Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre is Bronte's most popular novel.  It is the story of an orphaned girl who suffers misery at a charity school and who becomes a governess, eventually marrying her employer.  It was remarkable for the passionate intensity and rebellion of the protagonist, who consciously defies Victorian expectations regarding the passivity and docility of women.  While not an overtly political, the novel had a feminist effect on its contemporaries in its insistence on the validity of women's ambitions and desire for self-determination.  In the first  excerpt below, Jane has recently become a governess; Mrs. Fairfax is the housekeeper, and Adele is her pupil.  In the second, Jane's employer, Mr. Rochester, has feigned a romantic attachment to the odious Blanche Ingram in order to make Jane jealous.  So successful was his ploy that Jane, in this passage, insists on quitting her position and moving to Ireland.

Jane Eyre, Chapter 12

"Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trapdoor of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim skyline - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, town, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen; that then I desired more of practical experience that I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.  I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

Who blames me?  Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented.  I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.  Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.  

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.  Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.  Nobody knows how many rebellions beside political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people the earth.  Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.  It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh..."

Chapter 23

" 'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion.  'Do  you think I can stay to become nothing to you?  Do you think I am an automaton? - a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?  Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?  You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you - and full as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:  it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal - as we are!' "