Introduction

Abstract

Expressing trepidation about the possible reception of Jane Eyre shortly after its publication in 1847,¹ Charlotte Brontë maps relations of genre, gender, and history across a stock contemporary dichotomy of the public and the private: ‘It has no learning, no research, it discusses no subject of public interest. A mere domestic novel will I fear seem trivial to men of large views and solid attainments’ (Letters 1:554). Readers and critics have often accentuated ‘the timeless quality of the myth and day-dream’ (Leavis 489). For Kathleen Tillotson it is ‘a novel of the inner life, not of man in his social relations: it maps a private world. Private, but not eccentric’ (257). ‘Jane Eyre’s fairy-tale shapings, its archetypal themes of search for love and escape from danger, above all, perhaps, its representation of childhood suffering, do seem to point away from its specific historical moment, and towards areas of experience which all can readily understand’, Heather Glen argues in Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (65). She restores Jane Eyre to part of its historical moment by reading it alongside evangelical advice literature, tracts, and annuals.