Summary: Jane Eyre

The GIST

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is the story of a girl with no money, no family worth the name and no beauty, who insists all the same on being treated as a person. It appeared in London on 19 October 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell, subtitled An Autobiography, and it has never been out of readers' hands since. A BBC poll in 2003 ranked it the tenth best-loved book in Britain. It stands beside Pride and Prejudice as one of the most famous love stories in the language, and it is regularly counted among the greatest English novels.

What made it revolutionary was its voice. Jane tells her own life in the first person, from the vantage of maturity, and the events are coloured throughout by what she felt and thought as they happened. No novel before it had followed the moral and inner growth of its heroine so closely; one critic has called Brontë "the first historian of the private consciousness." Wrapped around that intimate voice is a wonderfully mixed book: a realistic account of a hard childhood, a Gothic mystery with a laugh in the attic corridor, and a romance between two people who are matched in mind though far apart in rank.

The Story

The novel follows Jane through five stages of her life, somewhere in the north of England.

It begins at Gateshead Hall. Jane is ten, orphaned when her parents died of typhus, and living with the family of her mother's brother because he asked for it on his deathbed. He was the only one of the Reeds who was ever kind to her, and he is long dead. His widow, Mrs Reed, regards the child as a burden and keeps her own three children away from her. The son, John, a spoiled bully of fourteen, torments Jane as he pleases. The only warmth in the house comes from the nursemaid Bessie, who tells her stories and sings to her, when she is not scolding.

One day Jane fights back against John, and it is Jane who is punished. She is locked in the red-room, a grand, cold, seldom-used bedchamber hung with crimson, where her uncle died nine years before. Brontë gives us the furniture piece by piece, the great bed like a tabernacle, the pale chair like a throne, the looking-glass in which Jane sees a strange little figure with a white face staring back. Alone there she rages at the injustice of her position. Why is she always accused and never able to please? She understands, looking back as an adult, that she was simply unlike everyone in that house: "I was a discord in Gateshead Hall." As the light fails her courage goes with it, she believes she sees her uncle's ghost, and she faints.

The kindly apothecary who attends her, Mr Lloyd, hears how miserable she is and suggests school. Mrs Reed is delighted to be rid of her and calls in Mr Brocklehurst, the stern clergyman who directs a charity school for girls, warning him that Jane has a "tendency to deceit." Before she leaves, the ten-year-old turns on her aunt and says exactly what she thinks of her. It is the first time we see what Jane is made of.

Lowood Institution is the second stage. The eighty girls there are kept in cold rooms, thinly dressed and badly fed, in the name of humility, while Brocklehurst's own wife and daughters go about in silk. Jane's first friend is an older pupil, Helen Burns, who is punished constantly for trifles and bears it without resentment. Jane cannot understand such meekness. Helen answers that it is her duty to endure, and that Jane would be happier if she stopped nursing grudges. When Brocklehurst visits, Jane drops her slate, is stood on a stool before the whole school and denounced as a liar. But the superintendent, Miss Temple, lets Jane tell her side, writes to Mr Lloyd to check it, and clears her name in public. From these two, the patient friend and the just teacher, Jane learns faith, self-command and the worth of being heard.

Then typhus sweeps through the weakened school, and Jane learns grief as well. The scandal exposes Brocklehurst's regime, new benefactors take charge, and Lowood becomes a decent place. Jane stays eight years in all, six as a pupil and two as a teacher. When Miss Temple marries and leaves, Lowood loses its hold on her. She wants a wider life, and she advertises for a post as a governess.

The answer comes from Thornfield Hall, where the housekeeper, kindly old Mrs Fairfax, needs a teacher for Adèle Varens, an excitable little French girl who is the ward of the absent owner. Jane settles in. One winter evening, walking out to post a letter, she sees a horse slip on the ice and throw its rider. He is gruff with her, but she helps him back into the saddle. When she gets home she finds that he is her employer: Edward Fairfax Rochester.

