Jane Eyre critics

John Maynard

He drew a strong sexual connection between Jane's experience as a child, locked in Uncle Reed's bedroom, and as an adult entering Rochester's bedchamber

Adrienne Rich

Jane is determined in her refusal of the romantic- not immune and definitely more tempted than Jane Austen's characters, but Jane has an inner clarity which helps her distinguish between a future or destruction

Susan Meyer: Rochester

Rochester 'compares his relationships with women to keeping slaves'

Sandra Gilbert

Jane's terrible journey across the moors suggests the essential homelessness of women in a patriarchal society

Sally Shuttleworth

Bessie's nursery tales lie behind Jane's adult tendency to find the supernatural in the natural, as in her first encounter with Rochester's dog

Eric Solomon

Jane, fiery as she is, has sufficient control to water down these fires

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Conventional marriage is a Bridewell, a prison, like Bluebeard's corridor of the third storey

Gayatri Spivak

Through Bertha Mason, Bronte renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate

Susan Meyer: Bertha

Bertha demonstrates an "odd ambiguity of race"- the narrative associates her with blacks, particularly the Jamaican antislavery rebels