Jane Eyre: A Cliff Notes' Introduction

When Jane Eyre was first published in 1847, it was an immediate popular and critical success. George Lewes, a famous Victorian literary critic declared it "the best novel of the season." It also, however, met with criticism. In a famous attack in the Quarterly Review of December 1848, Elizabeth Rigby called Jane a "personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit" and the novel as a whole, "anti-Christian." Rigby's critique perhaps accounts for some of the novel's continuing popularity: the rebelliousness of its tone. Jane Eyre calls into question most of society's major institutions, including education, family, social class, and Christianity. The novel asks the reader to consider a variety of contemporary social and political issues: What is women's position in society, what is the relation between Britain and its colonies, how important is artistic endeavor in human life, what is the relationship of dreams and fantasy to reality, and what is the basis of an effective marriage? Although the novel poses all of these questions, it doesn't didactically offer a single answer to any of them. Readers can construct their own answers, based on their unique and personal analyses of the book. This multidimensionality makes Jane Eyre a novel that rewards multiple readings.

While the novel's longevity resides partially in its social message, posing questions still relevant to twenty-first century readers, its combination of literary genre keeps the story entertaining and enjoyable. Not just the story of the romance between Rochester and Jane, the novel also employs the conventions of the bildungsroman (a novel that shows the psychological or moral development of its main character), the gothic and the spiritual quest. As bildungsroman, the first-person narration plots Jane's growth from an isolated and unloved orphan into a happily married, independent woman. Jane's appeals to the reader directly involve us in this journey of self-knowledge; the reader becomes her accomplice, learning and changing along with the heroine. The novel's gothic element emphasizes the supernatural, the visionary, and the horrific. Mr. Reed's ghostly presence in the red-room, Bertha's strange laughter at Thornfield, and Rochester's dark and brooding persona are all examples of gothic conventions, which add to the novel's suspense, entangling the reader in Jane's attempt to solve the mystery at Thornfield. Finally, the novel could also be read as a spiritual quest, as Jane tries to position herself in relationship to religion at each stop on her journey. Although she paints a negative picture of the established religious community through her characterizations of Mr. Brocklehurst, St. John Rivers, and Eliza Reed, Jane finds an effective, personal perspective on religion following her night on the moors. For her, when one is closest to nature, one is also closest to God: "We read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence." God and nature are both sources of bounty, compassion and forgiveness.

In reading this novel, consider keeping a reading journal, writing down quotes that spark your interest. When you've finished the book, return to these notes and group your quotes under specific categories. For example, you may list all quotes related to governesses. Based on these quotes, what seems to be the novel's overall message about governesses? Do different characters have conflicting perceptions of governesses? Which character's ideas does the novel seem to sympathize with and why? Do you agree with the novel's message? By looking at the novel closely and reading it with a critical focus, you will enrich your own reading experience, joining the readers over the last century who've been excited by plain Jane's journey of self-discovery.

Why did Jane Eyre choose Saul of Tarsus rather than St. John the Divine?

A redeemed sinner was worth as much to a Wesleyian as a righteous zealot. Rochester loved and needed Jane. St. John Rivers did not love Jane, and only needed her as a secretary. Jane was rewarded for her absolute faith in God's work. Was not St. Paul the man who brought the story of Jesus to the Gentiles? Had not Wesley openly acknowledged his debt to a feminine thinker Antionette Bouigignon, who had written "the love of God, outside of which there is no virtue". Brontë wrote with a sense of mission. Indeed, Brontë's first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, recalled being told by her that she always wrote "with a sense of mission". In Jane Eyre, this sense burns through almost every page. The novel Jane Eyre, regardless of personal predilection, is one that should at least be considered amongst religious works. Whatever the literary value by which it is judged, it is certainly not as spiteful triumphalist a book as that which describes the progress of a man called Pilgrim.  

Spiritual Revelation in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre ends with a spiritual revelation. The change in Rochester echoes the change in Tennyson. "You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog" he confesses to Jane, "but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now" (p. 393). God appears at last to Rochester in the form of the fire — an instrument of "divine justice" — which destroys Thornfield (p. 393). Rochester's newly found faith and his ensuing change of character make possible his marriage with Jane. The discovery of God, then, ties together all the loose ends of the novel, fulfills true love, and closes the book with an overall affirming message that two impassioned souls can unite in marriage after all, if the Lord wills it. A couple of contrasts with Tennyson, though, seem obvious. For one, Charlotte Brontë reveals God to her readers through symbolism, whereas Tennyson finally uncovers a divine plan in the various meanings of the word "type." Secondly, Brontë has God play an interactive role in the external, material reality, whereas Tennyson must search internally for God's revelation. For him, God exists as a "far-off divine event." If Tennyson had lived in the world of Jane Eyre, he probably would have not spent so long struggling with Hallam's death.