Rochester is no storybook hero. His face is "dark, strong, and stern," his manner is abrupt, and at their first proper meeting he accuses her of bewitching his horse. Jane, eighteen and without a penny, answers him straight. He is intrigued. Evening after evening he sends for her to talk, and she finds that this moody, worldly man treats her mind as the equal of his own. He tells her about Adèle's mother, a French dancer who was once his mistress, who claimed the child was his and then abandoned her.

But Thornfield is an uneasy house. From the third storey Jane hears a strange laugh, which the household puts down to a servant, the stolid Grace Poole. One night she wakes to find smoke pouring from Rochester's room and his bed curtains on fire, and she saves his life by drenching him. He thanks her with a feeling that keeps her awake till morning. The next day he is gone. He returns with a party of fashionable guests, among them the beautiful Blanche Ingram, whom everyone expects him to marry. Jane, watching from her corner, realises two things: that she loves him, and that Blanche is proud and heartless. A visitor from the West Indies, Richard Mason, arrives, and during the night he is attacked and badly hurt somewhere upstairs. Again Jane is asked to help and to ask no questions.

She is called away for a month to Gateshead, where Mrs Reed, struck down by a stroke, has asked for her. The old woman has a confession: years ago Jane's father's brother, John Eyre, wrote wanting to adopt his niece and make her his heir, and Mrs Reed told him the girl was dead.

Back at Thornfield, on a midsummer evening, Rochester teases Jane about how soon she will forget him once he is married. Her self-control breaks, and she tells him what she feels, speaking as one human being to another. His reply astonishes her. The courtship of Blanche was a ruse to make her jealous, and it is Jane he wants for his wife. She accepts.

The weeks before the wedding are happy and troubled. And then, a night or two before the ceremony, Jane wakes to find a strange woman in her room, who takes up the bridal veil and tears it in two. Rochester, once more, blames Grace Poole. Jane goes to the church knowing that the house has a secret it has not told her. What that secret is, and what Jane does when she learns it, alone and with nowhere to go, is the hinge of the novel. It will send her out onto the moors, to a new household and a very different kind of proposal, and it will test whether she can hold to herself when everything she wants pulls the other way.

What It's Really About

At its core this is a book about self-respect. Jane wants love badly, having had so little, but she will not buy it by giving up her integrity or her faith. The red-room scene has been called the whole novel in miniature: a small, clear-sighted person shut up by those who will not grant her intelligence or her personhood. Again and again she is confined, at Gateshead, at Lowood, by her poverty and her sex, and again and again the question is how a woman with no resources can get free and claim what she deserves.

That is why the book alarmed some of its first readers. It takes on class, religion and the position of women, and it does not flatter the powerful. It attacks the hypocrisy of a Brocklehurst while holding firmly to a Christianity of conscience. One reviewer in 1848 called it "pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition" and linked its spirit to political rebellion. Others were swept away; one wrote that it read like a page out of one's own life. Speculation about the author's sex ran wild, and one critic staked his reputation on the claim that no woman could have written it.

It is also drawn from life. Lowood is modelled on the school where two of Charlotte's sisters fell fatally ill, Helen Burns on her eldest sister, Maria, and Brocklehurst on the minister who ran the place. Like Jane, Charlotte worked as a governess.

And it is simply a marvellous story. Brontë blends exact realism with the pleasures of the Gothic: an old manor, darkness, storms, hints of the supernatural. Rochester is a classic Byronic hero, and the talk between him and Jane still crackles.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who loves a slow-burning romance between equals, a heroine with a spine, or a house with something hidden in it should read this. It rewards lovers of nineteenth-century fiction and readers coming to the classics for the first time alike, because Jane's voice is so direct that the years between her and us fall away. The language is rich and the pace is unhurried, so give it room. If you have ever felt overlooked and known you were worth more, Jane is your heroine.