Jane Eyre

In brief

An orphan of ten, unloved in her aunt’s house, is locked in a room where her uncle died, and then sent to a charity school where cold, hunger and typhus do the teaching. At eighteen she advertises for a place and becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, to the ward of a rough, clever, secretive and much older man, who talks to her as nobody has. He asks her to marry him. At the altar a stranger announces that he has a living wife, who is kept on the third floor behind a door Jane has walked past for months. She leaves at dawn with nothing, nearly starves on the moors, is taken in by people who turn out to be her cousins, inherits a fortune, refuses a clergyman who wants her for India, hears a voice calling across the country, and goes back.

It reached readers as the autobiography of a woman no one had heard of, edited by a man called Currer Bell. It is still startling how much anger it holds and how much it asks for.

The argument

The book’s claim is put in its plainest form in the orchard, to a man who has every advantage over her: “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!” (ch. 23). This is not a plea for kindness. It is a claim of equal standing, made by an employee to her employer, in 1847, and the novel means it literally. A little earlier, walking the leads of the roof, Jane has generalised it: “women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do” (ch. 12).

The plot tests the claim by a series of refusals. Each house offers Jane a way to be loved or useful that would cost her herself. At Gateshead the price is grovelling, and she will not pay it: “Speak I must: I had been trodden on severely, and must turn” (ch. 4). At Lowood, Helen Burns offers Christian submission: “It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself” (ch. 6). Jane loves Helen and does not believe her. At Thornfield Rochester, after the wedding is stopped, offers love as a mistress in the south of France, and nobody would be hurt. Here comes the book’s hardest sentence: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself” (ch. 27). This is not primness. She is not obeying the law because it is the law. She keeps it because a woman with no money, family or standing has nothing else that is hers.

Then she is offered the opposite of passion. St John Rivers proposes a marriage of pure duty and will not accept her as a colleague without it: “A part of me you must become” (ch. 34). This is the more dangerous temptation, because it comes in the language of God and she nearly gives way. Rochester wanted to own her body and St John wants to own her will; she says no to both, and only then has the moral standing to say yes to anyone.

Whether the ending keeps faith with this is the old question. She comes back with five thousand pounds, having by her own choice split a legacy of twenty thousand with her cousins, to a man who is blind, maimed and widowed. “I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress” (ch. 37). The book can imagine equality only after a fire, a legacy and an amputation. That is an honest report on how much would have had to change.

The shape of the book

Five houses in a line, each a stage in a pilgrimage. Gateshead (ch. 1 to ch. 4) is childhood under tyranny. Lowood (ch. 5 to ch. 10) is institutional cruelty and the first real friend. Thornfield (ch. 11 to ch. 27) takes up nearly half the book, and is love, Gothic mystery and catastrophe. Moor House and Morton (ch. 28 to ch. 35) are the mirror of Gateshead: three good cousins in place of three bad, a family and a living, won instead of endured. Ferndean (ch. 36 to ch. 38) is the deep-wooded end of the road.

The first edition was in three volumes, and the breaks are telling: the first closes after Jane saves Rochester from the burning bed, the second after the failed wedding. The whole has the patterning of a fairy tale, which it often invokes. Things recur with a change of key. The child in the red room, shut up in terror, becomes the woman who hears the laugh beyond the wall. Fire falls on Rochester’s bed and later on his house. The great chestnut, split by lightning on the night he proposes (ch. 23), turns up again as his own image, when he compares himself to the lightning-struck chestnut at Thornfield (ch. 37). The notorious coincidence that lands a starving Jane at the door of her unknown cousins (ch. 28, ch. 33) is the same logic. Brontë is not writing a probable world but one that answers.

The last page is a surprise that is often forgotten. The novel does not end on Jane’s happiness. It ends on St John’s letter from India, his coming death and his words: “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!” (ch. 38). The man she refused gets the last word, and she honours him for it.

The voice

Jane talks to us. “Reader” appears more than two dozen times, sometimes as courtesy and sometimes as a hand on your arm, up to the most famous opening in the book’s last chapter: “Reader, I married him” (ch. 38). Notice the grammar. It is not “we were married” and not “he married me”. She is the subject and she has done the marrying. She tells this ten years on, as she says at the end, and the double vision gives the book its authority: the child’s fury and the adult’s judgment of the child in the same sentence.

The prose can go in any direction. The opening is dry as a diary entry: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” (ch. 1). A few paragraphs later she is reading Bewick’s birds in a window seat and then being knocked down by her cousin, whom she calls “a murderer” and “a slave-driver”. Her dialogues with Rochester are the real love scenes, because the love is in the argument; he teases, she parries, and neither is ever bored.

The supernatural is never quite withdrawn. Jane hears a call at the moment St John has nearly won her: “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (ch. 35). Rochester, unprompted, later tells her he called out at that hour and heard her answer (ch. 37). Brontë gives this as fact and offers no explanation. A rational reader may wince; it is still what the novel has been promising since the light moved on the red-room wall (ch. 2).

The third floor

Everything in the Gothic plot lies behind one door. On her first tour of the house Jane walks a corridor “in some Bluebeard’s castle” and hears “a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless” (ch. 11). Then the fire in Rochester’s bed (ch. 15), the night Mason is torn and bitten (ch. 20), the figure who tears the wedding veil in two (ch. 25). The reveal is a set piece of disgust: “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal” (ch. 26).

