Jane Eyre Research Paper

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a Victorian-era novel written about the trials and tribulations of a young woman of the same name. Throughout the plot, the obstacles faced by Jane may seem cruel and even a bit unrealistic at times, especially if someone is reading this in the 21st century. What the reader may not know is that Jane Eyre is a reflection of the life of the author. Bronte and Jane share many similarities that the reader can conclude were inspired by Bronte’s life. Bronte creates this life in Jane Eyre to narrate her own life, and if Bronte’s life is understood then Jane Eyre is much easier to digest as well. At the age of five years old, Bronte lost her mother to cancer. Similarly, Jane Eyre faces a similar loss of both her father

One small detail that deviates from Jane and Bronte’s stories lies in the respective admiration and distrust towards their aunts. Jane sees her aunt as a cold-hearted woman who purposely mistreats her because of her rebelliousness as a child, yet Bronte would later describe her Aunt Branwell as her “favourite aunt and one to whom [she], as well as the family, looked up, as a person of talent and great amiability of disposition” (Gaskell 37). It’s likely that the character parallel to Bronte’s Aunt Branwell would be her Uncle Reed, whom had taken in Jane after the death of her parents much like how Branwell came into Bronte’s life after the death of her mother. However, Jane doesn’t speak much of her uncle, but only that she admired him for taking her in, as she recounts when she says he’d taken her in when she was a parentless infant (Bronte 13). It would ultimately be both aunts that would send the girls off to their schools. Bronte sees it that Lowood and Cowan Bridge schools are one in the same, and delivers a scathing review of both of them. Charlotte maintains in private that “she had not exaggerated” about her own boarding school when she says that the adequate conditions, lack of edible food, and exposure to the cold were what made it so awful and were definitely what killed her sister, Maria (Lane 58). Impacted by the death of her sister, Bronte took away nothing from her