Exploring Gender and Power in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre via History, Literature, and Film

Charlotte Bronte's fictional heroine Jane Eyre famously declared: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will." To what extent, though, was this more a fantasy rather than a lived reality for women in nineteenth-century England? We explore gender and power through an interdisciplinary approach to the novel, pertinent historical sources, and a few modern film adaptations.