SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “‘The Feelings and Claims of Little People’: Heroic Missionary Memoirs, Domestic(ated) Spiritual Autobiography, and Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.” In Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing, pp. 80-108. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Peterson compares Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to the nonfiction missionary writings of nineteenth-century women. Peterson suggests that Brontë's allusion to the missionary memoir raises broader questions about the life, education, and career path deemed proper for women.

When Charlotte Brontë read Harriet Martineau's Household Education (1849), she was astonished by the autobiographical passages that seemed so uncannily to recount her own childhood experiences. She told Martineau that “it was like meeting her own fetch,—so precisely were the fears and miseries there described the same as her own, told or not told in ‘Jane Eyre.’”¹ Similarly, when Martineau read Jane...