Typology, however, is not altogether absent from Brontë's novel. This "elaborate system of foreshadowing (or anticipations) of Christ" plays a crucial role in Tennyson, as we have seen. But it also plays a part in Jane Eyre. Helen Burns acts as a typological figure just as Hallam does. Like Hallam, this precocious girl who espouses Christian doctrine and seems closer to God than any of her evangelical teachers trods the earth "ere her time was right." She is too good for the world. We can view her death as a sacrifice because it teaches Jane a powerful lesson in faith. Her tombstone reads, "Resurgam," or "I shall rise again," confirming her status as a Christ figure, as well as foreshadowing Christ's second coming (p. 72). That two works as different as In Memoriam and Jane Eyre contain the elements of typology should not surprise the reader. Typology, after all, had an "enormous influence on medieval Europe, seventeenth-century England, and Victorian Britain" ("An Introduction to In Memoriam" ). At the time of Tennyson and Brontë, it proved a fundamental principle for the Evangelical Protestants, a minority party of the Church of England but a dominant force in English life between 1789 to 1850. The Evangelicals used this system to relate Old Testament figures and events to the New Testament. Eventually typology crossed into the art and literature of the era as well, providing these forms with an "imaginatively rich iconography and particular conceptions of reality and time".

Passion, Dreams, and the Supernatural in Jane Eyre

Introspection, half-belief in the supernatural, conflicting emotions, gushing description appear throughout Jane Eyre. Rochester's mention of prescience — both foreshadowing and premonition — come up again and again throughout the work. "I knew. . . you would do me good in some way . . . I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you," Rochester tells Jane. Both he and she believe implicitly the things they read in eyes, in nature, in dreams. Jane has dreams which she considers unlucky, and sure enough, ill fortune befalls her or her kin. When she is in a garden which seems "Eden-like" and laden with "honey-dew", the love of her life proposes to her. However, that very night the old horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the garden is struck by lightning and split in half, hinting at the difficulties that lie in store for the couple.

The turbulent exploration of Jane's emotions so characteristic of the text reveals some of Brontë's most prevalent ideas — that judgment must always "warn passion," and that the sweet "hills of Beulah" are found within oneself.

As Jane grows throughout the book, one of the most important things she learns is to rule her heart with her mind. When a child at Gateshead she becomes entirely swept up in an emotional tantrum, which proves to be the most painful memory of her childhood. At the pivotal point in the plot when Jane decides to leave Rochester, she puts her love for him second to the knowledge that she cannot ethically remain with him - the "counteracting breeze" once again preventing her from reaching paradise. Only when Rochester has become worthy of her, and judgment and passion move toward the same end, can she marry him and achieve complete happiness./

Charlotte Brontë, like her heroine, traveled to wondrous lands within the confines of her own head. While Jane, engrossed in Bewick's History of British Birds, was mentally traversing "solitary rocks and promontories", her creator might have been calling to mind memories of her own sojourns in imagined lands. By the time she was a teacher at the Roe Head school, Charlotte and her brother Branwell had been writing stories and poems about an African kingdom called Angria for many years. While she was away at the school, the fate of the inhabitants of the country lay in Branwell's hands, which made her very nervous, as he was given to intrigue and violence. She was unhappy with her situation, loathing the available company and describing herself as "chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls," and so her happiest hours were spent in the wild landscapes of her mind. "What I imagined grew morbidly vivid," she says, and indeed her visions of Angria are almost more real to her than what is actually happening around her. "All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable and half ecstatic: miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly; ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. (She sometimes referred to Angria as"infernal" or below.") When pupils or fellow teachers interrupt her reveries she is furious, saying once, "But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited."

About 1839 Brontë finally left Angria, saying 'still, I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long . . . The mind would cease from excitement and turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks grey and sober and the coming day, for a time at least, is subdued in clouds " (all materials from the Norton critical edition of Jane Eyre). Though she did at last consent to leave her imaginary world behind, it played such a large part in her child and early adulthood that there is no doubt her recollection of time spent there affected Jane's experience.