ABSTRACT
This chapter examines four texts, intended for varying reading age groups, which engage with Jane Eyre as an intertext. It serves to demonstrate how Jane Eyre's sustained presence plays an important role in twenty-first-century notions of childhood—at times specifically girlhood—and youth. Jane Eyre's intertextuality functions as an empowering narrative strategy that emphasizes children and youth's control and agency in their own maturation. Victorian vocabulary and concepts are introduced to children, bringing pieces of the Victorian era into the twenty-first century. Twenty-first-century conceptions and beliefs about childhood and adolescence were developed and formed in the nineteenth century, which forges and maintains the continued links of contemporary childhood to the Victorians. Jane Williams's self-restraint goes against current discourses arguing against teenagers being sexual beings because of their youth and presents a more Victorian discourse of sexuality that endorses waiting as an assertion of one's own control over sexuality.
