SOURCE: “Jane Eyre: The Tale of the Governess,” in American Scholar, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 263-69.

In the following essay, Bell focuses on what she describes as Jane's intense desire for independence, which the critic argues is the heroine's prime “social fault.”

Although Jane Eyre is a love story that ends in marriage, everything Jane says about herself is calculated to show that she is not the romantic heroine for whom the marriage ending is a foregone conclusion. To begin with, she is plain; her lack of the requisite beauty of such a heroine is stressed continually. She is puny, her features irregular—and her unpromising physical attributes never fail to be remarked upon by everyone she encounters, and by herself. Even as a child, her appearance contrasts, like that of George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, with a cousin's “pink cheeks and golden curls [which] seemed to give delight...