Jane Eyre Research Paper

The Victorian Era was a time of great change. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and society and the economy were changing greatly. People began to care less about religion and more about themselves. During the Victorian Era aristocratic people focused on morality, behavior and etiquette; few were troubled by the poor conditions faced by the working class. Those that were concerned were called Romantics. The things that remained the same however were the rigid class system and the gender-oriented society. Charlotte Bronte struggled to find a place in the world of literature. Because she was a woman she submitted and published her book, Jane Eyre, under a pen name, Currer Bell, in 1847. Ten years earlier Bronte had submitted a sample

Jane Eyre's and Charlotte Bronte's lives were very similar. Both Charlotte and Jane lost a loved one when they were both very young. Charlotte lost her mother to cancer when she was 5. While Jane lost both her parents to typhus at a young age. After the deaths of their loved ones, both Charlotte in real life and Jane in the novel, went to live with their aunt. When they are both ten they left their aunt's care to go to a girl's school. For Charlotte it was the Clergy Daughter School, Bronte said on multiple occasions that the conditions were so poor that it affected her health permanently. For Jane it was the Lowood Orphan School. In the novel the conditions were so horrible that at one point half of the school came down with an illness. The children were constantly unredressed and underfed. This shows that the people that placed them there and the wealthy people who ran the schools did not care about how the conditions the girls lived in. Girls in that time were considered less than boys and orphaned girls with no money or family to their name were considered even less. In this way, Charlotte and her character Jane's lives were very