Influences for the Creation and Development of Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte, is a fascinating novel that couldn’t have possibly been written by any other author other than Charlotte Bronte. Not only because of her intellectual genius, but because of the family, setting, and era she was born into. Born in 1816, Charlotte was born into a family where she would encounter many tragic events and live a hard life. After Chalotte’s mother and her two eldest children died, Chalotte was left with her sisters Emily and Anne, to the care of their father, and their strict religious aunt, Elisabeth Brandwell (Blackburn 10). During this period, Charlotte was in a very isolated environment where she and her sister ultimately relied on each other’s entertainment in the form of fictional plays and stories; so much so, that they actually created their own fictional world called Angria (Bell). As isolated as Charlotte Brontë was during her childhood, Jane Eyre provides the reader with a tremendous amount of subliminal context on the period in which the novel was written, and even more importantly, the author’s life; two factors that with no doubt influenced the creation and development of the novel.

The first personality trait that is easily distinguishable in Charlotte is her heavily opinionated personality, and also very impressive, her strong determination. As a writer and as a character in her novel, she was determined to publish her views, very unique for her time, on codes of conduct and femininity (Ostrov). As Susan Ostrov from the Center for Research on Social Organizations writes in a journal she published, “Jane’s radical assertion of the woman’s right to go beyond roles assigned by custom and her rejection of borders imposed by class caused controversy”(Ostrov). But along with the controversy, came a world of new ideas implanted in society, exactly what Bronte thought was necessary during her time period.

These ideas of equal roles of women was clearly important to Bronte; one cannot argue that had the...