Jane Eyre

Summary

Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John. After she strikes back at John she is locked in the red-room where her uncle died and collapses in terror; the kindly apothecary Mr. Lloyd suggests school. At Lowood, a charity school run by the stern and stingy clergyman Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane suffers cold, hunger and public shaming, but finds a mother-figure in the superintendent, Miss Temple, and a friend in Helen Burns, who teaches her Christian forbearance. Typhus sweeps the school in spring, and Helen dies of consumption in Jane's arms. The scandal brings reform, and Jane stays eight years, six as pupil and two as teacher. Advertising for a post, she becomes governess to Adèle Varens, the French ward of Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall. Rochester, brusque, moody and twenty years her senior, comes to value her frankness, and they fall in love. Strange events trouble the house: a mocking laugh from the third storey, a fire set in Rochester's bed, and a night attack on the visitor Richard Mason, all blamed on the servant Grace Poole. Rochester courts the beautiful Blanche Ingram to test Jane's feelings, then proposes to Jane in the orchard; that night lightning splits the great horse-chestnut. On the wedding morning a solicitor and Mason halt the service: Rochester has a living wife, Bertha Mason, whom he married in Jamaica and who is insane and confined in the attic. Rochester begs Jane to live with him abroad; she refuses and leaves Thornfield secretly at dawn with almost nothing. After days of wandering, sleeping on the moor and begging, she is taken in at Moor House by the clergyman St. John Rivers and his sisters Diana and Mary. She teaches a village school, learns that her uncle John Eyre has left her twenty thousand pounds, discovers that the Riverses are her cousins, and divides the fortune equally among them. St. John asks her to marry him and go with him as a missionary to India, offering duty without love. As she is about to yield, she hears Rochester's voice calling her name. Returning, she finds Thornfield a blackened ruin: Bertha set it on fire and leapt from the roof, and Rochester, trying to save her, lost an eye and a hand and the sight of the other eye. Jane goes to him at Ferndean, they marry, and after two years he regains partial sight in time to see their first son. The novel closes with St. John's letter from India awaiting death. It was published in London in October 1847 by Smith, Elder and Co. as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, edited by Currer Bell; the library text includes the preface to the second edition, dedicated to Thackeray.

Top Lessons

• Principles are for moments of temptation

  When Rochester begs her to stay as his mistress, Jane admits that every feeling urges her to yield. She leaves because the law of God and the principles she held when calm are meant precisely for such a moment. The novel presents conscience as a commitment kept against one's own desires.

• Helen's forbearance and Jane's fire

  At Lowood Helen Burns urges patience and forgiveness; Jane insists that she must strike back at those who are unjust. Over the novel Jane learns something from Helen without losing her own strong sense of justice, and she forgives Mrs. Reed at her deathbed. Brontë sets two kinds of Christian response side by side and lets each correct the other.

• Equal souls

  In the orchard Jane tells Rochester that, though she is poor, obscure, plain and little, she has as much soul and heart as he, and that they stand equal before God. Her dignity rests not on rank, beauty or wealth but on her nature as a spiritual being. That conviction lets her refuse both Rochester's unlawful offer and St. John's loveless one.

• Two ways of serving God

  St. John Rivers offers Jane a life of heroic missionary sacrifice without love; Rochester, humbled and repentant at Ferndean, offers love within marriage. Jane honors St. John's zeal, and the book ends with his words, but she judges that marrying without love would be a kind of death for her. The novel asks how calling, duty and love belong together.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Jane Eyre gathers many of the medical concerns of the 1840s into one life. Bertha Mason is the best-known madwoman in English fiction: Rochester describes her madness as inherited from a mother shut in an asylum, in keeping with the period's hereditary theories of insanity, and keeps her at home under a paid keeper rather than in an institution, explaining that his conscience recoiled from lodging her at his damp, unhealthy manor at Ferndean. Grace Poole is hired from the Grimsby Retreat, a fictional name that may recall the York Retreat of the Quaker moral-treatment movement; this is a reader's association, not stated in the novel. Bertha's violence, including the night she stabs and bites Mason and Jane's comparison of her to a vampire, belongs to Gothic convention as much as to clinical observation, and any modern diagnosis is speculative. Lowood shows the link between institutional diet, damp and crowding and disease: typhus sweeps the school, while Helen Burns dies separately of consumption, the distinction Jane notes. The child Jane's collapse in the red-room is treated by an apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, who perceives that unhappiness rather than the fall made her ill. Later episodes include Mrs. Reed's fatal stroke after her son's reported suicide, Jane's near-starvation on the moors, the surgeon Carter's attendance on Mason, and the amputation of Rochester's crushed hand and his blindness after the fire.

• Chapters II-III

  Jane faints from terror in the red-room and is examined by the apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who recommends a change of scene and school.

• Chapters V and IX

  Lowood's scant, spoiled food and damp situation; the spring typhus epidemic; Helen Burns's death from consumption; the public inquiry and reform that follow.

• Chapter XX

  Rochester and the surgeon Carter dress Mason's knife and bite wounds; Mason says his attacker sucked his blood.

• Chapters XXVI-XXVII

  Bertha is shown in her attic room with Grace Poole; Rochester recounts her family history of madness, his reasons for keeping her at Thornfield, and the hiring of her keeper from the Grimsby Retreat.

• Chapters XXVIII and XXXVI-XXXVII

  Jane's starvation on the moors; the account of the fire, Bertha's death, the amputation of Rochester's hand and his blindness, and his partial recovery of sight.