SOURCE: “The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley.” In Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 159-99.

In the following excerpt, Tayler describes the fluctuation of gender and sex roles that Brontë's characters experience, linking their struggles with Brontë's own desires for gender equality in society and a deeper sense of balance between the male and female qualities within herself.

Charlotte's work with her sisters in getting out their joint volume of poems still left her time to undertake her first novel specifically conceived and intended for publication—The Professor. In her “Author's Preface” Charlotte characterized the progress of her thoughts on literary method: “I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamental and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.” Her work would now stick close to the unadorned realities...