In addition to providing an exciting new reading of Charlotte Bronte’s classic, Jane Eyre, the book’s methodology includes close reading a range of archival and underexamined published sources, providing readers with new understandings of Bronte’s work and contexts.

The book’s range enables a story to be told about the enduring influence of the phenomenon of the female missionary on women biographers in the early decades of the nineteenth century, on famous women writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Olive Schreiner, and on women’s college culture at the turn of the century.

In unearthing important historical information on the representation of the female missionary, the book provides a valuable introduction to the under-explored topic of nineteenth-century missionary women, enriching knowledge of the period and opening up new areas for research.

For the first time, this book explores literary representations of the nineteenth-century female missionary in the context of the new imperial history as well as histories of gender and religion.

The book’s challenge of an easy linear relationship between religion and gender, and between the domestic and missionary female represents a significant contribution to studies of nineteenth-century literature, gender and religion.