Though Moor House servant Hannah's faculties were never ‘loosened or fertilized by education’ (Jane Eyre III.iii.340), she knows what schooling is for. Having registered the destitute but well-spoken Jane's claim to respectable social rank, Hannah immediately identifies the sole area in which a middle-class woman without ‘brass’ can support herself: education. As the servant of two governesses (on temporary leave to bury a father), she is aware that formal education at a boarding school is an essential qualification for any woman who aspires to live by teaching.

Hannah's creator had possessed that knowledge since childhood. Charlotte Brontë's own schooling was a family investment in her future ability to earn a living as a teacher, with the added bonus of her being able to pass on what she had learnt to Emily and Anne. Even the period at Cowan Bridge was part of a scheme to educate the Brontë girls (except Elizabeth, who clearly was not held to be the academic type) for teaching posts. The original advertisement for the Clergy Daughters' School in the Leeds Intelligencer spoke of pupils' being fitted ‘to return with Respectability and Advantage to their own Homes, or to maintain themselves in the different Stations of Life to which Providence may call them’.