Reflecting on Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a feminist Pilgrim’s Progress in which the heroine asserts the moral equality and responsibility of men and women—an outrageous claim for a female, and moreover a governess, to make. Pat Macpherson reads in Jane Eyre the dramatic dynamic of adolescence itself, as a Gothic landscape of battles and pacts, seductions and betrayals, transgressions and policings, where identity is forged in relation to social norms of class, gender, race, generation, and nationality. Her exuberant n...