_Jane Eyre_ was a great success from the day it came from the press.
It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light
of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had
decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing
unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte
Bronte in their demands for freedom from many strict social
conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it
gives of the wild revolt of a passionate nature against the coldness,
the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the
middle of the last century.
This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the
sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the
stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.
The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's
Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness,
are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the
humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation
in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte
wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many
of her descriptions in _Jane Eyre_ have never been surpassed. Hers was
that brooding Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes
the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human
love and suffering.
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