A Class Perspective to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor

In the mid-19th century, Great Britain was so much facing social class inequalities that the writers

of the period oriented their compositions towards those discriminations. Victorian authors such as

Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell...strove to denounce the

inequalities generated by the social class system. Charlotte Brontë did not depart from that norm.

In the light of the above, the present work is an analysis of the socio-economic features

surrounding Charlotte Brontë's four novels: Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1854), and

The Professor (1857). The rationale for such an initiative resides in the fact that the authoress's

works of fiction cover a wide range of topics, where social class stratification is the most evident.

More practically, four aspects inherent to the topic have been identified. These are: the defects of

the upper-class, the Master-pupil/Master-servant relationship, the tribulations of the middle class

(represented by governesses, companions, tutors, teachers, etc.), and class-based matrimonies.