The women who make history are not the ones who are pliant, become who others want them to or by take the easiest path. The women who make history are strong. They stand up for what they believe in and have sound morals that they adhere to. In addition, the women who make history are the ones that change the standard, and break tradition in order to pave a path that is brighter for other women to follow. However, becoming the woman who is strong enough to make these groundbreaking decisions is difficult due to the feminist mores that society has placed on them. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a feminist bildungsroman set in the early 1800s. During this time,women were expected to serve as model figures of domestic society, accept their social standing with motherhood as their greatest goal. In Jane Eyre, Jane refuses to accept the conventions of the Victorian woman and makes a name for herself by her own means-through fiction. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bronte uses Jane as a figure of strength and op-position in order to criticize the social prejudice that women of the Victorian era.
Jane Eyre is particularly about the narrow social sphere of British governesses and Jane's challenges and adventures are somewhat parallel to Charlotte Bronte's own life, making it a semi-autobiographical piece. However, due to the common convention of the time that, "Litera-ture cannot be the business of a woman's life: & it ought not to be." Bronte originally published Jane Eyre, under the pen name Currer Bell. Critics of the time had split options on Bronte's nov-el, some saying it was "superficial", "vulgar", and even "an anti-Christian composition", while others "admired the power and freshness of Bronte's prose". Although the work was primarily about life as a governess, the novel explores the different social classes and the superficiality of the era.
