Customer Reviews

Understanding Jane Eyre: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (The Greenwood Press "Literature in Context" Series)

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This book has some valuable background documents on topics that form the story of this great classic novel: marriage law, the Victorian governess, insanity, and women's rights. Reading these excerpts may help high school students understand a novel which is set almost 200 years ago in a world of unimaginable darkness and cruelty. On the other hand, there are two flaws which mitigate against this being a good choice for any high school library. First, the style is amateurish and hackneyed. The author often uses the same word twice in a sentence. I would not want my students learning this rhetoric of literary criticism. Second, there are many factual errors. In the "Literary Analysis" chapter. Richard Mason is called Bertha's stepbrother. This is his relationship in "Wide Sargasso Sea." We know from the marriage certificate read by solicitor Briggs in Hay Church that Richard is her brother and Jonas Mason is their father. Blanche Ingram is characterized as an "heiress" with a large dowry. In the book the Ingrams have little money even though Blanche's brother is Lord Ingram. In her evaluation of the characters of Jane and Edward, Ms. Teachman opines that if they had kept their feelings under control, Jane would not have run off into the night at risk of life and limb. Spoken like a true Victorian! In discussing women's education, Ms. Teachman describes Lowood as a school for the daughters of poor clergymen. She is at pains to tell her readers that it is not a charitable institution. In this, she confuses Cowan Bridge School for Clergy Daughters, which the four oldest Bronte sisters attended, with its representation in the novel as that most infamous of charity schools, Lowood Institution.