Private letter from Thackeray to Bronte’s publishers, which they then passed on to the author
I wish that you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy. Who the author can be I can’t guess — if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a ‘classical’ education. It is a fine book though — the man & woman capital — the style very generous and upright so to speak . . . Some of the love passages made me cry . . . I don’t know why I tell you this but that I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman’s writing but whose? Give my respects and thanks to the author — whose novel is the first English one (& the French are only romances now) that I’ve been able to read for many a day. (qtd. in Juliet Barker, The Brontes, St. Martin’s Press, 1994: 535)
Review published in the Era (14 November 1847)
This is an extraordinary book. Although a work of fiction, it is no mere novel, for there is nothing but truth and nature about it, and its interest is entirely domestic, neither is it like your familiar writings, that are too close to reality. There is nothing morbid, nothing vague, nothing improbable about the story of Jane Eyre, at the same time it lacks neither the odor of romance nor the hue of sentiment . . . The story is, therefore, unlike all that we have read, with very few exceptions, and for power of thought and expression, we do not know its rival among modern productions . . . all the serious novel writers of the day lose in comparison with Currer Bell. (qtd in Juliet Barker, The Brontes, St. Martin’s Press, 1994: 536)
Anonymous Review (Elizabeth Rigby) published in The London Quarterly Review (December 1848)
Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of the unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control which is liable to dazzle the eye too much for it to observe the inefficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.
Altogether the autobiography of Jane Eyre is preeminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment–there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence–there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact, has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.