Jane Eyre: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting

INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the Author

Unlike her famous character, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë grew up surrounded by a loving and nurturing family. Charlotte’s Irish father, Patrick Brontë, moved to England to attend Cambridge, took Holy Orders in the Church of England, and eventually accepted an appointment as rector of the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, located in Northern England. The growing Brontë family made their home in the church’s parsonage, alongside desolate, rolling moors where the Brontë children could roam freely and let their imaginations soar. The four youngest children drew upon their adventures to conjure fantastical worlds with complex mythologies, maps, histories, and characters that filled the pages of their notebooks.

But even the most magical of childhoods was not enough to shut out death, an early and frequent visitor to the Brontë home. The first to be taken was the children’s mother, Maria Brontë, who died in 1821 from uterine cancer, shortly after the birth of the last of her six children: Maria (born in 1814), Elizabeth (1815), Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820). In 1824, the widowed Rev. Brontë enrolled the four oldest girls—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily—in an austere boarding school that served the daughters of clergymen. It wasn’t long before Maria and Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis—a highly contagious bacterial infection that is easily carried and transmitted by those who have no symptoms—and were sent home to die. Rev. Brontë pulled Charlotte and Emily out of the school and brought them home, just in time, it seems, to save their lives.

The Brontë home cultivated learning and creativity. Rev. Brontë was a published poet and strove to give his children a good education. Despite the terrible outcome of her first school, Charlotte was later sent to another, Roe Head, where she was prepared for an occupation as a teacher or governess, the only roles open to women at that time besides wife and mother. Charlotte loved being a student, but her nature was not inclined toward teaching. She returned to Roe Head in 1835 where she taught just a few years, longing each day for the lessons to end so that she could return to writing—the only occupation she dreamed of. When one of her students interrupted her thoughts in the classroom one day, she recounted in her journal, But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I could have vomited.¹

Charlotte and her brother, Branwell, each sent their poetry to a famous poet they admired, daringly hoping to receive feedback and perhaps encouragement. Charlotte chose Robert Southey, Britain’s poet laureate, a writer in the Romantic tradition that Charlotte and her siblings loved and emulated. The beginning of her letter displays an endearing, if melodramatic, youthful passion:

Sir,—I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this the nineteenth year of my life, I have lived among secluded hills, where I could neither know what I was, or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature.²

After a few torturous months, Southey’s response arrived. You evidently possess & in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of verse’, he wrote. I am not depreciating it when I say that in these times it is not rare. How exciting it must have been for Charlotte to receive such praise from the nation’s leading poet! But these laudatory words were followed by a discouraging admonition:

. . . there is a danger of which I would, with all kindness and all earnestness, warn you. . . . Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much.³

It took a couple of weeks for Charlotte to compose a reply. The opening lines reveal her sense of humiliation:

At the first perusal of your letter, I felt only shame and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody; I felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion . . .

After defensively stating her dutiful intention of becoming a governess, she added,

In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. . . . I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself . . . Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print: if the wish should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter, and suppress it.⁴

It is difficult to determine when reading them today just how earnest (or ironic) a tone to read into these lines. Detecting a tinge of sarcasm is tempting. But whatever Brontë’s posture may have been in penning the words, her ambitions were not ultimately suppressed by Southey.

In 1839, Brontë turned down two offers of marriage, both from clergymen. She seriously considered the first proposal, from the brother of a close friend, but concluded she did not love him as much as she should to be his wife, nor did she believe she could make him happy. The second offer, which she also rejected, was from a clergyman she had met only once. It seems that the sort of passion she wrote about was one she sought for her own life.

