Fall 2025: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

In addition to the broad pedagogical frameworks outlined in the general introduction, the 2025 iteration of the Brontëgram assignment invited students to engage with three skills that we had practiced throughout the course: close-reading, engaging with scholarship and journalistic responses to the novel, and engaging with the concept of a persona through writing and images.

In this iteration of the course, the students preferred to have a short lecture and then a discussion. The opening lecture that I gave contextualized Jane Eyre within the Brontë sisters’ childhood manuscripts, The Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, where—drawing from newspapers, magazines, and other materials in the Brontë family’s home—the sisters created fictional worlds where they grappled with topics such as British imperialism in Africa. They had already had some exposure to the mechanics of close-reading and the histories of enslavement and imperialism from the first unit of the course, where we had engaged with scholarship, historical work, and literary texts about the 1781 Zong Massacre and the 1804 Haitian Revolution alongside the development of the British Romantic lyric.

One resource that became especially helpful for the students as we moved through Jane Eyre was Vanessa Zoltan and Lauren Sandler’s Hot and Bothered podcast about the novel, which dovetailed well with the emphasis on gender, race, and realism that I was emphasizing about the novel in my lectures and class discussions. I found that in class discussion and weekly responses, a particularly important concept that Zoltan and Sandler introduced for my students was critical pleasure—how to enjoy a novel while also being critical of its shortcomings as well as our own limitations as readers (“Final Thoughts”).

Another important activity that we pursued was reading Dominican-British writer Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a postcolonial novel that articulates the events preceding the plot of Brontë’s Jane Eyre through the perspective of Bertha Mason (Antoinette Cosway). While WSS is now well-known to scholars in Postcolonial Theory as well as Victorian Studies, from a teaching perspective, the novel remains fresh and perspective-shifting for our students. In this case, Rhys’s work helped to decenter Brontë’s voice as the only, or the most important, authority over the plot of Jane Eyre, and its rearticulation of the tale from Bertha Mason’s perspective helped to lay the groundwork for the Brontëgram assignment, since the assignment would require them to similarly take on the perspectives of different characters in the novel to construct a social media profile in their voice. The full syllabus for the course is available in the above tabs as well as the assignment sheet. The accompanying artist statements for each student group specify what sources they drew from in order to construct the social media profiles.

One thing I wish I had done differently was to be more explicit about what I mentioned in the general introductory essay: that while engaging more thoughtfully with how Jane Eyre depicts love and romance seems to strip these things of their magic or readerly pleasure, it actually helps us see how these phenomena are constructions and inventions that operate according to a script, and that script—when seen for what it is—can then be rewritten. I think this perspective was conveyed implicitly through the assignment, but, if I had had more time (and forethought!), I would have asked the students at the end of the assignment how they would like romances—both in the nineteenth-century past and today—to be rewritten and why. How would they like love to be understood or experienced in a novel?  Why does it matter, and what is preventing that vision from becoming real in the twenty-first century?

Cherrie Kwok

University of Iowa