Beijing doesn’t get it – Jane Eyre is no model for domesticity

Love becomes, in Brontë’s telling, a choice, not a surrender. Perhaps that is the lesson young readers will take away from it.

2 min readOct 2, 2026 06:14 AM IST First published on: Oct 2, 2026 at 06:14 AM IST

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an unlikely heroine for a state seeking to teach young women a moderate face of feminism and the value of domesticity. Plain, financially constrained, lacking in social capital she might be, but Brontë’s heroine wasn’t short on self-awareness. She declares, “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.”

It is probably this insistence on equality that has lent the novel such appeal in China since it was first introduced in translation in the early 1920s. Now, however, the Chinese state has made it mandatory reading for ninth-grade students, arguably for quite different reasons: Beijing is waging an uphill campaign against plummeting birth and marriage rates. A 19th-century romance, with its promise of true love and a value system oriented towards home and hearth, could work as useful propaganda. In this modernist state re-reading, Eyre is rebellious, but not irredeemably so; independent, but not averse to settling down; outspoken, but unmistakably feminine. She is proof that a woman can have a mind of her own without turning her back on the domestic.

And yet, there are postscripts to this reading. Marriage at the end of Jane Eyre is undergirded by clarity. Eyre walks away from it when staying would have meant becoming lesser, unequal. Only later, with an inheritance of her own and the independence it guarantees, does she return to Rochester. Love becomes, in Brontë’s telling, a choice, not a surrender. Perhaps that is the lesson young readers will take away from it.