Between these two proposals, Charlotte took an ill-fitted and short-lived post as a governess. Soon she and her sisters hatched a plan to open their own school. So in 1842, Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels to hone their skills in French and German. When the admiration Charlotte developed for her teacher—the older and married head of the school—grew into a romantic attraction, the situation turned sour. The warmth with which her teacher and his wife first treated Charlotte cooled, and Charlotte eventually returned home to overcome her unrequited love. The Brontës’ attempt to start a school drew no students, and the endeavor was over before it began. But because Charlotte’s aunt—who had helped Rev. Brontë raise the children after their mother’s death—left an inheritance to the young women, though none of them had married, they at least possessed a little to live on.

In 1846, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne decided to publish their poetry together in one volume. Because they wanted their work to be judged on its merit rather than on their sex, they used the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Besides, they had no desire for the limelight, living as they were in the seclusion of Yorkshire, withdrawn from genteel society. But this they need not have feared: the volume sold only two copies.

Even so, the project inspired Charlotte to send out the manuscript for a novel she’d written, The Professor. It was roundly rejected (and would not be published until 1857, posthumously). But one publisher did ask if she had a longer work, one that could comprise three volumes, a popular format at the time. Charlotte did indeed have another novel-in-progress—Jane Eyre. She soon finished it, and in 1847, the first of the Brontë sisters’ novels was published. Novels by Anne and Emily followed.

In 1848, Branwell, who had long struggled with drugs and alcohol, died of tuberculosis. Emily soon followed, but not before infecting Anne, who died a few months later, in 1849. All that remained of the Brontë family were Charlotte and her father.

Charlotte published two more novels, Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). Her society expanded greatly with her growing celebrity within a tight literary society (who eventually solved the mystery of the identity of Currer Bell), and she developed a rich, although awkward, social life, attracting suitors from within these circles. But it was a quiet, unpresuming minister whose proposal of marriage she accepted in 1854. Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s assistant curate (and a fellow Irishman), had been in love with Charlotte for years, though his love had gone unreturned. She of whom the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray had once said, There’s a fire and fury raging in that little woman,⁵ was slowly won over by Nicholl’s patience, sensitivity, and goodness. Brontë’s desire for youthful passion had matured into something ultimately more satisfying.

The newlyweds were happy, and Charlotte was soon pregnant. But sadly, she was afflicted with hyperemesis gravidarum (a pregnancy-related illness with symptoms which can closely resemble tuberculosis). On March 31, 1855, at the age of thirty-eight (the same age at which her mother had died), Charlotte Brontë, along with her unborn child, passed into eternity.

Background of the Work

When Jane Eyre was released on October 16, 1847, the novel as a literary form had been developing for about a century. Most novels tended to fall within fairly hardened categories: the cleverly witty, the piously moral, or the ridiculously romantic. Jane Eyre was brilliant, moral, and romantic—but even more than all this, it presented a unified first-person narrative in the voice of someone whose language was like that of a close friend. The world had seen nothing like it. The Westminster Review declared Jane Eyre the best novel of the season.⁶

Jane Eyre was widely read and reviewed from the start, and such considerable attention brought controversy as well as praise. A work so bold and original was bound to have detractors, and Jane Eyre was criticized on several counts. Some complained the story was too melodramatic or too unrealistic; one anonymous reviewer claiming that the plot was most extravagantly improbable.⁷ On the other hand, others criticized Jane Eyre for being too realistic—coarse was a common phrase used to describe the frank expression of the thoughts and behavior of a young woman who felt such passion and even sexual desire. Because of the pseudonym Brontë used, people did not know whether the author of Jane Eyre was a man or a woman, and some critics, trying to guess the sex of the author, judged the novel one way if by a woman and another if by a man. The critic Elizabeth Rigby declared that no feminine hand could have produced such a book, but if it did, it must be one who had long forfeited the society of her own sex.⁸ All seemed to agree, however, that whoever Currer Bell was, he or she had written a groundbreaking book. A few years after its publication, one critic declared that "the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre."⁹

What was it that made Jane Eyre so revolutionary? It gave powerful expression to the modern sense of the self.

