Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

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Recommended: Upper class in the Victorian era

If a middle class family in Victorian England was able to afford employing a governess it certainly meant they were wealthy. Governesses aided the development of middle class children by teaching them in history, languages, music, art and geography (Smith 203). However, the lives of these middle class governesses were not as good as they might sound. A governess had a unique position in the family she worked for, because she was not part of the household, nor was she a servant. Governesses had the social position of middle class women, yet they received a salary. Being a governess meant having financial worries like a fear of unemployment. Besides that there was a possibility of being socially rejected by the servants and their masters. One of the most influential governesses was Charlotte Brontë. In a letter from 1839 she wrote that “a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil” (Gaskell, ch. 8, ¶ 243). In 1847 Brontë published the novel Jane Eyre, which deals with this very subject. The novel Jane Eyre provides a sound insight into the class system of the Victorian era and the place of the woman in this system. The novel achieves this by making Jane Eyre climb the social ladder. The young Jane Eyre is a poor orphan, who receives an education and becomes a governess, after a while she inherits a substantial amount of money and eventually she marries the master of Thornfield.
The novel starts with giving an outlook on how the lower classes were being treated. The young Jane Eyre lives with Mrs Reed, who was the woman married to her uncle. Jane’s uncle adopted her, and when he died she had to take care of her. Jane is ambiguous i...

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...dent from Mr Rochester and only goes back to him after she is financially independent from him. For the 21st century reader, the novel gives a perfect look into the class system in Victorian England and the position of the Victorian women in that system.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Print
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Bronte – Volume 1. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1906. Project Gutenberg. Web. 27 February 2014.
Pell, Nancy. “Resistance, Rebellion, and Marriage: The Economics of Jane Eyre.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31.4 (1977): 397-420. Web. 24 February 2014.
Smith, Bonnie G. Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700. Lexington; D.C. Heath and Company, 1989. Print.
Sun-Joo Lee, Julia. “The (Slave) Narrative of Jane Eyre” Victorian Literature and Culture 36.2 (2008): 317-329. Web. 27 February 2014

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