Review of ‘Jane Eyre; An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell’, in The Quarterly Review, Vol. 84, no. CLXVII

Date

December, 1848

Identifier

Shoults Eb 1809 Q

Publisher

London: John Murray

Abstract

In 1848, Charlotte Brontë published her first novel Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Elizabeth Rigby, writing anonymously, produced a particularly scathing review. Rigby – one of the first women to write for the Quarterly – declared Jane Eyre ‘a decidedly vulgar-minded woman’ and Rochester ‘a strange brute’. If the author was a woman, wrote Rigby, ‘she had long forfeited the society of her own sex’. Unaware of her reviewer’s identity, Brontë responded, “I am afraid he is no gentleman’.

Files

Cab 4- rigby.jpg

Citation

[Elizabeth Rigby], “Review of ‘Jane Eyre; An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell’, in The Quarterly Review, Vol. 84, no. CLXVII,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage, accessed March 29, 2024, https://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/10811.