The sense we have today of the self—an independent moral agent informed by conscience, will, and an essential nature—is unique to modernity. Of course, the self existed in pre-modern cultures, but in the ancient and medieval worlds, people gained their identities from their communities: the families they were born into, the traditions they were raised in, the social class they were part of, and the bonds of religious belief they shared with others. With the Protestant Reformation, a new understanding emerged of the ability and responsibility of each individual to be saved, to read the Bible, and to grow in sanctification. This theological reformation spilled over into every part of life and reshaped society. Protestantism cultivated a sense that by the exertion of her own nature, conscience, and will, an individual could produce meaningful, even dramatic, change.

The novel is the literary genre that expresses the journey of this individual, modern self. Like other novels of the time, Jane Eyre is the story of a modern soul who discovers, then expresses, her nature, conscience, and will. Charlotte Brontë lived during the time when this sense of the modern self was taking hold, and like all good writers, Brontë wrote what she knew. Jane Eyre draws on a number of Brontë’s real-life experiences, as well as on her strong sense of self.

Perhaps the most striking autobiographical element in the novel is the charity school Jane attends, which is closely based on the school for clergyman’s daughters that Brontë and her sisters attended. The character of Helen Burns, whom Jane befriends, is modeled after Charlotte’s oldest sister, Maria, particularly Helen’s stoic resignation to her fate. Jane’s older, brooding, intellectual romantic interest, as in her other novels, is drawn from the tutor Brontë studied under and fell in love with Brussels. Even the chestnut tree struck by lightning is based on a real such tree Charlotte saw while visiting the estate of a friend.

However, the most dramatic events in the novel are fictitious. Despite drawing from the materials of her life, Brontë was a writer of fiction, and she created a work of art. Unfortunately, the conflation of Charlotte Brontë with the character she created started as soon as the identity of Currer Bell was known (which didn’t take long)—and this confusion has never ceased. Brontë vehemently objected to being identified with her artistic creation and was offended when an author she greatly admired, William Makepeace Thackeray, once introduced her as Jane Eyre.

Some of the confusion can be attributed to the book’s original title, which was Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. At that time, it was common for a work of fiction to claim to be a true story, history, memoir, letter, or journal, for which the author served as editor. The term novel was often avoided because it was associated, not with high literary art, but with racy tales of amorous adventures written by hacks providing scintillating (and profitable) entertainment. Furthermore, fiction had long been frowned upon in conservative religious communities, influenced by the Puritans in particular. So Charlotte Brontë was merely following a more than century old convention when she presented her novel as an autobiography. Unfortunately, she would spend the rest of her life dispelling the myth that she was Jane Eyre.

The subtitle An Autobiography was not the only thing that made readers think that Jane Eyre was a true story. Its startling realism made the story (mostly) believable. Of course, it would be another half-century before the literary movement called realism would take hold, and Jane Eyre by no means displays that level of the technique. In fact, it can be difficult for readers today to recognize just how realistic Jane Eyre seemed in its time. (Watch a film made thirty or even just twenty years ago that seemed realistic at the time and note how cartoonish it now appears because of the techniques in realism that have grown in sophistication. Literature has a parallel history.)

The most realistic element of the novel is not its plot, setting, or even its characterization, but its main character and narrator, Jane. Neither poor servant girl nor genteel beauty, Jane is Everywoman—and Everyman. It was Jane’s ordinariness that made the novel extraordinary. She objected to her sisters’ penchant for creating beautiful heroines, telling them, I will show you a heroine as plain and small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.¹⁰ And she did. It is the interior life of Jane, not the exterior one, which is so believable. The self the novel portrays, far more than the events of the story, rings true. The voice of the girl who says, I resisted all the way. The voice of the woman who demands in the face of the worst pain of her painful life, Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? . . . 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! And the voice of the modern self who asserts, I am not an angel . . . and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Jane is considered one of literature’s first modern women in refusing to fit into either of the age-old dichotomies: angel or whore. She is realistic in being, simply, human. No wonder that in his essay Charlotte Brontë, G. K. Chesterton called Jane Eyre the truest book that was ever written, adding, Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath.¹¹

Even so, Jane Eyre is not an autobiography, but a work of the imagination, a novel. It was innovative, but it also drew upon long-standing literary traditions.

