by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre follows its narrator from an unloved, orphaned childhood to an independent adulthood, through five houses that each test what she will give up in order to be loved and to belong. Brontë braids together three kinds of book: the realist novel of development, Gothic romance, and spiritual autobiography.
Published in 1847, when middle-class women had almost no legal or economic independence and few respectable occupations beyond governessing, the novel is radical in giving a “poor, obscure, plain, and little” woman a first-person voice full of anger, desire and moral conviction, and in insisting she is the moral equal of the wealthy man she loves. Its confessional narration, addressed straight to the reader, struck some Victorian critics as scandalous.
The novel argues that integrity must never be traded away — not for love, not for security. Jane leaves Thornfield rather than become Rochester's mistress, and refuses St John's loveless proposal even when duty seems to demand it.
Where to look: “I care for myself” (Ch. 27); the interrupted wedding (Ch. 26); refusing St John (Ch. 34–35).
Jane hungers for affection from the first page, but Brontë is careful that belonging never costs autonomy: the marriage of equals only becomes possible once Jane has money and family of her own.
Where to look: Helen and Miss Temple at Lowood; discovering the Rivers cousins (Ch. 33); “Reader, I married him” (Ch. 38).
As a governess Jane is neither servant nor family, and the novel is sharp about how a woman's worth is priced. Her uncle's inheritance is what finally lets the ending happen between equals.
Where to look: the Ingram party's contempt for governesses (Ch. 17); the inheritance (Ch. 33).
From the red-room to Bertha in the attic, the book fills with images of shut-in women. Jane's declaration that “women feel just as men feel” is one of the era's boldest; Bertha embodies a rage the heroine cannot speak.
Where to look: the red-room (Ch. 2); the battlements speech (Ch. 12); Bertha revealed (Ch. 26).
Brontë weighs faith through three figures (Brocklehurst's hypocrisy, Helen Burns's passive endurance, St John Rivers's cold ambition) and has Jane forge a fourth way: a conscience-led faith that does not deny feeling.
Where to look: Lowood (Ch. 4–9); St John's proposal (Ch. 34).
Fire-and-ice imagery runs throughout, and the supernatural (the split chestnut tree, the voice across the moor) externalises what characters feel. The novel disciplines passion without extinguishing it.
Where to look: the chestnut tree struck by lightning (Ch. 25); the telepathic call (Ch. 35).
“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!”
Jane to Rochester — Chapter 23
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was the daughter of a Yorkshire parson. She attended the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge (the model for Lowood, where two of her sisters died), and later worked as a teacher and governess. She and her sisters first published as the “Bell” brothers so their work would be judged “without... prejudice”.
There was no Married Women's Property Act: a wife's earnings and property passed to her husband until reforms of 1870–82. The vote was decades away. For a genteel woman who needed an income, governessing was almost the only respectable route — poorly paid and socially ambiguous, neither servant nor family.
Rochester is a Byronic hero: brooding, guilt-ridden, magnetic. The novel also draws on the Gothic tradition of Ann Radcliffe, on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and spiritual autobiography, and on fairy tale — Bluebeard and Cinderella both hover behind Thornfield.
Rochester's fortune and first marriage come from the Caribbean; Bertha Mason is a Jamaican Creole heiress. Later readers, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), have read the “madwoman in the attic” as the colonial cost hidden inside an English love story.
An immediate bestseller admired by Thackeray, but attacked by some reviewers as “coarse” and even “anti-Christian” for its heroine's anger and independence.
Orphan, pupil-teacher, then governess at Thornfield. Plain, poor and passionate but governed by conscience; grows from powerless child to a woman who marries on her own terms.
Worldly, secretive, Byronic; keeps his first wife hidden. Morally compromised but capable of change — blinded and maimed in the fire, he is humbled into an equal.
Confined in the third-storey attic and kept by Grace Poole. Violent and wordless; works as Gothic obstacle and as a double for Jane's own suppressed fury.
Handsome, glacial, consumed by missionary ambition. Offers Jane marriage as a “helpmeet” without love — duty stripped of warmth.
Devout and forbearing; endures injustice with Christian patience and dies of consumption in Jane's arms. A model Jane admires but cannot fully follow.
The aunt who rejects Jane and lies about her; and the hypocritical clergyman who runs Lowood on “privation” while his own family lives in luxury.
Gateshead (injustice), Lowood (discipline), Thornfield (love and temptation), Moor House (independence and kinship), Ferndean (equal union). Each move is a stage of growth and a fresh test of principle.
Bessie (kind nurse), Miss Temple (fair-minded superintendent), Diana & Mary Rivers (warm cousins), Adèle (Jane's pupil), Blanche Ingram (Rochester's supposed match), Grace Poole (Bertha's keeper).
Punished for fighting back against her cousin John, Jane is locked in the cold room where her uncle died. Terror, injustice and her first open rebellion; the room haunts the whole novel as an image of confinement.
