eader, I chose the novel for seminar, students rebelled, but the novel won them over.
Like Jane’s “Reader, I married him,” the story is more complex than that synopsis. But for anyone who might want to know in advance, it had a happy, complicated ending, not unlike the novel. Along the way, the essential questions about teaching literature in our time came up, and I wrote this essay to discover whether that’s reason enough to choose the book again next time around.
In the fall semester 2025 I co-taught a Baccalaureate Seminar in history and literature at Bard College with my colleague, Wendy Urban-Mead, a historian of Africa. The seminar is designed for adult learners who either never attended college or who are returning after life interrupted their previous attempt. Wendy and I have collaborated on the “Bacc Sem” several times. The students have always been passionate and curious, as you might expect from a group that has elected to pursue a liberal arts degree halfway through their life’s journey. The course is meant to resemble Bard’s first-year seminar, providing students with practice in critical analysis and writing through shared readings of great books. But it is also meant to strengthen relationships in the cohort as they reflect on their educational and life experiences.
Wendy and I have generally chosen two core texts about education and schooling — one that will be approached historically, the other that will be engaged with as a work of literature. Our practice has been to begin together as a large group, then split the cohort for half the semester, during which I teach literature to half the cohort, and Wendy teaches history to the other half. We meet as a whole group again at midterm, swap, and then reunite for a plenary session at the end, during which we reflect on the differences between the two disciplines.
For the 2025 version of the course, Wendy was eager to teach Ngũgĩ wa’ Thiongo’s memoir Dreams in a Time of War, supplemented by historiography on topics raised by his account. Characteristically, I agonized over several possibilities for my part. The low-hanging fruit would be to teach a Ngũgĩ novel, or at least a work of African fiction. But while we wanted the course to be thematically unified, with texts that spoke to each other, we also felt that the two sections should provide contrast. I had been rereading the Brontës and had taught Emily over the summer. It had been almost a decade since I last taught Jane Eyre, and we decided that it could work: a first-person narrative from the ascendency of the British empire, one with a rich critical heritage and the burden of canonicity. The resonance with Ngũgĩ would be powerful, and yet each section could stand on its own.
How to frame the novel was my next question. A defining characteristic of the contemporary literature course is a theme that provides the rationale for the selection of texts. Catchy course titles are a must in the marketplace of registration. For years I taught The Empire Writes Back, a course on post-colonial responses to canonical European literature. I borrowed the title from Salman Rushdie, whose work was always included. It’s one of the most popular classes I ever taught. Among its virtues was that the modern fiction and poetry, mostly from the global South and powerful in its own right, provided a reason for students to read a handful of Brit Lit classics that they (incorrectly) assumed would be fusty and irrelevant. Jane Eyre was part of that course. Many times, I reversed chronology, beginning with poetry from Lorna Goodison and Derek Walcott, moving next to that reimagining of Jane Eyre’s origins, Jean Rhys's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, and finishing with Brontë’s book. That sequence constituted just over a third of a sixteen-week seminar and, invariably, led to discussions of race, genre, the subaltern’s voice, and canonicity.
The Empire Writes Back had a limitation that all thematic courses share: the theme pre-reads the texts. That slightly overstates the case. There are many ways to read “imperialism” in Jane Eyre, for example. But a powerful theme, particularly one that appeals to the social and political predispositions of the students, tends to invite predictable interpretations. All of us bring our knowledge and biases to our readings, so the thematic course risks enabling a student’s tendency to reduce imaginative works to foregone conclusions. One reason I shelved The Empire Writes Back was that I wanted to free the literature from those constraints, and free the students to find something unexpected.
That was my intent in teaching Jane Eyre in the Baccalaureate Seminar, and yet I couldn’t simply hand them the novel. As I see it, to do so is a form of teaching malpractice in a literature course, one that I experienced most often back in the dark ages when I was a student. In fairness to the professors who mentored me, the standard rationale for the book we were assigned in those days was the period it represented. We were reading Pope, for instance, because he’s an Augustan, and it was a course on the Augustan Age. Or in some cases, the sheer greatness of the text itself was the rationale. I took a course called Ulysses, and another called Paradise Lost. I could have taken one called Hamlet. The rationale for that course would have been that it’s Hamlet, for goodness’ sake, so what more rationale do you need? I have some sympathy with the approach and would encourage any student to take a course called Hamlet. But as the canon of what constitutes “English” has opened up, literature teachers owe their students compelling reasons for embarking on a book. A well-wrought curriculum will offer multiple points of contact among the works during the journey. To shift the metaphor: it will ensure that students have many paths into the texts and that they can find many ways that the texts connect to each other. Whether to disclose the reasons from the start is an important decision, since doing so can have the same effect as a dominant theme. Wendy and I chose to give what we considered to be just enough information to orient the students, and then trust that students would discover the rest.
