Read this excerpt from a research paper that argues that Charlotte Brontë was a pioneer of feminist literature. Which sentence is an example of evidence from a primary source? Charlotte Brontë is a well-known novelist and poet. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre. She was one of the few women in the Victorian era who pushed the boundaries and laid the groundwork for future feminists. Charlotte Brontë created a strong female character in her novel who voiced the author’s views on the status of women in society during the Victorian era. Through her character Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created an ideal female protagonist who refuses to submit to the rules set by the patriarchal society. For example, in the novel her character says, "Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer." Charlotte Brontë’s own rebelliousness and intolerance toward any injustice to women is reflected in her character Jane Eyre.

The novel Jane Eyre also has the character of Bertha Mason who is not portrayed as a well-behaved woman typical of that era. She is a mad woman living in an attic. Many literary critics believe that the character of Bertha Mason reflects the atrocities and pressures on women in the Victorian era. Though Bertha Mason is one of the antagonists of the novel, she shows how Victorian society viewed and ridiculed women who were passionate about something. This point is explained in the book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.