ABSTRACT
Jane Eyre is an amateur artist. She receives the conventional art education for young ladies at Lowood School and progresses to the stage where she can later instruct others and even reproduce a creditable likeness of the beautiful Rosamond Oliver. Her art becomes her mode of self-expression, revealing in rare glimpses her depth of character and aspirations for independence. Jane Eyre is Charlotte Brontë’s first novel in which the protagonist is a heroine and it is significant that her heroine should be a visual artist rather than a writer. Until the age of nineteen when she returned to Roe Head as a teacher, Charlotte intended to be a professional artist, but without the finances and necessary training she remained an amateur like her heroine. Much critical attention has been focused on Anne Brontë’s heroine as a professional artist in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, yet because Jane Eyre never sells her paintings her role as visual artist has been neglected. This essay attempts to trace Jane’s experience of art as a representation of Charlotte Brontë’s own education and artistic trajectory, and by extension that of all young women of the period whose lives were circumscribed by convention. In the process, the essay will provide a survey of the type of visual art that influenced the Brontë family in their formative years.