At Lowood Jane meets two responses to a harsh world: Helen's patient endurance and Miss Temple's fairness. Helen's death after the typhus epidemic closes Jane's childhood.
Rochester's horse slips on the causeway and he must lean on Jane to stand. Their relationship begins with the social hierarchy briefly inverted.
Pacing the battlements, Jane delivers the novel's manifesto on women's need for “a field for their efforts” — and immediately hears the first sound of Bertha's laugh.
At the altar the ceremony is stopped: Rochester is already married. He takes the wedding party up to the attic to see Bertha “snatch and growl”. The Gothic secret erupts into the romance.
Tempted to stay as Rochester's mistress, Jane chooses self-respect over love and security and leaves Thornfield with almost nothing.
As St John presses her to marry him, Jane hears Rochester's voice on the wind. She returns to a burned Thornfield, a dead Bertha and a blind Rochester — and the marriage can finally be one of equals.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Jane — Chapter 23
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 23
“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!”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 23
“I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: 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!”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 23
“Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings?”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 23
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”Jane — Ch. 27
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this... I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now.”Jane — Ch. 27
“Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?” Still indomitable was the reply: “I care for myself.”Jane's inner debate — Ch. 27
“I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld.”Jane — Ch. 14
“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 15
“I am my own mistress.”Jane, after the inheritance — Ch. 37
“You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”Jane to John Reed — Ch. 1
“I resisted all the way: a new thing for me...”Jane, carried to the red-room — Ch. 2
“Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power.Jane, in the red-room — Ch. 2
“I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there.”Jane — Ch. 2
“Speak I must: I had been trodden on severely, and must turn.”Jane, before confronting Mrs Reed — Ch. 4
“I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live.”Jane to Mrs Reed — Ch. 4
“You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so.”Jane to Mrs Reed — Ch. 4
“A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs Reed.”Jane — Ch. 4
“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.”Jane — Ch. 12
“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”Jane — Ch. 12
“Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.”Jane — Ch. 12
“Anybody may blame me who likes.”Jane, before the battlements passage — Ch. 12
“I climbed the three staircases... and stayed there... while my mind's eye was fixed on... a bright vision.”Jane, pacing the third storey — Ch. 12
“I would always rather be happy than dignified” — but freedom must come first.Jane — Ch. 15
“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.”Narrator, of Bertha — Ch. 26
“It grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing.”Narrator — Ch. 26
“the clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet.”Narrator — Ch. 26
“That is my wife... And this is what I wished to have... this young girl who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell.”Rochester — Ch. 26
“Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family.”Rochester — Ch. 27
“it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.”Jane, of Bertha and the wedding veil — Ch. 25
“My bride is here... because my equal is here, and my likeness.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 23
“It is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 23
“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 23
“I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 27
“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 27
“To be privileged to put my arms round what I value... is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”Jane to Rochester — Ch. 37
“Reader, I married him.”Jane — Ch. 38
“I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine... To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.”Jane — Ch. 38
“I have now been married ten years.”Jane — Ch. 38
“I live in calm, looking to the end.”Helen Burns — Ch. 6
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”Helen Burns — Ch. 6
“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.”Helen Burns — Ch. 6
“By dying young I shall escape great sufferings... I am going to God.”Helen Burns — Ch. 9
“my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh.”Mr Brocklehurst — Ch. 7
“God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife... you are formed for labour, not for love.”St John Rivers to Jane — Ch. 34
“If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.”Jane to St John — Ch. 35
“God did not give me my life to throw away; and to do as you wish me would... be almost equivalent to committing suicide.”Jane, refusing St John — Ch. 35
“He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people.”Jane, of St John — Ch. 38
“you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed... it is your place to be humble.”Abbot to Jane — Ch. 2
“if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.”Abbot, of Jane — Ch. 3
“You are dependent, do you understand, Miss Eyre? you have no money.” — the governess is priced, never placed.The Ingram party on governesses — Ch. 17
“half of them detestable, and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi.”Blanche Ingram, of her governesses — Ch. 17
“I am an independent woman now... my own mistress.”Jane, after inheriting from her uncle — Ch. 37
“I would give it all to you... I give it away to my cousins.” — Jane splits the £20,000 four ways.Jane, on the inheritance — Ch. 33
“The great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.”Narrator — Ch. 25
“the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below... you did right to hold fast to each other.”Rochester, of the split chestnut tree — Ch. 25
“You—you strange, you almost unearthly thing!—I love as my own flesh.”Rochester to Jane — Ch. 23
“I heard a voice somewhere cry—‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’—nothing more.”Jane, the call across the moor — Ch. 35
“‘I am coming!’ I cried. ‘Wait for me!’”Jane, answering the voice — Ch. 35
“it was on Monday night—near midnight—that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to it.”Rochester, confirming the telepathy — Ch. 37
“Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin now... a dreary spectacle of desolation.”The innkeeper, of the fire — Ch. 36
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