CER (Cambridge English Readers) 4 The Amsterdam Connection

No angel in the house, or her author, could be innocent, or believe in the sanctity of love, and still speak with a man so easily, if censoriously, about sex and his mistresses, and about her own feelings. No woman should want to control her fate so desperately that she seeks out new «servitudes» in order to experience «realities» conceived in her imagination, realities having no apparent connection to the domestic. No unmarried woman in reality should say no to a minister's request for marriage and service to God and, listening to a voice in the wind, return to a man who may yet be married. "Reader, I married him." What is the moral here? Though French critic Eugene Forcade (Bronte's favorite critic of her novels) found Jane Eyre "a drama in which society plays more or less the cruel and tyrannical role assigned to fate in the tragedies of antiquity," and praised Bronte for her refusal to "call down a fiery judgment" on that society, few English readers could see anything beyond the passions of Jane Eyre, and even fewer could find a moral in them ...»