Freud's evocative analogy as a tool to explore the charged emotions that accompany the critical responses to the novel. The chapter then challenges some of the terms of the debate on Jane Eyre's ethical status for feminism, and also argues that criticism has an emotive history that can be best understood by stating the cultural sites from which the critic speaks. Finally, it investigates the heightened emotions that Jane Eyre has aroused in twentieth-century literary criticism.

Jane Eyre focuses from the outset on the conflict between a “pagan” principle of ethical vengeance (exemplified in Jane’s early outburst against her aunt), and the Christian principle of forgiveness to which the saintly Helen Burns introduces the young Jane in the orphanage. Forgiveness is the very essence of “gift”— “pure grace,” as Vladimir Jankélévitch says—and Bronté’s investigation of the psychology of forgiveness is, correspondingly, intertwined with an exploration of the psychology of gift-giving. There are two central scenes of forgiveness: Jane’s attempt to force her forgiveness on her dying aunt, who will have none of it, and St. John’s purported forgiveness of Jane after she insults him in rejecting his offer of marriage. As Jane understands, St. John’s forgiveness is actually a covert form of revenge—a paradigm case of the poisoning of the aggressive instincts when they are controlled by means of a moral ideology that refuses to recognize their real physiological hydraulics. Brontë’s analysis of forgiveness as poisoned gift and as perverted channel for will to power unfolds across three interlocked scenes of gift-giving, each involving two actors. In the first, Jane is the gift-giver and would-be dominator; in the second and third, she is the gift-receiver who must resist domination. In the first and third scenes, what is involved is the sublime gift of forgiveness, in the second scene, ordinary material gifts. The second scene makes explicit the fact that gifts can be used as an instrument of domination (in a way that is relatively innocuous, by comparison with the gift of forgiveness); hence, the second scene mediates between the first and third scenes of gift-giving, making explicit what remains implicit (though plainly visible) in them. The St. John Rivers plot, normally underplayed or completely ignored by critics, is central to the literary and intellectual design of the novel, which is structured narratively around Jane’s successive rejections of Rochester’s and St. John’s efforts to appropriate her, and intellectually around Jane’s struggle to work out a version of Christian moral ideology that is compatible with her culture, but which will not stifle her psycho-physiological economy. That Christian doctrine is an ideological instrument of domination is first made evident through the figure of Brockelhurst. Brontë then casts a glaring light on this social function of moral ideology by making Helen, the most abject and submissive character in the book, enunciate the doctrine of forgiveness as a rationale for social submissiveness. The theme of Jane’s oppression by religious-moral ideology is then cast into the background during her time with Rochester, but re-emerges with St. John, in such a way as to close the ideological circle that opens with Helen. Forgiveness operates in the subjugated subject (Helen) as an ideological prop for submission, in the subjugating subject (St. John) as an ideological prop for subjugation.

The chapter begins with a recounting of Willing and Rae's dramatization of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which contains a subplot with sororophobic themes that is common in the literature of the era. In the Victorian world, the concept of sisterhood is founded on the differences between women—most notably sexual—and their attempts to bridge this chasm of difference. Sisterhood is seen as a safe, neutral haven which enables the unification of seemingly irreconcilable interests. The chapter briefly discusses the limited sociological material on sisters and their relationships. Then, with readings from Collins, Rossetti, and Hardy, the chapter further examines sisterhood as a structure for the containment and representation of sexual differences among women. In the last section, the chapter presents a different though similarly complex manifestation of sororophobia in George Elliott's anti-melodramatic Middlemarch in contrast with the typical Victorian marriage plots.

This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.

This chapter examines discourses concerning childhood passion in England during the 19th century. During this period, passion carried a rich overlay of meanings and the passionate child was a typological projection from religious and education discourse which was to play a crucial role in the development of child psychiatry. Most children's literature published during this period focused on the child who gave way to passion. Examples of these are Reverend Carus Wilson's The Children's Friend and the works of Jane Eyre and George Eliot.

This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.

The ongoing interest in Jane Eyre and its various adaptations, appropriations, mash-ups and sequels are indicative of the fact that the story and the main character have loosened themselves from literary forms and have become transmedia phenomena. Taking into consideration the independent web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and the media discussion it generated among online communities, this chapter argues that in contrast to popular screen adaptations of the novel, the web series disentangles the heroine from the romantic plot and re-positions her within a network of relationships that encourage her growth. In this way, the series bypasses gender critiques levelled at Charlotte Brontë’s text and the majority of its mainstream adaptations. The web series’ media format and exploration of authorship enables its viewers to treat it both as an adaptation and a fictional vlog, highlighting the complex ways in which this classic of Victorian literature continues to matter today.

