When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, its Victorian critics didn't know what to do with it. One 1848 reviewer complained that Jane was “a merely moral person” who “might have been a Mahomedan or a Hindoo”— anyone but a Christian. Others confessed they couldn't tell whether she was “Hindoo, Mahomedan, or infidel.” Lady Eastlake pronounced the whole novel “preeminently an anti-Christian composition.” Scholar Sarah Barnette argues they could not have been more wrong — and that modern readers, who prize the book as a story of romance and female independence, miss the same thing from the opposite direction. Jane Eyre, she shows, is a profoundly pious novel, built on the architecture of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and animated by Charlotte Brontë's own anguished wrestling with Calvinist predestination and her father's Arminian faith in free will. Jane's true journey is not from governess to wife. It is from pride to humility, from rebellion to submission — a pilgrim's progress toward salvation, won by learning to obey the “still small voice” of conscience. The book Victorians called godless turns out to be about almost nothing else but God: