Jane Eyre and the Genre of "Governess Novels"
Jane Eyre is perhaps the best known governess charatcer in nineteenth-century fiction, but as this article shows, Charlotte Brontë's heroine differs radically from the common depiction of governesses at the time. After an outline of the genre characteristics of the governess novel this article offers a close reading of some scenes in Jane Eyre in order to establish to what extent the novel can be