Rochester’s account of Bertha Mason follows, and it is the only one we get: a Creole heiress of Spanish Town, thirty thousand pounds, a marriage arranged by his father and brother, then madness and years of confinement (ch. 27). We have only his word, and he is an interested party. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) read Bertha as Jane’s double, the rage that the governess must not show, acting out what Jane feels: the night before the wedding she dreads, someone rips the veil. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) took the other course and gave the woman a name and a history, and Gayatri Spivak’s essay of 1985 argued that Jane’s rise depends on Bertha’s being treated as less than a person.

They are right about a real blindness. The novel uses the language of slavery freely for its heroine’s troubles. Jane calls John Reed “a slave-driver” (ch. 1) and teases Rochester that she will preach liberty to his “harem” (ch. 24). The wealth that frees her comes from an uncle at Madeira, the “Funchal correspondent” of the Masons’ house (ch. 26). The book sees injustice with piercing clarity in one woman’s body and cannot see it in another’s.

The people

Small, plain, quick to judge and proud of it. She is not always likeable; she enjoys being right. Her passion is real and she spends half of the book holding it down by force.

Edward Rochester

A Byronic hero seen from close up, which is to say a good deal of a bully and something of a child. He dresses up as a gypsy to interrogate her (ch. 19), courts Blanche Ingram to make her jealous (ch. 17, ch. 23) and attempts bigamy. He is also the only person who has ever asked what she thinks. The novel loves him and judges him.

St John Rivers

The most interesting man in the book, and the coldest. Handsome and frightening, he suppresses his love for Rosamond Oliver for the sake of the mission (ch. 32). Jane’s comparison is exact: “I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another” (ch. 35). Brontë admires him and would not have him in the house.

Helen Burns

The schoolfriend who dies of consumption in Jane’s arms (ch. 9). She is drawn from Charlotte’s eldest sister, Maria, who was sent home from Cowan Bridge to die at eleven.

Mrs Reed and Mr Brocklehurst

The two faces of respectable cruelty, one domestic and one Evangelical. Brocklehurst, who stands the child on a stool as a liar (ch. 7) and whose economies kill her schoolmates, was close enough to the Reverend William Carus Wilson that the book caused a dispute. Mrs Reed’s deathbed, at which she confesses to having hidden Jane’s uncle’s letter and still cannot love her, is one of the book’s best-judged scenes (ch. 21).

How it was made

Charlotte Brontë was eight when she was sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and her sisters Maria and Elizabeth came home from it to die in 1825. She worked as a governess between 1839 and 1841 and hated it. In Brussels she fell in love with her married teacher, Constantin Heger, and wrote him letters he did not answer.

She began writing in Manchester in August 1846, in lodgings where her father was recovering from a cataract operation, on the day when her first novel, The Professor, was rejected again. That novel never found a publisher in her lifetime, but its last rejection, from Smith, Elder, was encouraging enough that she sent them this one. They published it within about two months, on 19 October 1847, as edited by Currer Bell. The second edition, in January 1848, carried a preface that is a counter-attack on her pious critics: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.” She dedicated it to Thackeray, not knowing that his wife was mentally ill and confined, and the gossip that followed was embarrassing to both.

Readers and critics

It was an immediate success. Thackeray lost a day’s work to it; G. H. Lewes reviewed it warmly. It was also an immediate scandal. Elizabeth Rigby, in the Quarterly Review of 1848, called it “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” and heard in it the same tone of mind that had produced Chartism and revolution abroad. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) then recast the author as a suffering saint of the parsonage, which took the edge off for a century.

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), quoted the rooftop passage and complained that the author’s anger had jarred her book, breaking off for Grace Poole’s laugh just as the argument gets going. That complaint set the terms for later feminists to answer. Adrienne Rich read Jane as a motherless woman making her own way in 1973; Gilbert and Gubar made Bertha central in 1979; Spivak and the postcolonial readers then asked what the feminist reading had left out.

Afterlives

John Courtney had it on the London stage by January 1848, within months of publication. The film of 1943, directed by Robert Stevenson with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, gave it the shadowy look many people still imagine, and there have been many since, Franco Zeffirelli’s of 1996 and Cary Fukunaga’s of 2011 among them. Its real descendants are in print. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) reworks the plain young woman, the older man and the first wife in the house. Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites it from the other side of the Atlantic. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) sends a detective into the text itself, and Tracy Chevalier’s anthology Reader, I Married Him (2016) shows how far one sentence can travel.

How to read it

Do not skip Moor House. Readers who want the love story hurry through it. It is where her inner life is tested without Rochester.
Keep Bertha in mind. Ask who tells her story, and read Wide Sargasso Sea afterwards, never before.
Listen to the “Reader”s. Mark each time Jane addresses you and ask what she wants from you just then.
Take St John seriously. The ending is less cosy if you do.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Bertha’s side of the marriage, and the indispensable answer.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853). Her greatest novel in some eyes, the same inner life with no consoling ending to speak of.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847). Published the same year, and far wilder about the same subject.
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938). The plot with the anger taken out and the dread turned up.