As sources of material for her fiction Brontė used the experiences she her sisters and her
As sources of material for her fiction, Brontė used the experiences she, her sisters, and her female friends had at school and work. While neither she nor any of her sisters or friends fell in love with and married an employer like Mr. Rochester, the experiences of school, as student and teacher, and of governess work, were based strongly on experience. Brontės experiences at Cowen Bridge School provided the foundation for much of Janes experience as a student at Lowood, and Brontės experiences at Roe Head School provided her with an understanding of the experiences Jane would have undergone as a teacher at Lowood. Brontė worked for two separate families as a governess. Those experiences, together with those of her sister Anne, gave her a clear understanding of the restrictions involved in the life a governess was supposed to lead in Victorian England. All these experiences combined with her own ideas of romantic love, gleaned primarily from Romantic novels and poetry, to create the novel Jane Eyre. To understand the world that Charlotte Brontė was a part of, and how unlikely it was that women like Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontė would come to write novels as full of romantic ideas and thoughts of freedom for women as they did, one must examine the ideas that dominated the early Victorian world and dictated its lifestyle. ... Middle-class girls, like the Brontė sisters, tended to attend either boarding schools or day schools (if they attended school at all), where they learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. ... Page numbers in parentheses following quoted material refer to the texts listed in the suggested readings at the end of each chapter.