Critical quotes

• an "anti-christian composition"


  Elizabeth Rigby
• "a response to the constraints imposed on women in the early Victorian period"


  Vicky Simpson
• "Orphan girls are starved and frozen into proper Christian submission"


  Gilbert and Gubar
• "Sexual appetite was considered one of the chief symptoms of moral insanity in women"


  Elaine Showalter
• "St John's death in India could be said to show the danger that Charlotte saw in icy reason without emotion"


  Nicholas Johnson
• "She is part of new, emerging, more sympathetic attitudes to childhood"


  Sally Shuttleworth
• "Bertha... is Jane's truest and darkest double."


  Gilbert and Gubar
• "There is an interconnection between the ideology of male domination and the ideology of racial domination."


  Susan Meyer
• "Jane Eyre is between two worlds and belongs in neither"


  Helen Dunmore
• Rochester's injuries as a "symbolic castration", a punishment for his earlier promiscuity


  Richard Chase
• Victorian audience's reaction(The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction) 1847


  Reviewers criticized Jane Eyre for its unconventionalism, immorality, passionate exchanges, anti-authoritative and anti-Christian tendencies

  the novel blatantly violates contemporary moral and social codes and aims blows against political, religious, and social institutions at every opportunity

  Not a single natural character - Clergymen (St John) aren't cold and stoic, Ladies (Blanche) would never be so rude, children (Jane) never so outspoken
• 'Jane cannot be placed in the slot of working class, neither can she be considered part of her aunt's class'


  Politi
• "A pillar of society and a large bad wolf, Mr Brocklehurst has come with news of hell to remove Jane to Lowood'"


  Gilbert and Gubar
• "The reader cannot see anything loveable in Mr Rochester."


  The Spectator (1847)
• "Bertha's arson and suicide should not be condemned- it is a moment of being"


  Virginia Woolf
• "It lifts the lid on a sick, deranged and hypocritical society."


  Dr Stevie Davies
• "humble her with a consciousness of her physical and social inferiority."


  Nicola Onyett
•  "violated every code, human and divine"


  Elizabeth Rigby
• "each setting is dominated by a different tone"


  Karen Sayer