An Eyre of Disapproval: The Contemporary Reception of Jane Eyre
Welcome back to my blog! Via Helen Allingham on Unsplash I think I’m the most excited to write this installment of any of the posts I have written about Jane Eyre . When I started doing research, I knew I wanted to write about the context of the book: how Brontë’s life influenced it, how it was received because of the attitudes of the time, etc. I went down a bit of an internet rabbit hole about these subjects — it took me to some interesting literary analysis of the book’s themes, to various speculations about Charlotte Brontë’s love life, and to so many “Reader, I married him” jokes — but the best discovery I made was a contemporary review of the novel. Published in 1848, the year after Jane Eyre was first printed, it is exhaustive, scathing, and highly entertaining. It was written by “Lady Eastlake”, the alias of author and critic Elizabeth Rigby, who, evidently, truly hated this book. I don’t know if you find nineteenth century literary criticism to be the height of drama, but, t...
