Departure from Gateshead — Jane Eyre

At five in the morning on January 19th, Bessie finds Jane already up and dressed by moonlight. The coach leaves at six. Bessie asks if Jane will go in to say goodbye to Mrs. Reed. Jane says no: she has been her foe, not her friend. Good-bye to Gateshead. She clings to Bessie's neck until the guard lifts her into the coach.

The journey takes all day, fifty miles, through several towns and then into country Jane has never seen: great grey hills heaving up on the horizon, a valley dark with wood, wind in trees as night falls. She falls asleep and wakes to the coach door open and rain, wind, and darkness. A servant leads her through a locked door, along passages, into a room with a fire where she is left alone.

The tall, grave lady who comes in with a candle is Miss Temple. She notes that Jane is very young to be sent alone, asks her questions gently, touches her cheek, and sends her to bed. The under-teacher Miss Miller leads Jane through the building into a long schoolroom where eighty girls in uniform brown dresses sit studying by candlelight. Supper is thin oaten cake and a mug of water shared between all. Jane drinks but cannot eat. She is too tired to notice what the bedroom looks like. Miss Miller is her bed-fellow. She is asleep in minutes.

Morning: a loud bell before dawn, bitter cold, a rush to wash at basins with a single towel between six. Breakfast is porridge burnt in parts and half raw in others, served in dirty tin vessels. The girls eat it in silence. Jane cannot. Two hours of lessons follow in an unheated room. Then outdoor exercise in the garden in the January cold.

In the verandah, alone in the cold reading a thick book while other girls walk and talk, is a girl Jane has not seen before. Jane asks if she may look at the book. The girl hands it over: Rasselas. Jane gives it back. She stays and asks questions. The girl answers them all: the school is Lowood Institution, partly a charity school for orphans, run by Mr. Brocklehurst who buys all the food and clothes, overseen day to day by Miss Temple who has to answer to Brocklehurst for everything she does.

That afternoon in history class, Miss Scatcherd dismisses this same girl in disgrace and sends her to stand in the middle of the room. Jane watches, expecting distress and shame. The girl neither weeps nor blushes. She stands composed and still, as if her eyes are turned inward, thinking of something beyond her punishment and beyond her situation. Jane does not understand it yet. But she cannot stop watching.