Lowood School

Abstract

AbstractAbstractThe account of Lowood School (chapters v. to x.) is unquestionably studied from the old Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. Much conflict has taken place upon the accuracy of the picture drawn by Charlotte Brontë, and it is undesirable to revive it. But that the account of the school reflected Charlotte Brontë's own impressions, coloured doubtless by imagination, there can be no doubt. Mrs. Gaskell (Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 63) says: “Miss Brontë more than once said to me, that she should not have written what she did of Lowood in Jane Eyre if she had thought the place would have been so immediately identified with Cowan Bridge, although there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it; she also said that she had not considered it necessary, in a work of fiction, to state every particular with the impartiality that might be required in a court of justice, nor to seck out motives, and make allowances for human failings, as she might have done, if dispassionately analysing the conduct of those who had the superintendence of the institution.” On the other hand the Rev. H. Shepheard (A Vindication of the Clergy Daughters' School and of the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, from the Remarks in “The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Kirkby Lonsdale, 1857) says:—‘The caricature of the Cowan Bridge School, under the name of ‘Lowood,’ had even not been recognised as an intended portrait by many readers who knew the School.