In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë uses several characters as foils to Jane to reveal Jane's true persona. Characters with strong personalities, such as Georgiana Reed and Blanche Ingram, show a significant contrast to Jane's more docile nature. Brontë also creates foils in the characters that interact with Jane, bringing forth different sides of Jane's personality. Mrs. Reed and Miss Temple are used to employ this technique. Her reactions to these characters allow the reader to delve into her true nature.

One of the first foils the reader encounters is that of the young Georgiana Reed, Jane's haughty cousin. She is beautiful, spoiled, and selfish, and makes it known that she does not consider Jane as part of their family. They see Jane as "a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities" (17). While Jane tidies and dusts like a family servant, Georgiana is enraptured with...