Respond to the following prompt by writing a comparitive essay of at least 750 words.

Jane Eyre was first published under the pseudonym of "Currer Bell." Ten years earlier, Charlotte Brontë sent a sample of her work to the Poet Laureate of the time, Robert Southey. His reply gives us an insight into society’s opinion of women writers in 1837:

“ . . . Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity . . .”

Explain how both the author and her character represent “the outsider,” the free spirit struggling for recognition and self-respect in the face of rejection by a class-ridden and gender-oriented society.

The author Charlotte Brontë provides a critique of Victorian England and the social hierarchies that structured society at the time. In Jane Eyre, Brontë used the ambiguity in the position of the governess to show how class standing was a source of tension throughout the book. Jane had the manners and educated background and was sophisticated as Victorian governesses were expected to be because they taught etiquette and academics to the children of elites. However, they were employees and lacked the wealth and were dependent on the families they worked for, much like servants. Women were similarly dependent and discouraged from pursuing the means to be self-sufficient. Jane Eyre's journey allows her to build up skills and to establish herself so she can marry Rochester as an equal. The author writes that "but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do," (p 127) an idea that was radical for her time.