Reflection on Research

To find most of my results, I was using the search term “jane eyre” or “jane eyre feminist.” I found the most useful resources using JSTOR, and I found a few on Humanities Source and MLA Bibliography but I found that these websites did not have as many useful sources as JSTOR. What was the most difficult for me was finding secondary sources that weren’t about Jane Eyre but rather on the subject of feminist media or analyzing similar themes/constructs in another text. (which, now that I am writing it feels like I was only supposed to find secondary sources on Jane Eyre, but I thought it would help me to draw upon ideas from other theories/arguments that did not involve Jane Eyre). I wish I was able to find sources from the Victorian/Georgian era of critics/reviewers, but one of the secondary sources I found did have quotes from these people and I could potentially track those sources down through that article. From my research, I have determined that there is an endless amount of discourse on Jane Eyre dating back to when it was published. There are people arguing in defense of Jane/Bronte, in critique of Jane/Bronte, and many different analyses of all different parts of the text. This reduced my fear of sounding redundant or repeating what many have said before, as now I know I am just joining in on the never-ending discourse of this text and I feel challenged by all these different ideas to come up with unique ones of my own.