A Pre C20th GCSE Assignment on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Speaking & Listening and/or Written Response

I often get asked how to make Pre-Twentieth Century texts more accessible. This assignment has been used with a number of classes with children with statements of SEN and the students have enjoyed it. I hope you can make use of it too.

It can be used in conjunction with the full novel, the full chapters and/or the film version of the novel. The full chapters are available as a separate download and can be used on a whiteboard or...

Binary Opposition

The way a text creates and shapes its reader’s interpretation to develop both meaning and feeling can be fruitfully and subtly analysed by means of binary opposition. Despite its apparent complexity, this method can easily be understood by students of varying levels and ability from GCSE upwards. It can allow them to create subtle analyses of texts of the kind that can fulfil the requirements of the highest grade bands.

The theory works from the premise that many words and phrases have, as Steve Campsall terms it, their...

Jane Eyre & AO2

Form, structure and language - is often considered to be the hardest Assessment Objective to cover in A level essays. In fact, all three of these in Jane Eyre contribute to the development of themes, characters and plot, so they should be form an integral part of any discussion of these. Integrating points about form, structure and language into other discussions is a better way of including them than constructing a paragraph specifically to address AO2. Here are some ideas about ways it can be tied in:

A paragraph about Jane...

Brontë uses extended passages of direct speech to tell Jane’s story. In some ways this acts as protection against Jane’s later knowledge intruding on her younger self. As a device it enables characters to speak for themselves; it enables the reader to see, for example, Rochester’s feelings about Jane when she herself cannot. Apart from her initial introduction of the Reeds, we do not usually rely on Jane’s assessment of anyone, instead being given the opportunity to judge for ourselves from their actions.

Many passages in the book...

Jane Eyre is set firmly in northern England, in five separate locations. The Reed house at Gateshead, Lowood School, Thornfield Hall, Moor House (the Rivers’ house) and Ferndean Manor, which is Rochester’s smaller, more rural home. Mary, Rochester’s housekeeper at Ferndean, gives Brontë the chance to demonstrate that her control of the Yorkshire dialect is as strong as Emily’s, who used it in so extensively in Wuthering Heights: ‘she’s noan faâl, and varry good-natured.’ The dialect emphasises the more rural and remote...

The plot has been constructed by Brontë in order to allow her to create not only an absorbing and suspenseful narrative, but also, of course, to allow her to explore several themes in interesting and often persuasive ways.

Love

Love is a strong theme throughout the novel, which is essentially a romance; it is also the aspect of the novel which is quintessentially Romantic, with a capital ‘R’, in that the love which Rochester and Jane share is an extreme emotion. Both of them confess to overpowering feelings which cloud their judgement,...

Jane Eyre

Brontë constructs the character of Jane as having been left as an orphan after her parents’ death through typhoid; Jane is initially brought up by her mother’s (dead) brother’s wife, along with their children. Her paternal family are apparently ‘poor’, and she does not know anything of them, until her aunt – on her deathbed – reveals a letter from her father’s elder brother, who has made his fortune, but who has no children to whom to leave it. Later she discovers the Rivers family – the children of her father’s...

Brontë’s choice of creating a novel narrated by a ‘first person autobiography’ narrator of Jane Eyre and ostensibly edited by ‘Currer Bell’ is a conceit that serves to heighten the identification between author and protagonist – and which adds effectively to the authenticity and authority of the narrator.

The character of Jane narrates her life with the knowledge that she herself would possess at the time, if she were a real woman, rather than foreshadowing the dramatic narrative or giving any hint of future events. The form is...

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and was the first of Charlotte Brontë’s novels; it was written in the same year as her sister, Emily Brontë’s, only novel, Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte (born 1816), together with Emily and Anne, lived at Haworth Parsonage, in North Yorkshire, where between them, they created complicated make-believe worlds as children before growing up to write.

Their mother died when Charlotte was just five, and when she was only 9, she found herself the eldest child, looking after the family, including her brother and...

Jane Eyre Overview of Specifications & Assessment Objectives.pdf

1. ­Overview of Specifications & Assessment Objectives

2. Context

3. Form

4. Characters

5. Themes

6. Setting

7. Language

8. Writing about Jane Eyre