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As sources of material for her fiction Bront used the experiences she her sisters and her

As sources of material for her fiction, Brontë used the experiences she, her sisters, and her female friends had at school and work. While neither she nor any of her sisters or friends fell in love with and married an employer like Mr. Rochester, the experiences of school, as student and teacher, and of governess work, were based strongly on experience. Brontës experiences at Cowen Bridge School provided the foundation for much of Janes experience as a student at Lowood, and Brontës experiences at Roe Head School provided her with an understanding of the experiences Jane would have undergone as a teacher at Lowood. Brontë worked for two separate families as a governess. Those experiences, together with those of her sister Anne, gave her a clear understanding of the restrictions involved in the life a governess was supposed to lead in Victorian England. All these experiences combined with her own ideas of romantic love, gleaned primarily from Romantic novels and poetry, to create the novel Jane Eyre. To understand the world that Charlotte Brontë was a part of, and how unlikely it was that women like Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë would come to write novels as full of romantic ideas and thoughts of freedom for women as they did, one must examine the ideas that dominated the early Victorian world and dictated its lifestyle. Twenty-first–century readers of Brontës works can hardly imagine a world in which women are not allowed to enter professions, in which married women are not permitted to control their own money, in which mothers do not even have the right to be a part of their own childrens lives unless their father gives permission. ... That understanding will enable contemporary readers to incorporate ideas and attitudes from Brontës own time as well as from the twenty-first century into their personal interpretations of the novel. ... The second chapter explores the formal education that was available for girls in Brontës time.

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