139-40). Undeterred by the fact that their book of poems sold only two copies and determined to support themselves as writers, the young women began work on novels thereafter. Charlotte’s first mature effort, The Professor, was rejected by numerous publishers, but the firm Smith, Elder & Co. urged her to try a three-volume novel with more action and excitement. The result was the immediately successful Jane Eyre, a novel that treats the social realities of mid-nineteenth-century Britain in a context of gothic mystery.
England’s orphans and orphanhood. Scholars and critics often comment on the literary usefulness of orphanhood in the world of the novel. The orphans of fiction, they observe, have a wider field of experiences open to them than would a child raised in a family: there are no protective parents to prevent interesting adventures or misadventures from befalling an orphan as the action of a novel proceeds. This is certainly true for Jane Eyre, who is thrown into several crises from which a parent might have rescued her.
As convenient a device for fiction as orphanhood might have been, there was a social and historical basis for the large number of orphanheroes in nineteenth-century British novels.
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