What you'll learn

• What context means in Jane Eyre and how to use it for AQA.
• How Victorian ideas about gender, class, religion, and education shape Jane’s story.
• How to handle difficult context around empire, race, and Bertha Mason carefully.
• How literary context — especially the Gothic and the Bildungsroman — affects Brontë’s methods.

What “context” means

For AQA, context is assessed through AO3, which means explaining the relationship between the novel and the world it came from. It is not a separate history paragraph. You need to show how context helps us understand Brontë’s choices and the reader’s response.

Use this map as a quick overview of the main contexts that shape Jane Eyre.

Charlotte Brontë and the Victorian world

The Victorian period means the years of Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to 1901. Jane Eyre was published in 1847, early in this period.

Charlotte Brontë published the novel under the male-sounding pseudonym — a pen name — “Currer Bell”. This matters because women writers often faced prejudice: their work could be dismissed as improper, emotional, or intellectually weaker than men’s writing.

Brontë’s own life also matters. She was the daughter of a clergyman, attended the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and worked as a governess. Lowood and Jane’s governess role are not simple autobiography, but Brontë clearly uses experiences she understood.

Gender and patriarchy

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold most power in the family, law, politics, and public life. In Victorian Britain, respectable women were often expected to be modest, obedient, domestic, and dependent on male protection.

Married women also had limited legal independence. The legal idea often called coverture meant that a married woman’s property and legal identity were largely controlled by her husband. This makes Jane’s insistence on independence especially important.

Jane repeatedly refuses to be treated as a decorative or passive woman. Her famous declaration, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” uses metaphor — describing one thing as another — to reject confinement. The “net” suggests the social traps of gender, marriage, and dependency.

The ending is important too. “Reader, I married him” gives Jane grammatical control: she is the subject of the sentence. Brontë does not simply reject marriage; she imagines a marriage that can only become acceptable once Jane has money, choice, and moral independence.

Class and the governess

A governess was an educated woman paid to teach children in a wealthy home. She occupied an awkward class position: too educated to be treated as an ordinary servant, but still paid and dependent, so not fully equal to the family.

Jane’s position at Thornfield is therefore socially unstable. She is close enough to Rochester to talk with him intelligently, but far enough below him in wealth and rank for their relationship to seem improper.

Education, charity, and Lowood

A charity school was a school intended for poor or dependent children, often funded by wealthy donors and linked to religious teaching. Lowood is Brontë’s fictional charity school.

Lowood exposes how charity can become cruel when it is mixed with pride, hypocrisy, and class superiority. Mr Brocklehurst preaches humility and self-denial to poor girls while his own family appears comfortable and well-dressed. Brontë criticises a system where vulnerable children are expected to suffer in the name of moral improvement.

The outbreak of typhus at Lowood also reflects Victorian anxieties about disease, poor sanitation, and institutional neglect. Jane survives, but Helen Burns dies, making Lowood a place where spiritual lessons and physical suffering are painfully connected.

Religion: faith, hypocrisy, and conscience

Victorian society was deeply shaped by Christianity. Evangelicalism was a Christian movement that emphasised scripture, moral discipline, personal conversion, and reform. In the novel, Brontë presents several versions of religion rather than one simple message.

Mr Brocklehurst represents religious hypocrisy: he uses Christian language to control and shame children. Helen Burns represents forgiveness and endurance, especially when she tells Jane to “Love your enemies”. St John Rivers represents duty taken to a cold extreme: his missionary ambition demands self-sacrifice without love.

Jane’s own faith is different. It is linked to conscience, self-respect, and moral choice.

Empire, race, and colonial wealth

Colonialism means one country controlling or exploiting another territory. Britain’s empire shaped Victorian wealth, trade, and attitudes. Jane Eyre contains important colonial links: Bertha Mason comes from Jamaica, Rochester’s marriage brings West Indian money, and Jane’s inheritance comes through her uncle in Madeira.

This context needs care. British slavery was abolished in most colonies in 1833, before the novel was published, but West Indian wealth was still associated with plantation history and racial exploitation. The novel reflects some racist and racialised assumptions — meaning people are described or judged through ideas about race.

Bertha Mason is especially difficult. She is locked away, silenced, and often described through animalistic Gothic imagery. A modern reader can recognise that the novel uses troubling stereotypes while still analysing how Bertha functions in the plot.

Literary context: Gothic, Romanticism, and the Bildungsroman

The Gothic is a literary mode involving mystery, fear, secrets, confinement, threatening buildings, and supernatural-seeming events. Thornfield is full of Gothic features: locked rooms, strange laughter, night-time danger, and hidden violence.

Romanticism was a literary movement that valued emotion, imagination, nature, and individual experience. Jane’s intense feelings, spiritual independence, and love of wild landscapes show Romantic influence.

A Bildungsroman is a novel of growth and development, following a character from youth towards maturity. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman because Jane moves through Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, and Ferndean while developing moral judgement and independence.

How to write context well

A strong context sentence usually follows this pattern:

• Make a point about the novel.
• Attach a short quotation.
• Name Brontë’s method.
• Connect to a relevant context.
• Explain the effect on meaning or the reader.

For example: Brontë uses Jane’s metaphor “I am no bird” to reject the Victorian expectation that women should be passive and contained; the image of the “net” makes social restriction feel like physical entrapment.