Like many of their contemporaries Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield read and admired the works of the Brontë sisters, particularly Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Concentrating on Mansfield’s short story, ‘Bliss’ (1918), and von Arnim’s novel, Vera (1921), this essay explores the resonances of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in von Arnim and Mansfield’s writing. It likewise uses von Arnim and Mansfield’s concurrent engagement with the Brontës to reexamine their relationship to one another as writers, considering how they both engage with aspects of the Brontës’ writings to address the experiences of female characters. By examining the traces of Jane Eyre in ‘Bliss’ and Vera, this essay suggests several ways in which the Brontës’ influence contextualises the cousins’ relationship, addressing the thorny question of influence in their own writing.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is a novel flush with the details of furniture and drapery; in particular, Brontë seems to have been something of an aficionado of wood. At Gateshead, the residence of the despicable Reed family, there is massive mahogany furniture. Some of the finest mahogany once came from Madeira and the Caribbean; indeed, in the Caribbean the word “madeira” meant mahogany (as well as wine) well into the nineteenth century. Both places were deforested of mahogany and planted with the cash crops that allow Jane Eyre to furnish her world with souvenirs, in the form of mahogany furniture, of the original material source of her wealth. The geographical coordinates of Jane Eyre—Britain, Madeira, and Jamaica—allow the novel to revisit and remember the violence that inheres in the history and geography of British colonization, slavery, and trade. This chapter argues that Jane's purchase and placement of mahogany furniture symbolizes, naturalizes, domesticates, and internalizes the violent histories of deforestation, slavery, and the ecologically and socially devastating cultivation of cash crops in Madeira and Jamaica.

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

This conclusion draws on the juvenilia of Queen Victoria to frame an account of the alteration of attitudes and responses to gypsies evident by the late 1830s. Returning to the perceived connection of gypsies to storytelling, the chapter includes a close examination of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, arguing that Brontë’s depiction of a gypsy embodies the culmination of what has been described in earlier chapters, but also that the novel (written after the period covered by this book) typifies a dropping away into another manner of writing about gypsies, in which the gypsy has been comprehensively tamed and can thus be exploited by writers and artists in new ways. Referring out to gypsies in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and in Wilkie Collins' writings, the chapter points ahead to the more nostalgic idea of the gypsy which proliferates in the literature of the Victorian period.

This chapter examines the emergence of child psychiatry in England during the 1840s. It discusses Leonard Guthrie's book Functional Nervous Disorders in Childhood where he highlighted the enormous changes that took place in the final decades of the 19th century when there was a preoccupation with the ‘mind of the child’. It also discusses the novels that influenced Guthrie's interpretation of the problem concerning the study of the child of the mind. These are George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

This essay provides a Darwinian feminist analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, particularly regarding male-female power dynamics. Both men and women strive for autonomous individuality, or self-determination, but normative male mating strategies may conflict with efforts after autonomy. Men seek to control resources, including sexual resources (women), in the interest of inclusive fitness. This evolved male predisposition received strong social sanction in the nineteenth century, when Brontë wrote Jane Eyre. Both of the men who seek to marry Jane in the novel engage in behaviors that constrain the development of autonomous individuality. Notably, their behavior constrains not only Jane’s individuality but their own as well, since it inhibits the development of a mutually rewarding pair bond. Casting gendered power dynamics in an evolutionary light, this analysis illustrates the damaging effect of patriarchal institutions on human selfhood and relationships.

As British female writers, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot perceived their environs with keen awareness of the intra-action of the female body with matter. The environs, often linked to the materiality of natural phenomena, is open space, which is inhabited by animate and inanimate entities as objects intra-relating with each other. Through an interpretive reading of Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), my objective is to reconsider the female body in the novels as part of an assemblage of distinct objects (i.e., subject treated as object) in the context of a neo-materialist approach to ecofeminism. My attempt is to read the female body in relation to entities, yielding a perception of the body, which examines the body-as-matter within narrative discourse. The female body, however, is not meant to be constituted as a subject-less object without agency that, in effect, results in disempowerment. Instead, my discussion examines selected instances by which the female body has been entangled with more-than-human nature, revealing the vibrancy of the female body and its agential link to matter.