And Jane Eyre was the book of the year in England. Charlotte Brontë had let loose all the pent-up hatreds of her nature. She was no longer afraid. There had been hatred in her sister’s book. But Charlotte’s was a very concrete hatred and very personal. She went after the school that had killed her two older sisters. She made horrible images of the teachers and of the system. She took for her heroine a small plain-looking orphan girl who was designed by nature to be the butt of sadistic people. She wrote herself into little defenseless, tortured Jane Eyre. The hatred that forced the book out of her made its writing astoundingly vivid. It knocked its readers cold.

        —Margaret Lawrence, in The School of Femininity, 1936.