‘Odd and incorrect’: Convention and Jane Eyre’s Feminist Legacy

Abstract

This article investigates the Victorian reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the collision of literary criticism with political commentary. Brontë’s novel has always had a reputation for being politically troublesome, but no one seems to know why. My essay develops two claims. First, I argue that the novel’s political slipperiness stems from its critics’ inability to agree on what the work actually is. Jane Eyre provoked contradictory judgements from readers who could not reconcile it with existing frameworks of literary convention. The stakes were high, as attempts to define the novel’s genre fused with attempts to produce a coherent sense of literary and social history. Second, I argue that the liberal feminist subject that modern criticism projects backwards onto Jane Eyre did not exist for Victorian readers, and that Brontë’s governess heroine instead activates a historically fraught relationship between character, type, and women’s economic and legal roles. Rather than addressing Jane Eyre directly, I treat it as the absent centre of a debate over convention, waged in reviews, pamphlets and essays, that merged literary criticism with political commentary and set crucial precedents for mid-Victorian legal debates on the woman question.