Jane EyreStudy Guide

A solicitor stands in a Yorkshire church and names a wife still living under the same roof. Jane is already in the dress. She hears the truth at the altar, refuses to become Rochester's mistress that night, and leaves Thornfield before dawn with almost nothing. Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847. What the book does with that walk is refuse the bargain everyone expected a poor governess to take: her name, in exchange for a secret.

Jane Eyre is an orphan: small, plain, penniless, and so sure of her own worth that a locked red room cannot talk her out of it. Edward Rochester is her employer at Thornfield, older, wealthy, and magnetic enough that his secrets look like mystery until they become a trap. Mrs. Reed calls charity a debt and punishes the child who will not stay grateful. Helen Burns endures Lowood's punishments as if this world were already finished. St. John Rivers offers Jane a missionary marriage that would use her soul as equipment. Around them Brontë places Bertha Mason, the wife hidden in the attic; Adèle, the French ward Jane is hired to teach; Mrs. Fairfax, who keeps the house running without asking the questions that would break it; Blanche Ingram, who performs the match Rochester pretends to want; and Diana and Mary, the sisters who give Jane a family once she has already learned to live without one.

Mrs. Reed locks ten-year-old Jane in the red room where her uncle died. At Lowood, Brocklehurst brands her a liar on a stool, Helen dies of consumption in her arms, and Miss Temple's fairness is the first adult justice she has ever seen. Jane advertises, arrives at Thornfield as governess, and meets Rochester after his horse slips on the ice. She puts out the fire in his bed. In the garden he proposes after pretending he will marry Blanche, and Jane answers that she is poor, obscure, plain, and little, and still not a bird in anyone's net. At the altar Briggs and Mason stop the wedding. Jane leaves that night. She nearly dies on the moor, is taken in at Moor House, inherits a fortune, and refuses St. John's loveless proposal even when he calls it God's will. A voice calls her name across the night. She returns to Ferndean, finds Rochester blind and maimed after the fire, and marries him as a woman who already has a life.

Brontë published the book as Currer Bell, and Victorian readers felt the shock of a woman speaking in the first person as if her inner life were as large as a man's. She never treats the attic as gothic decoration, or the walk away as a cute test the lovers will pass. Secrecy fails. Gratitude dressed as a debt fails. Even holy purpose, when it arrives as St. John's claim on her future, fails. What remains is not a sermon against passion. It is a picture of what happens when a woman with nothing but a conscience refuses to become convenient, and when love is only possible after she has already proven she can live without it.

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