Enemies of Freedom in "Jane Eyre"

Jane Eyre is a novel of liberation. A series of quests by Jane for freedom and her final attainment of that goal constitute its principal action. This fact places it in a large class of other nineteenth-century works of art: as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, the prison haunted the mind of the nineteenth century, which may be said to have had its birth at the fall of the Bastille. The genius of the age, conceiving itself as creative will,...