One of these traditions is Gothicism. The word Gothic has a long history but eventually came to be associated with medieval architecture and aesthetics. Gothic literature—with its fascination for the irregular, grotesque, dark, sensational, and mysterious—became popular in the second half of the eighteenth century. The terror of the red room, the eeriness of Thornfield Hall, the overbearing force of Jane’s master, the ominous strike of lightning, and a strange and sudden telepathic experience are all scenes torn from the pages of Gothic literature. Yet, Brontë weaves these tropes into the texture of the narrative in such a way that they become far more than mere clichés. They are exterior events that reveal Jane’s interiority, becoming part of the narrative voice that is, as already discussed, the most realistic part of the novel.

Gothic literature preceded and became part of the Romantic Movement, which was the most significant influence on all the Brontës. The start of the Romantic Movement in England is marked by the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. Romanticism was a counter swing against the Enlightenment, which birthed the modern age in the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment brought about some of the most dramatic shifts yet in human history, including the scientific revolution that gave way to the Industrial Revolution, shifting populations from the country to the city and in some places, turning the landscape black from the mining and burning of coal. Lamenting these changes, the Romantics wrote often of the glories and goodness of nature. While the Enlightenment exalted reason, science, certainty, and technology, Romanticism, in reaction, emphasized emotion, imagination, mystery, and nature. Brontë admired the Romantic poets immensely (Lord Byron in particular), and Jane Eyre has been noted for treating the natural landscape in prose in a way that parallels Wordsworth and Coleridge’s treatment of it in poetry. Jane Eyre is rich with imagery drawn from nature—particularly birds, trees, landscape, fire, and ice. Such imagery transcends mere detail or adornment, through its placement and repetition accumulating meaning and shaping the aesthetic experience of the novel.

In both its ethical and its aesthetic values, Romanticism contrasted with the neoclassical period that preceded it. The works of Jane Austen, for example, who died the year after Brontë was born, offer an interesting juxtaposition with Brontë’s works. Austen’s wit and satire, along with her emphasis on the manners and rules of society (sense), stand starkly against the passion, emotion, and rebellious spirits (sensibility) of Romantic literature. Not surprisingly, Brontë was not keen on Austen. Austen, Brontë said, does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. But, she continued,

. . . the Passions are perfectly unknown to her . . . Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death—this Miss Austen ignores.¹²

Another Romantic element Jane Eyre offers is a textbook example of the Byronic hero. Named after Lord Byron, who exhibited the qualities his literary namesakes came to reflect, a Byronic hero is a gloomy, alienated figure who is restless and haunted by mysterious guilt. Other famous Byronic heroes include Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, and, a more modern version, the twentieth century’s rebel without a cause, James Dean.

Brontë rejected Neoclassicism and embraced Romanticism. Yet she lived after both of these in the Victorian period. It was in the Victorian age that the novel reached its artistic height, and Brontë contributed considerably to the development of the genre. Victorian novelists—not only the Brontë sisters, but Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and many others—refined earlier, sometimes clumsier, attempts at long prose narratives that centered on ordinary individuals. The spirit of Victorianism contributed to the work of all of these novelists, including Brontë, because it was in the Victorian age that the sense that possibility of progress and improvement, on both the individual and social levels, took hold. This idea of growth is the basis of the bildungsroman, a German term that means novel of development, a subgenre of the novel that was especially prominent during this age. In centering on the growth and education of a single character from youth to maturity, Jane Eyre is one of the most notable examples of the bildungsroman. Such progress is the theme of the novel as a literary genre: the rise of the individual—the progress of a modern soul, like that possessed by Jane Eyre.

