Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the novel that made Charlotte Brontë famous and one of the most influential novels ever written. Published in October 1847 under the pseudonym “Currer Bell” and subtitled “An Autobiography”, it is narrated by Jane, an orphan who looks back on her life from childhood: her persecution by a cruel aunt, her years at a grim charity school, her post as governess at Thornfield Hall, her love for its master, the moody, sardonic Edward Rochester, the terrible secret that stops their wedding, her flight into destitution, her refusal of a loveless marriage to a missionary, and her return to Rochester, now blind and maimed, as his equal. Its intensity of feeling, its passionate, rebellious, intelligent heroine and its mixture of realism and Gothic mystery made it a sensation, and it has never lost its power.

At a glance

The story

Jane Eyre, aged ten, lives at Gateshead Hall with her widowed aunt, Mrs Reed, and her three spoiled cousins, John, Eliza and Georgiana. Jane’s parents, a clergyman and a woman disinherited for marrying him, died of typhus when she was a baby; her uncle, Mr Reed, made his wife promise to raise her as one of her own, then died. Mrs Reed hates her. One November afternoon, John Reed, fourteen, bullies Jane and throws a book at her head; she fights back — “Wicked and cruel boy!… You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!” — and is locked in the red-room, where her uncle died. In the gloom she sees a gleam of light, thinks it is her uncle’s ghost, screams, and faints; Mrs Reed coldly locks her in again. Jane falls ill.

The kindly apothecary, Mr Lloyd, suggests sending her to school. Mrs Reed arranges for her to go to Lowood Institution, a charity school run by Mr Brocklehurst, a tall, black-clad, sanctimonious clergyman — “a black pillar” — whom she warns that Jane is a liar. Before leaving, Jane confronts her aunt: “I am glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt again as long as I live… You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so.”

At Lowood the girls are cold, half-starved, and humiliated in the name of Christian discipline; Brocklehurst orders the girls’ natural curls cut off while his own wife and daughters arrive in velvet and furs. He makes Jane stand on a stool and proclaims her a liar to the whole school. Two people sustain her: the kind superintendent, Miss Temple, who believes her and clears her name, and Helen Burns, a gentle, studious older girl who endures cruel punishments without complaint, teaching Jane to “love your enemies” and bear injustice patiently. In the spring, typhus sweeps through the school, killing many girls; Helen is dying of consumption, and Jane creeps into her bed at night. Helen dies in her arms, serene in her faith: “I am going to God.” The epidemic exposes the school’s conditions; it is reformed, and Jane spends six years as a pupil and two as a teacher.

When Miss Temple marries and leaves, Jane, eighteen, longs for “liberty… a new servitude!” She advertises for a post as governess, and is engaged by a Mrs Fairfax at Thornfield Hall to teach a little French girl, Adèle Varens, the ward of the absent master, Mr Rochester. Thornfield is a large, quiet, battlemented house; Jane is happy enough, but restless. Walking on the roof one day, she reflects on women’s confinement:

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action… 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.

On the third floor she hears a strange, low, mirthless laugh; Mrs Fairfax says it is a servant, Grace Poole, who sews there.

One January evening, walking to post a letter, Jane encounters a horseman whose horse slips on the ice and falls; she helps him remount. He is Edward Rochester, the master of Thornfield — dark, stern-faced, not handsome, about thirty-five, abrupt, sardonic and moody. He questions Jane in the evenings, sees her drawings, and enjoys her independence and frankness. He tells her of his past: Adèle is the daughter of a French opera dancer, Céline Varens, who was his mistress and betrayed him, and who may or may not be his child. Jane begins to love him.

One night Jane hears the laugh outside her door, finds smoke pouring from Rochester’s room, his bed curtains on fire, and drenches him with water, saving his life. Rochester, strangely agitated, says it must have been Grace Poole, and asks her to say nothing. He holds her hand and thanks her with warmth — then leaves the next morning for a house party.

He returns with a crowd of fashionable guests, including the beautiful, haughty Blanche Ingram, whom everyone expects him to marry. Jane is forced to sit in the drawing room and watch, listening as Blanche and her mother insult governesses. Rochester disguises himself as an old gypsy woman to tell fortunes, and tries to read Jane’s feelings. A stranger arrives from the West Indies, Mr Mason; that night a terrible scream rings through the house, and Rochester secretly asks Jane to tend Mason, who has been stabbed and bitten in the arm — “She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart” — in a locked room on the third floor, while he fetches a surgeon. Jane sits by the bleeding man through the night, hearing snarling behind a door.

Jane is summoned to Gateshead, where Mrs Reed is dying. John Reed has ruined himself and probably killed himself. Mrs Reed confesses that three years earlier Jane’s uncle John Eyre, a merchant in Madeira, wrote asking to adopt Jane and make her his heir — and that she told him Jane had died of typhus at Lowood. She dies unrepentant.

Back at Thornfield, on a midsummer evening in the orchard, Rochester teases Jane that he is going to marry Blanche and that she must go to Ireland. Jane breaks down and declares her love and her equality:

Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?… Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart!… it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, — as we are!

Rochester reveals that he loves her, not Blanche (he spread a rumour that he was poorer than believed, and Blanche’s interest cooled), and asks her to marry him. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” That night, lightning splits the great horse-chestnut tree under which they stood.