I assumed that if any students knew Jane Eyre already, they were likely familiar with a post-colonial reading and Wide Sargasso Sea. So I wanted to give them a different context that was just as important critically and historically. The new Norton Critical edition included an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s essay on the Brontës, which reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s “Jane Eyre: Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” That would be the angle: to go back to the early feminist readings that reoriented the critical discourse around Brontë’s novel from Victorian moralizing about Jane to taking her character seriously as an experiment in female voice and agency. I would begin with Woolf’s essay on “How to Read a Book,” in order to think about how and why we read fiction. That would be followed by Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” a powerful allegory of identity, reading, and storytelling. After several classes on the novel itself, we would end with Woolf and Rich’s influential interpretations of Jane Eyre.
From the outset, every class session was an animated exchange among a committed group of students — a teacher’s joy. Even students who expressed skepticism dutifully read the texts. A few classes in, I began to keep a journal:
Finally it dawns on me that the flashpoint was Rich’s poem, because it purports to speak of a common experience of oppression and marginalization: “We are, I am, you are.” It may not matter that Rich of course recognized differences, including her own “privilege” relative to others, because the students’ frustration seems to come from representation as such. That is, white women writers (in these cases) representing women’s experience (singular), when (so the argument goes) women-of-color see and experience the world differently. The problem with Jane Eyre, by extension, is that it is caught up in this myth of representation because of its centrality to (white) feminism.
“Why are we still centering Jane Eyre?” students asked, in those terms, even as they admired Brontë’s writing and were compelled by Jane’s voice. I had hoped to let Jane Eyre breathe a bit. Maybe my framework had boxed her in. I began to question my decision to lead with Woolf and Rich, rather than any number of other options:
It’s a Bildungsroman, Rich’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s a gothic fiction with complex characters and prose — that is, an example of genre fiction as art. It examines spiritual, even religious, struggle, the problems of belief. It examines anger and cruelty, as well as resilience and grace. Irrespective of one’s take on its feminist afterlife, it is evidently about domineering, gaslighting men, and women trying not to be destroyed by them. Its evocation of mood and setting are often unsurpassed. Likewise, its sentimentality can be profoundly embarrassing…. In teaching the Bacc Sem, I need to be sure we consider the novel’s breadth and range and not make it solely about a white girl who triumphs over patriarchy.
Between classes, I reached out to the students who had asked “Why Jane now?” The shared concern among a diverse group was that, Ngũgĩ notwithstanding, the seminar could be construed as elevating white voices. Brontë, Woolf, Rich — hadn’t their stories already been heard? In response, I suggested that I propose alternative readings. It was already evident that most of the students wanted to read Jane Eyre, and I considered it important to honor that. But I could revise the slate of other readings to bring in writers of color. I posted the suggestion over email, with the caveat that no changes would be made until we had a class discussion and came to consensus.
In the ensuing discussion, while the majority expressed appreciation for the gesture to change the readings, they were inclined to stay the course. They wanted to read Jane Eyre and the others as I had planned on the syllabus. One student made the case that if the novel lived up to its reputation, everyone should be able to find something of value in it. Others said that they didn’t need guidance towards writers of color. They were well-read in literature by Black and Brown writers, could make suggestions if anyone wanted them, and were more interested in finding out where these texts, which they’d never read, would take us. The question of whether to center a white writer seemed moot at this point, others argued, because the die had been cast by the professor already. To retrench now risked tokenizing whoever replaced Woolf or Rich, and there was the fact that half the course would be Ngũgĩ. About an hour into the discussion, the consensus was to stick with Jane and Company.
Without a full transcript and a description of each student who spoke, I cannot do justice to the passion and care of that conversation. Suffice it to say that if our public discourse in the US were half as civil on divisive matters, the nation could live up to its ideals. Be that as it may, I found myself preparing even more assiduously than usual for each class meeting. I tried to anticipate every possible concern or objection. That’s a fool’s game, and it isn’t worthy of the hearts and minds of students. It took me a few sessions to remember that:
Rarely have I fretted so much about my students’ reaction to a text, and then each time the class has been a delight. What surprises me most is the personal engagement with Jane — the genuine, felt interest in her story — not uncritical, but the critique of the novel proceeds from an investment in the character. It’s as if Jane were real, and her concerns were worth attending to. That experience of the novel is essential to what the form offers — we have to enter the imagined world or the effect is dulled. From there, we can grapple with the social and moral questions that the story, the art of it, has raised.