Themes of the Work

The major themes of Jane Eyre are so intricately connected that it is difficult to separate one from another. In addition, the themes are so tied to major plot events that they can only be touched upon here in order to avoid spoilers. For this reason, much more about these themes will be drawn out in the discussion questions at the end of each volume and the questions for further reflection that follow the novel.

The central theme, as already seen, is the creation of the self. Indeed, Jane Eyre is widely considered to be a high point in the literary development of the novel because of how Brontë refined the form of the novel by making the inner life of the self the theme. The form that inner life takes is the first-person narrator, Jane. But Jane doesn’t start out knowing who she is or having a voice. As an orphan, she has none of the context for a sense of self that is usually provided by family and community. The reason so many novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries feature an orphan is that such a figure serves as a metaphor for what we all are in modernity: autonomous individuals with a will, burdened with the task of forging an identity. The conditions of the modern age that both allow and compel us to choose for ourselves (or so we believe) our religion, our class, our job, and our marriage partner are aptly symbolized by the figure of the orphan who is heir to nothing. The story of Jane—who enters the narrative as an orphan with no place to call home and no one to love—is the story of a modern, self-conscious self on a quest to discover who she is.

This freedom—and responsibility—to create one’s sense of self, to be self-governing, is called autonomy (auto means self). Thus, a second theme in the novel—isolation—can be understood as a further expression of the idea of the creation of the self, or the autonomous modern individual. Jane’s isolation is conveyed powerfully through not only the novel’s plot and settings, but in its imagery as well: from the birds she reads about as a girl to her wanderings on the moors. Scenes of isolation serve to reinforce the theme of Jane’s need to forge her identity as an individual. At one point, faced yet again with the prospect of being alone, Jane declares that her own integrity, her own soul, will be her companion, and she asserts, "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

This self-respect Jane insists upon is connected to the concept of equality—a theme not only of the novel, but of the age. In the century previous to the publication of Jane Eyre, England had experienced the American Revolution and witnessed the French Revolution, both events which, although rooted in different principles, advanced the modern concept of human equality. Yet, even at the time Brontë was writing, the world was sharply divided by sex, race, and class. As a poor woman, Jane could never—and would never—expect anything like the political or economic equality that we profess to believe in today. This makes Jane’s belief in soul equality all the more powerful and revolutionary. At one point, she tells the man who employs her at Thornfield Hall, 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! She comes to see herself as the moral, emotional, and spiritual equal of her master. (And the reader comes to see her, perhaps, as his better.)

Closely related to equality is Jane’s deep sense of justice and injustice. When she is treated unjustly, she rails and resists. Unjust!—unjust! she cries, even as a small child, when she is treated cruelly and unfairly. While her concern with justice throughout the novel is portrayed in terms of individual justice, being concerned mainly with herself, the novel shows how justice is inherently a social issue as well. The idea of justice being something that matters outside the context of property and power was yet newly emerging. For Jane to seek justice as a penniless, powerless female in such a world was to challenge the very structure of her society, even if unconsciously and accidentally. Critics who called the book revolutionary understood this.

Yet, Jane Eyre is rooted in tradition, as well. As a quest—a quest for self-possession, for equality and justice—Jane Eyre is patterned on that magnificent precursor to all novels—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Yet, Brontë departs from the pattern set forth in that famous allegory in ways that reflect the modern condition of choice, will, and autonomy. It is another character in the novel who will take the path chosen by Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Jane reflects, rather, the mind of her author, of whom Virginia Woolf a generation later said, possessed an untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things.¹³

Despite this warring with the given order, which is central to Jane Eyre, a competing tension can be seen in Brontë’s emphasis on the nature of a person. Jane’s passionate nature is also one that seeks—and needs—love. As a child, in describing how she always took her doll to bed, she explains it was because human beings must love something. Later, a school friend cautions Jane that she thinks too much of the love of human beings. Jane’s need for love—one that all human beings share—is the greatest driving force in her quest, the one that becomes even more important to her than liberty.

