In the following excerpt, 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 Brontë '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 her adult personality, thus essentially ignoring the first quarter of the novel. While many have celebrated Brontë ' s carefully wrought description of her protagonist's first eighteen years for its vivid pathos, no one has as...