Charlotte Bronte For the CSET

If you are studying for the CSET English or the CSET Multiple Subjects, you should know about Charlotte Bronte.

Charlotte Bronte (April 21, 1816 – March 31, 1855) was an English novelist. She is most famous for her book Jane Eyre (1847).

Jane Eyre is a classic romance novel. When Charlotte Bronte set out to write the novel Jane Eyre, she was determined to create a main character who challenged the notion of the ideal Victorian woman.

Bronte’s determination to portray a plain yet passionate young woman who defied the stereotype of the docile and domestic Victorian feminine ideal most likely developed from her own dissatisfaction with domestic duties and a Victorian culture that discouraged women from having literary aspirations.

Historical Context

During an era when etiquette guides circulated freely, empire waists gave way to tiny-waisted corsets, and tea parties grew in popularity, it might seem incongruous that realistic novels would set the Victorian literary trend. Perhaps the socially conscious novel may have been a result of the belief of the rising middle class of Victorian England in the possibility for change, since they had witnessed such economic changes in their lifetimes.

Even though the Industrial Revolution opened up new venues for lower-class women, offering them new factory jobs in place of household work, it did not do much good for the middle class. A single woman at this economic level still had only one option for respectable employment: working as a governess. Although a woman could maintain a decent living with this job, she could also anticipate “no security of employment, minimal wages, and an ambiguous status, somewhere between servant and family member, that isolated her within the household”. Before 1848, no women’s colleges existed, and even if they had, a woman could not have improved her professional prospects by attending one. The precarious lifestyle of the governess remained all that a middle-class, single woman could strive for.