Jane Eyre | Jane Eyre: The Quest for Optimism

In the following excerpt, Frederick L. Ashe follows Jane's deprived childhood experiences and connects them to her relationship with Rochester later in life.

Critics have traditionally endowed the heroine and eponym of Charlotte Bronte's romantic masterwork, Jane Eyre, with a prodigious free will. According to various commentators, Jane draws on her knowledge either of good and evil or of her own nature in choosing between a series of conventional literary oppositions—reason and passion, absolute and relative morality, and, finally, love without marriage and marriage without love. Such a reading, however, judges the actions of Jane the young woman without allowing for the extraordinary childhood forces that largely determine...

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