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Critical responses to Jane Eyre over time
Included here are six responses to Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre
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1
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What insights do you gain into the novel
from reading each piece of criticism? What do you learn about the critic
writing?
2
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A set of critical position cards is included at the end of this article
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You can also
download and print out this set of Critical Position Cards
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Read through the critical position cards and make sure you understand the
gist of what each one means
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Re-read the critical responses to Jane Eyre and decide which of the critical
positions each critic is drawing on or is sympathetic towards – whether he/she
knows it or not!
5
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6
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You can read a selection of
critical readings of this novel and extracts from Jean Rhys’s diary in which she
explores the connection between the two novels by downloading The Wide
Sargasso Sea, included in emagplus
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Critical readings of Jane Eyre
Focus on the
behaviour of the
characters
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Critic seems
disturbed by the strong
emotions, especially
where these seem to be
‘without cause’
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1
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Jane Eyre is this, if we
admit it to be true; but its truth is not probable in the principal
incidents, and still less in the manner in which the characters
influence the incidents so as to produce conduct
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The reader cannot see anything loveable
in Mr Rochester, nor why he should be so deeply in love with
Jane Eyre; so that we have intense emotion without cause
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Although minute and somewhat sordid, the first act of the
fiction is the most truthful; especially the scenes at the
philanthropic school
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Concern with
whether it is ‘true’
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Use of third person
implies it is the view all
reasonable and educated
readers think
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Focus
Hide
Position Moral
Hide

Regards a free, passionate style of writing as
cause for criticism rather than praise
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Assumes she knows what the
author’s ‘chief object’ was and
is therefore in a position to
judge whether or not ‘he’ has
succeeded
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Assumes the author is male
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2
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We are
painfully alive to the moral, religious, and literary deficiencies
of the picture and such passages of beauty and power as
have quoted cannot redeem it, but it is impossible not to be
spellbound with the freedom of the touch
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It bears no impress
of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and
hurry of an instinct, which flows ungovernably on to its object,
indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too
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We deny that he had succeeded in that
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We acknowledge her
firmness – we respect her determination – we feel for her
struggles; but for all that, and setting aside higher
considerations, the impression she leaves on out mind is that
of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman – one whom we should
not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek
as a friend, whom we should not desire as a relation, and
who we should scrupulously avoid as a governess
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Suggests that this critic is disturbed
by the effect of this novel on her
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Applies a very conventional set
of standards by which to judge
female characters and judges
the book as a whole on the
basis of like/dislike of the main
character
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Implies the reader should
learn something useful from
a novel
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Generalisations about
particular sort of writer
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Reveals that he thinks there is
some merit in the novels but it
is not possible to tell what this
is
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Her heroines do not try to disentangle the chaos of their
consciousness, they do not analyse their emotions or
motives
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They only feel
strongly about everything
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Jane Eyre,
Villette, The Professor, the best parts of Shirley, are not
exercises of the mind, but cries of the heart; not a deliberate
self-diagnosis, but an involuntary self-revelation
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It might be
thought that since they are about different people her books
had different imaginative ranges
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You can learn about the external life of many
different sorts of people by observation: but no amount of
observation can teach you about the inner life of anyone but
yourself
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Nor
was Charlotte Bronte an exception
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Her range is confined, not only to a direct
expression of Charlotte Bronte’s emotions and impressions
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The world
she creates is the world of her own inner life; she is her own
subject
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Charlotte
Bronte’s incapacity to make a book coherent as a whole is
only equalled by her incapacity to construct a plausible
machinery of action for its component parts
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Her books – and this is true of no other English novelist of
comparable merit – are, but for the continued presence of
certain figures, incoherent
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No, each is a drama: but not one drama
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The first quarter of Jane Eyre is about Jane’s
life as a child; the next half devoted to her relation with
Rochester: in the last quarter of the book, St John Rivers
appears, and the rest of the book, except for the final
chapters is concerned with her relation to him
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Interested in the writer rather
than her writing, but as
revealed through her literary
work
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Writing at one remove from
the novel – taking an
overview
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Setting Bronte’s work in
the context of a tradition
of novelists
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way responses to a novel alter
according to when it is read
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Most interested in characters
and relationships
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4
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Fundamental to all her novels is the pupil-master
relationship, which is her rationalization, based on her own
limited experience of life outside Haworth, of one of the
commonest sexual dreams of women: the desire to be
mastered, but to be mastered by a man so lofty in his scorn
for women as to make the very fact of being mastered a
powerful adjunct to the woman’s self-esteem
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But it goes a
step beyond the Cinderella story in sophistication
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Phyllis Bentley has argued that Jane Eyre is
much more than ‘a mere “escape” romance’ because Jane
does not ‘enjoy a complete, unreal triumph’; she is left with a
half-blind husband
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When he is
helpless it is the woman’s turn to stoop; Rochester’s
mutilation is the symbol of Jane’s triumph in the battle of the
sexes
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Even
Cecil who knew her
true identity read her
as a novelist rather
than as a female
novelist
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Reading it as a
psychological allegory, i
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the romance story ‘stands
for’ something else
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Relationship with the
reader and the way this
affects both the tone of
the novel and its
meaning
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Writer’s manipulation of the
reader
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5
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The connecting power of Charlotte
Bronte’s fiction is in just this first-person capacity to compose
an intimate relationship with the reader: from the easy
friendly beginning – ‘I was glad of it, I never liked long walks’
– to the final and secret sharing – ‘I kept these things then,
and pondered them in my heart’: things the reader knows but
the others – the other characters, the outside world – do not
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’ But that address to the reader, that
capital public address, is a late pulling away as the story
fades into retrospect, into the given account
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What
matters throughout is this private confidence, this mode of
confession: the account given as if in a private letter, in
private talk; the account given to a journal, a private journal,
and then the act of writing includes, as it were involuntarily,
yet it is very deliberate and conscious art – the awareness of
the friend, the close one, the unknown but in this way
intimate reader: the reader as the writer, while the urgent
voice lasts
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Raymond Williams, The English Novel, 1970
Focus
Hide

