ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a new reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to argue that, while Brontë found a strong, heroic identity in the figure of the woman missionary, she rejected the notion that Victorian women should emulate the female missionary’s self-sacrifice. In addition to outlining how Brontë was exposed to the nineteenth-century missionary culture, the chapter demonstrates how Brontë’s governess novel follows the form of female missionary life writing and tract fiction, while revealing how such writing’s depiction of conversion relationships, missionary marriage and self-sacrifice constructed a pernicious ideology of missionary femininity for women to emulate. However, as the chapter reveals the role played by the evangelical, missionary supporter Ellen Nussey in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Brontë, the argument is made that, despite Brontë’s rejection of self-sacrificial missionary femininity for herself and her characters, Gaskell’s biography of her fellow novelist associated Brontë with missionary femininity and martyrdom. In this way, it is argued that Gaskell constructed Brontë as a female missionary heroine, resembling her missionary martyr character Ruth and her own self-construction as a martyred, missionary author.