It was my students’ relationship with the character that made Jane’s first references to race and enslavement all the more disconcerting. Locked away in the red room as punishment for fighting back against her cousin, John Reed, Jane seethes in “the mood of a revolted slave” (16). She tries to reconcile her dead uncle’s wish that she be cared for, with her aunt’s mistreatment of her, and concludes that Mrs. Reed could not “really like an interloper not of her race … an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group” (17). That the adult Jane’s use of “race” in her reflections is best understood as the equivalent of “kindred” makes her no less race-conscious. To my students, her claim of kinship with enslaved peoples bordered on offensive, even if scholars have pointed out that this was a common strategy of abolitionists. “Her father’s college education was sponsored by William Wilberforce,” I noted, as if the Brontës’ proximity to abolition were a palliative. And yet Jane’s descriptions of Bertha Mason trade on vocabulary that is at once typical of Gothic fiction and racist, so much so that we elected not to read the passages aloud. Blanche Ingram and Rochester are “dark” in complexion and character, but only Bertha is given bloated features, thick lips, and “purple” skin. Some students read Bertha as Jane and Charlotte intended — that is, as dehumanized, vampiric, not a full character. But others saw that as further evidence of the novel’s essential flaw: its racist denial of humanity to Bertha. In 2025, students went further than Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea and insisted on reimagining Bertha as a person of color. Because they had seen themselves in Jane’s loneliness and intellect, in her perseverance and her singular desire to learn and be taken seriously, they were frustrated by her callousness toward Bertha. And by extension, they could not forgive Brontë’s preference for the white girl over the brown. One of the most poignant student essays from the term was written as a letter to Charlotte, taking her to task for creating a character whose voice sometimes felt like their own, but who seemed all but oblivious to Jane’s sisterhood with Rochester’s former victim.
In the end, our students expressed gratitude for having read Jane Eyre in community. They did not feel that it should be shelved, and several have already asked if I’ll teach it again. They assume that I will, but I am not so sure, at least not in a compulsory educational setting, in which students haven’t elected to read the novel. Long ago now, it seems, Gayatri Spivak declared that it should not be possible to read nineteenth-century fiction such as Jane Eyre without reference to imperialism, and even if empire was not the topic of our seminar, we confronted its presence in Charlotte Brontë’s novel. But could doing so ever be enough?
For many years, Chinua Achebe taught at our college. The great African novelist who argued that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a racist text regularly taught the novella in his course Images of Africa in the West. I never had the opportunity to ask him about this choice, but I think it’s safe to assume what his reasoning was. The course was an elective, Conrad was listed in the description, and if you sign up for a course of that title, you should assume that the professor will guide you through the most notorious and influential “image” of Africa in the western canon. Conrad’s novella held its place in the canon for so long because, unlike the more popular imperialist images of Africa in H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, it's the kind of text made for an English class. It has the complicated, symbolic structure of a nightmare. It asks unanswerable questions. Its principal characters, Marlowe and Kurtz, are far from heroic. They are morally compromised people whom Conrad understands from the inside, even as he thoroughly misunderstands and misrepresents their victims and the culture of the lands being colonized. As the fact that Achebe taught the novel implies, to understand the imperialist mind that Conrad abhorred, a student would do well to deconstruct Conrad’s vision.
Jane’s story has more to recommend it than Marlowe’s. Her race consciousness is more naïve, as is Brontë’s, and it’s not the novel’s ostensible concern. I disagree with the position that assigning Jane Eyre privileges her perspective and centers a white voice. The novel arrives to us already canonized, and reading it as we did in the seminar provides an opportunity to assess its centrality and question Jane’s status as a representative character from the margins. But I take Achebe’s example to be instructive. Jane’s story, Brontë’s novel, is so absorbing that its racism is felt as personal. We cringe because we’ve embodied Jane. That is literature’s power, but experiencing it should be a choice. A better question than “why read Jane Eyre?” is “Under what circumstances might we assign Jane Eyre?” Based on our seminar experience, I will not shelve Jane Eyre, but I doubt I will again make it a core text in a compulsory course outside the major.
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 1-20.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Deborah Lutz. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2016.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1966.
Rich, Adrienne. “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979. 89-106.
_____. “Diving Into The Wreck.” The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984. 162-164.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243-261.
Thiongo, Ngũgĩ wa. Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir. New York: Vintage, 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights.’” The Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1984. 155-161.
_____. “How Should One Read a Book?” The Second Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1986. 258-270.
Created 24 August 2026