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- Strongly religious, believes there's nothing better than God and spreading God's love. Endures this life simply because she looks forward to the joys of the next life.
- Submissive and meek to Mr Brocklehurst and Miss Scatcherd, indeed anyone who tries to oppress her, resigning herself to her fate.
- Helen reading 'Rasselas' argues that only surrender and self-control will enable us to bear with the difficulties of life.
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- Becomes a strong friend and almost mentor to Jane during her time at Lowood.
- Her death by consumption leads Jane to reject self-sacrifice in the name of religion. Allows Jane to progress with the Bildungsroman idea: she has completed another step of her journey into self-discovery.
- Helen represents a mode of Christianity that stresses tolerance and acceptance, and ascetically trusts her own faith.
- Jane chooses 'Resurgam' to go on Helen's grave (I will rise again), stressing her faith in the afterlife and for worldly existance.
- Stark contrast to Mr Brocklehurst and St John's interpretations of religion.
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- ''Helen offers her own wonderfully generous creed which extends salvation to all human souls. However, Helen's shining capacity for love and forgiveness almost knocks Jane off her own personal path of righteousness'' (Sally Minogue)
- It is said by some critics that Helen Burns was modelled on Charlotte's sister Maria Bronte, who also died of consumption aged 11. Both sisters attended Cowan Bridge School, very similar in description to Lowood, with poor conditions and harsh punishments.
- ''Feminists may argue that the two most prophetic voices in the novel; Helen Burns and Jane Eyre, are female.''
- ''Helen and Bertha present implied and explicit connections to Victorian sexual ideology, but they also operate in an archetypal dimension of the story. Bronte gives us three faces of Jane, and resolves her heroine's psychic dilemma by destroying the two polar personalities to make way for the development of the central consciousness, integration of the spirit and the body.'' (Elaine Showalter)
- ''Rasselas is symbolic of the kind of wisdom, disenchanted stoicism and the acceptance of reality which Helen Burns has to teach Jane'' (Q.D.Leavis)
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- ''In the tranquility she imparted there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness''
- ''make his word your rule, and his conduct your example''
- "It is far better to endure pain which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you''
- ''By dying young I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.''
- ''I rely implicitly on his power, and confide wholly in his goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to him, reveal him to me."
- ''Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when lifeis so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness--to glory?"
- ''The fury of which she was incapable hadbeen burning in my soul all day''
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