Female Education as a Theme in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë.

In her novels, Charlotte Brontë challenges the experiences of women in education, class, marriage and employment. It is not surprising that female education had a prominent part to play in her novels: two of them have their main setting within a school, and the protagonist is employed as teacher, governess or tutor. Although Charlotte’s preoccupation with teaching as a career and with the means by which a woman could achieve that role reflects her own life experience, it is incorrect to assume that she wrote about these matters simply because this was familiar territory for her. Education, and particularly the education of women, was an issue of growing importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My paper outlines some significant educational issues at the time Charlotte was writing — the function of teaching and learning and the curricula content for male and female education — and considers the connection in her novels between education and power imbalance between the sexes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]