oving. The
fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield
are described with inimitable life, but they are described as they
appeared to the lady's-maids, not to each other or to the world.
Charlotte Bronte perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does
not in a friend's house address her host's footman before his guests in
these words--"Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Nor
does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is
thought to be about to marry in these terms--"She is a rare one, is she
not, Jane? A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom."
But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance.
Charlotte Bronte, when she wrote her first book, had hardly ever seen
any Englishmen but a few curates, the villagers, and her degraded
brother, with rare glimpses of lower middle-class homes. But Jane
Eyre's own doings and sayings are hardly the effect of mere ignorance.
Her nocturnal adventures with her "master" are given with delightful
_naivete_; her consenting to hear out her "master's" story of his
foreign amours is not pleasant. Her two avowals to Edward
Rochester--one before he had declared his love for her, and the other
on her return to him--are certainly somewhat frank. Jane Eyre in truth
does all but propose marriage twice to Edward Rochester; and she is the
first to avow her love, even when she believed he was about to marry
another woman. It is indeed wrung from her; it is human nature; it is
a splendid encounter of passion; and if it be bold in the little woman,
it is redeemed by her noble defiance of his tainted suit, and her
desperate flight from her married lover.

But Jane Eyre's ignorances and simplicities, the improbabilities of her
men, the violence of the plot, the weird romance about her own life,
are all made acceptable to us by being shown to us only through the
secret visions of a passionate and romantic girl. As the autobiography
of a brave and original woman, who bares to us her whole heart without
reserve and without fear, _Jane Eyre_ stands forth as a great book of
the nineteenth century. It stands just in the middle of the century,
when men were still under the spell of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and yet it is not wholly alien to the methods of our latest
realists.

It is true that a purely subjective work in prose romance, an
autobiographic revelation of a sensitive heart, is