“Why can’t you love me the way I am?”:

Fairy Tales, Girlhood, and Agency in Neo-Victorian Visions of Jane Eyre

Abstract

This article explores the lasting appeal of Jane Eyre through an examination of two neo-Victorian adaptations, the recent televised mini-series Jane Eyre (BBC1, 2006) and April Lindner’s young-adult novel Jane (2010), which both call upon fairy-tale allusions in Charlotte Brontë’s novel. These fairy-tale connections function rhetorically to enhance Jane’s narrative ownership, promoting empathy with the heroine and defining agency in contemporary girlhood through a dialogue with the Victorian past. The article ultimately gestures toward the larger significance of neo-Victorianism in the representation of contemporary female childhood and adolescence in twenty-first-century popular culture