The language and categories used to articulate the self within each historical era offer a definitive key to cultural interpretation. From the ways a society draws the boundaries of selfhood, one can trace the dominant assumptions governing understanding of both social and psychological order. In each era there are significant shifts in these boundaries, altering, for example, the perceived relationship between visible form and inner quality, social formation and individual subjectivity, or the lines demarcating the normal from the pathological. Changes in the conventions governing the representation of character in the novel highlight, and contribute to, these transformations. Thus generalized references to physical appearance in the eighteenth-century novel are supplanted in the nineteenth by detailed delineations of external features; and the abstract qualities of mind attributed to earlier characters – the ‘true elegance of mind’ possessed by Austen's heroines – give way to descriptions of physiological surges of energy within the Victorian protagonist. Critics working on the modernist novel have been quick to point out the very direct relationship which exists between formal innovation, and early twentieth-century theories of psychology. With reference to the Victorian novel, however, there has been, correspondingly, comparative silence–an eloquent testimony, perhaps, to the power of the realist illusion.

Nowhere has this tendency to consider novels in isolation from contemporary psychological discourse been more evident than in the domain of Brontë scholarship.