Jane Eyre and Mary Garth: The Similarities In Which Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot Establish Their Respective Heroines as Truly Groundbreaking Puja Harikumar College

When comparing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to fellow Victorian novelist, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one might feel inclined to draw similarities between the title character of the former, to Dorothea Brooke. However, the Middlemarch character who is far more reminiscent of Jane is none other than Mary Garth. While the Jane and Dorothea’s respective decisions to marry for love regardless of social conventions are duly noted, Mary’s lower class status, inability to rely on any impressive endowment of beauty in her patriarchal society, and refusal to compromise her morals at the behest of men in her lives, regardless of their social and financial advantage over her, is far more reflective of the feminist themes of Bronte’s work.

Firstly, neither Jane nor Mary is described within their respective novels as possessing any considerable amount of beauty. Mary is repeatedly described in terms of her “plainness”, and Jane is described as plain at best by others, some of whom go so far as to refer to her as a “little toad” in terms of her looks. Mary and Jane’s lack of any major beauty may seem like a minor similarity at a surface level reading, but further examination will reveal the major disadvantage their unremarkable appearance...