The engagement is uneasy: Rochester wants to dress her in silks and jewels; Jane resists being made his “doll”. Two nights before the wedding, she wakes to see a tall, savage woman with dark hair, a discoloured, swollen face and red eyes, who puts on her wedding veil, tears it in two and tramples it. Rochester says it was a dream, or Grace Poole.

At the church, as the vows begin, a lawyer, Mr Briggs, declares an impediment: Mr Rochester is already married. Mason confirms it. Rochester, savage and defiant, leads everyone to the third floor and shows them his wife, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, a Creole woman from Jamaica, who rushes at him like a wild beast:

In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

Rochester explains: fifteen years ago, as a young man, he was married by his father’s arrangement to Bertha in Jamaica for her fortune of £30,000; she turned out to be violent and mad, from a family of madness; he brought her to England and has kept her hidden, guarded by Grace Poole, while he wandered Europe seeking love. He begs Jane to go with him to the south of France and live as his wife. She loves him desperately, but will not become his mistress: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.” Before dawn she slips out of the house with twenty shillings.

The coachman sets her down at a crossroads called Whitcross, on the moors; she has left her parcel in the coach. For three days she wanders, begging for work and food, sleeping on the heather, eating porridge meant for a pig, turned away at doors. At last, starving and drenched, she follows a light across the moor to Moor House, where she collapses on the doorstep. She is taken in by St John Rivers, a handsome, cold, ambitious young clergyman, and his sisters Diana and Mary, who nurse her back to health. She gives her name as Jane Elliott. St John finds her work as the mistress of a village school for poor girls.

St John is in love with the beautiful heiress Rosamond Oliver but suppresses his love, since she would not be fit for his chosen life as a missionary in India. He discovers Jane’s identity from a scrap of paper. Her uncle John Eyre has died and left her £20,000 — and the Rivers are her cousins, their mother having been John Eyre’s sister. Jane, overjoyed to have a family, shares the fortune equally with them.

St John asks Jane to learn Hindustani with him, and then to marry him and go to India as a missionary’s wife — not for love, but because she is “formed for labour, not for love.” She offers to go as his sister, not his wife; he coldly refuses, insisting that God demands the marriage. His will almost overpowers hers. One night, as she is on the point of yielding, she hears Rochester’s voice calling her name across the miles — “Jane! Jane! Jane!” — and answers, “I am coming! Wait for me!”

She travels to Thornfield and finds it a blackened ruin. An innkeeper tells her what happened: Bertha set the house on fire; Rochester got the servants out, then went up to the roof to save his wife, who leapt from the battlements to her death; Rochester was trapped by the falling staircase, lost one hand, and was blinded. He lives in seclusion at Ferndean, a damp manor house in the forest. Jane goes to him. He is gloomy, helpless, scarred; she brings him water, teases him, and wins him back to life. He tells her that on the night she heard his voice he had cried out her name in despair, and heard her answer.

The last chapter begins: “Reader, I married him.” They have a quiet wedding; ten years later, Jane writes, they are perfectly happy, “ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.” Rochester regains partial sight in one eye and sees their first-born son. Adèle is educated well. Diana and Mary marry happily. The novel ends, surprisingly, with St John Rivers, working himself to death in India, awaiting his reward in heaven: “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!”

Themes

Independence and equality. Jane’s story is a series of struggles to preserve her integrity against forces that would diminish or possess her: Mrs Reed’s cruelty, Brocklehurst’s hypocrisy, Rochester’s desire to make her his mistress, St John’s cold religious will. Her insistence on equality of soul — across class, sex and wealth — made the novel revolutionary, and her financial independence (the legacy) makes her final marriage one of equals.

Love and conscience. Jane loves Rochester passionately, and the novel makes that love fully, physically real — yet she leaves him rather than compromise her principles. It is a novel of desire and of self-command.

Religion. The novel contrasts three kinds of Christianity: Brocklehurst’s hypocritical, punitive religion; Helen Burns’s saintly, otherworldly patience, which Jane admires but cannot share; and St John Rivers’s cold, ambitious zeal. Jane’s own faith is personal, emotional and compatible with earthly love.

Class and the governess. As governess, Jane occupies an anomalous place, neither servant nor lady, which exposes the snobbery of the gentry.

Bertha Mason. The “madwoman in the attic” has become one of the most discussed figures in literature. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) read her as Jane’s dark double, the embodiment of the rage and sexuality that Jane must repress. Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) gave Bertha — whom she renamed Antoinette — her own story: a Creole heiress in post-emancipation Jamaica, married for her money, renamed, uprooted, and driven mad by an English husband. Postcolonial critics, notably Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, 1985), have shown how the novel’s feminist liberation depends on the silencing and death of a colonial, racialised woman — and on a fortune made in the colonies.

Gothic and realism. The mysterious laugh, the fire, the torn veil, the voice across the moors: Brontë uses Gothic devices to embody psychological truths, within a realistic social world.

Reception and afterlife

Jane Eyre was an immediate bestseller and a scandal. Thackeray loved it; some reviewers attacked it as coarse and rebellious. It has been adapted dozens of times for film (Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, 1943; Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, 2011), television, stage and opera. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) rewrites it; Wide Sargasso Sea answers it; Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) plays with it.

In conversation

• “Reader, I married him” — a triumphant, matter-of-fact announcement.
• A madwoman in the attic — a hidden, repressed or inconvenient truth (or woman).
• “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me” — the declaration of independence.