Journal

must combat the temptation to live with a married man she recognises as her
soul mate, and who must resist the equally strong temptation to fulfil her duty
to God by being a missionary in India. Her duty she finally believes lies
elsewhere, to fulfil her destiny as a woman. She believes she has as much a
duty to herself as a creature of God with particular talents, as to others. In
her hour of greatest need, when she is tempted to become the lover of
Rochester, Jane’s personal fortitude and self-reliance is sustained by her
Christian principles: ‘I will keep the law given by God … Laws and principles
are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments
as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour: stringent are
they; inviolate they shall be’ (ch. 27). As mistress she could play the part of
Rochester’s wife and fool society; but she knows she can only maintain her
self-respect and personal integrity when her conscience is clear before God.
Charlotte Brontë’s unconventional upbringing and her religious training had
bred in her a tenacious commitment to this kind of personal truth. Jane Eyre
expresses her rebellion against social convention and against what she terms
‘the warpt system of things’ (preface to Jane Eyre). It is difficult for us to judge
now just how radical this novel was when it first appeared. But we can get a
good idea from contemporary reviews, like the influential review by Elizabeth
Rigby who condemned Jane Eyre as ‘pre-eminently an anti-Christian
composition’ and, if by a woman, the work of an immoral one who has
‘long forfeited the society of her own sex’ (The Quarterly, December 1848).
Many readers were shocked by Jane Eyre’s plea for the equality of all before
God and for spiritual affinity in marriage. And when the author was
discovered to be a clergyman’s daughter there was more scandal. Even
Charlotte Brontë’s own godmother would never speak to her again. Charlotte
replied in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, reminding her critics
of ‘certain simple truths’:
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is no religion. To
attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face
of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of
Thorns… appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human
doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be
substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ.
In the last year of her life Charlotte Brontë achieved a personal happiness that
had for so long escaped her, when she married Arthur Bell Nicholls (1819-
1906), her father’s curate for seven years. It was not the passionate romance
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