Putting Charlotte
Bronte’s work in the
context of trends in
Victorian literature
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The consciousness of the
writing process
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Reading 6
This critic approaches
criticism as a story
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Analysing the function of love in
the novel
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Political and social
context in which the novel
was doing
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Suggests it is the job of the critic
rather than the writer to interpret
the significance of a novel within
the context in which it was
written
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Here it is not a
criticism, but part of an
argument showing just how
ground-breaking jane Eyre is
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In 1847, a young woman of genius, vexed at publishers’
rejections of The Professor, the first novel she had
completed, on the grounds that it ‘lacked colour’ and was too
short, sat down to give the reading public exactly what she
had been told they wanted – something ‘wild, wonderful and
thrilling’, in three volumes
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The young woman’s name
was Charlotte Brontë and the novel she produced, Jane
Eyre, is still, after a century and a half, ‘wild, wonderful and
thrilling’
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Charlotte Bronte lived during one of the greatest periods of
social change in English history
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Jane Eyre herself is the prototype
Charlotte Bronte heroine – a woman on her own for whose
behaviour there are no guidelines
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I don’t think for one moment that Charlotte Bronte knew
she was doing this, precisely
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The clarity and strength of Charlotte Bronte’s perception of
her heroine’s struggle for love is extraordinary
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Elizabeth Rigby, writing in the Quarterly
review, 1848, makes the exact point that the novel combines
‘such genuine power with such horrid taste’
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’ In order to do something new, in order to describe a
way of being that had no existing language to describe it,
Charlotte Bronte reverted, to a large extent to pre-bourgeois
forms
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Emphasis on the ‘wild’ and
uncontrollable tone and style
gives some insight into what
worried the earlier critics
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In the context of its publishing
history
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Sees literature as being the
product of wider
cultural/political forces
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plus a titillating hint of Cinderella
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Episodes such as that in which Rochester’s mad wife rips
apart the veil he has bought Jane to wear at his second,
bigamous wedding have the delirium of dream language
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Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted, 1992

Focus
Hide
Position Genre Biographical Cultural
Hide
materialist Psychoanalytic

Psychological and sexual
significance of plot
events
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Even a
minor work by a great author has value
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The writer’s art
is what the reader should be able to see clearly
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All good literature is
basically moral and uplifting
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This text interests me because …
I dislike this text because …
STRUCTURALISM/POST-STRUCTURALISM
I am not interested so much in when a text was
written, or who it was written by, or even what it
is about
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Therefore, in literature, I am most interested in
how the text is constructed: its form, its overall
structure and the patterns of language in it,
especially pairs of opposites
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Some critics who, like me,
were interested in patterns and structures
became more interested in the gaps, silences
and absences in texts
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This text interests me because …
I dislike this text because …
GENRE THEORY
I believe that all literature can be classified into
various types, or forms e
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tragedy, comedy,
romance, thriller, epic, lyric etc
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You can only really make sense of a
text when you recognise the tradition to which
it belongs
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I work on
constructing meanings from the text, filling in
the gaps, making connections and predictions,
and seeing how far these expectations of it are
confirmed or disappointed
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This text interests me because …
I dislike this text because …
PSYCHOANALYTIC
Because of my interest in the unconscious, I
pay most attention to what is glossed over or
‘repressed’
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I also look for representations of
psychological states or phases in literature, and
am more interested in the emotional conflicts
between the characters or groups in a text than
in its wider context
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I prefer to read literature written by women,
which explores women’s experience of the
world
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This text interests me because …
I dislike this text because …
RACE/POST-COLONIAL
The literature I prefer to read is often outside
the white Anglo-Saxon tradition
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I am
aware of the negative portrayals of black
people, and their absence generally, in white
literature
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I am aware when
Eurocentric attitudes are taken for granted, and
I look in the text for cultural, regional, social
and national differences in outlook and
experiences
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I also explore the ways in
which post-colonial writers write about their own
identity and experiences
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I think it is
important to relate a text to the social context
of its author and the historical contexts in which
it was written and is read
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I am
interested in pre-twentieth century texts, often
those written in the Renaissance, for example
Shakespeare
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However, I also analyse the text
closely, in order to question previous ways in
which the text has been read
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This text interests me because …
I dislike this text because …



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