Context: Victorian Women & the Gothic
The World of Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. At the time, female authors were often dismissed or patronised, so Brontë chose an ambiguous name to ensure her novel was judged on its merits. The book was an immediate sensation — and a scandal. Its heroine was unlike anything Victorian readers expected: plain, poor, and fiercely independent, Jane challenged every assumption about how women should behave.
To succeed in the Edexcel exam, you need to understand the social and literary context that shaped the novel. You need to connect Brontë’s choices to the world she was writing in and against.
Victorian Class and Gender
Victorian England was rigidly hierarchical. A person’s class determined almost everything: who they could marry, where they could live, and how much respect they were owed. Women occupied a particularly constrained position. Middle-class women were expected to be domestic, obedient, and morally pure — the so-called Angel in the House ideal. They had no right to vote, limited access to education, and once married, their property belonged to their husband.
Jane exists in an awkward space between classes. She is educated and genteel, but penniless and dependent on others. As an orphan raised by hostile relatives, she has no family name to protect her and no inheritance to give her independence. Her declaration “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” is a direct challenge to a society that valued women primarily for beauty and wealth.
Jane occupies a liminal class position — educated but poor, genteel but dependent. Brontë uses this to expose the injustice of a system that values wealth and status over character and intellect.
The Governess Figure
The governess was one of the few respectable occupations available to educated but impoverished women. However, governesses occupied an uncomfortable position: too educated to mix with the servants, but too poor to be treated as equals by their employers. They were essentially invisible, and their vulnerability — isolated in someone else’s house, dependent on their employer’s goodwill — made them a frequent subject in Victorian fiction.
Brontë herself worked as a governess and drew directly on her experience. Jane’s humiliation at the hands of Mr Brocklehurst, her careful navigation of Thornfield’s social dynamics, and her determination to maintain her dignity all reflect the real pressures faced by women in this role.
Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire. Her mother died when Charlotte was five, and the children were largely raised by their aunt. Charlotte and her sisters attended the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge — a harsh institution that directly inspired Lowood in the novel. Two of her older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis there and died, an experience that haunted Charlotte for life.
Like Jane, Charlotte worked as a governess and a teacher. She experienced the loneliness and social awkwardness of the role first-hand. The passionate, headstrong voice of Jane Eyre was Brontë’s response to a world that expected women to be silent and submissive.
The Gothic Tradition
The Gothic novel was well established by the 1840s. Writers like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley had pioneered stories of dark secrets, haunted buildings, imprisoned women, and the blurred boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Jane Eyre draws heavily on these conventions: Thornfield Hall is a brooding manor with a locked third storey, mysterious laughter echoes through the corridors, and Rochester harbours a terrible secret.
However, Brontë subverts the Gothic tradition as much as she uses it. In a typical Gothic novel, the heroine is passive and victimised. Jane is neither. She confronts her fears, makes her own decisions, and refuses to be a victim. The “madwoman in the attic” — Bertha Mason — is both a Gothic horror and a complex symbol of everything Victorian society repressed.
Brontë uses Gothic conventions — the brooding house, the hidden secret, the supernatural atmosphere — but subverts them by giving her heroine agency. Jane is not a passive Gothic victim; she is the moral centre of the novel.
Romanticism influenced Brontë’s emphasis on emotion, nature, and individual feeling. The novel is deeply personal — written in the first person, it invites the reader into Jane’s inner world with an intensity that shocked Victorian readers. Nature mirrors Jane’s emotions throughout: storms accompany crisis, the chestnut tree is split by lightning on the night of Rochester’s proposal.
Religion plays a complex role. Brontë criticises religious hypocrisy through Brocklehurst (who preaches austerity while his own family lives in luxury) and St John Rivers (whose cold, dutiful faith lacks human warmth). Yet Jane’s own morality is deeply Christian — it is her faith that gives her the strength to leave Rochester when she discovers his secret.
Understanding these contextual layers — class, gender, the governess role, the Gothic, Romanticism, and religion — will allow you to write analytically about Brontë’s intentions and connect her choices to the world she inhabited.