Written decades before the development of modern psychology, the novel’s emphasis on the sheer force of Jane’s inborn personality is groundbreaking. If Brontë could have seen into the future, she would have nodded knowingly at our fondness for personality assessments such as the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. Jane’s nature is a powerful force in the story from beginning to end. In Brontë’s vision, it is how God made her: passionate, intense, introspective, and sharp. At first, it is a nature that others see in her, hurling it at her in accusation. Eventually, it becomes something that Jane sees for herself, and must choose to embrace or reject—or to bring into balance with her Christian faith.

Reading Jane Eyre as a Christian Today

The story of Jane is the story of a Christian seeking to be faithful within a nominally Christian society (similar to our own), which fails to affirm the basic human dignity of one who is poor and unconnected. Jane Eyre shocked readers who saw it as an affront to Christianity. What was once revolutionary will often, over time, become conventional. Thus it can be difficult for readers today to see what so shook Brontë’s contemporaries. One reviewer said it was pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition. The reviewer declared, There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment.¹⁴

Jane Eyre challenged the status quo in a number of ways. Even as a child, Jane asserts herself—defends herself. As an orphan, a female, a governess, and someone with no property or means, Jane is one who, according to her society, had no rights and no grounds for authority—even over herself. The word authority derives from the word author, and Jane—by using her voice, both within the story, but even more in telling her story—becomes an authority, in both a literal and symbolic sense, over herself.

Jane has no source of power or authority—except language—and the novel reflects the role that language plays in the creation of the modern self. Since creation, human beings have had the gift of language. But the modern age—which brought about a culture of print and with it more widespread literacy—engendered a new kind of self-reflectiveness, or subjectivity (an emphasis on the inner life), that print encouraged. In both form and content—written in everyday prose about everyday people—the novels of this time reflected and advanced new possibilities for the self. This phenomenon is reflected in Jane Eyre in the way Jane discovers, develops, and defends her sense of self through language: she reads books, she asserts herself verbally, she engages in witty repartee, she sustains arguments in her own mind and with others, and she narrates her story, even from time to time addressing her reader.

To address the attacks on her novel as being contrary to Christianity, Brontë added a preface to the second edition (the version used for this volume). This preface is not to be skipped. In it, Brontë addresses the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of the novel. Brontë defends her work by declaring, Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. Brontë stakes out her aim to distinguish between the appearance of Christianity and authentic Christian faith and practice. One should read the novel with an eye to the way she makes these distinctions. Doing so, one cannot help but think about the many ways in which such discernment continues to be necessary today. For example, the Christian who is rightly suspicious of any sort of revolution for revolution’s sake (or for any sake other than a godly one) faces a challenge in reading a text that is often and easily praised for its revolutionary, modern, feminist, and progressive achievements. Yet, there are overlaps in each of these categories with a robustly and holistic Christian worldview. Indeed, the message of the value, equality, and authority of each individual soul advanced by Jane Eyre was the direct result of the evangelical Christian influence throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One could say that Christianity created Jane Eyre.

As she strives to create a sense of self within a set of conditions in which almost nothing is a given, Jane does so as a committed Christian. Her faith is tested and strengthened a number of ways in the story. She is painfully subject to the hypocrisy of nominal Christians and Christian institutions. And she also encounters practices of true Christianity that are good—but not good for her.

Jane also understands the Christian life to be one of ministry or service. She understands that a Christian woman—even one as poor and oppressed as she—can serve God as a teacher, as a governess, as a missionary, as a wife, or as a mother. She can serve in any of these ways—or another. So when she sets out to find, in her own words, a new servitude, she does so wanting to be the person God has created her to be and with the understanding that even within his will, she has choices to make.

One of these choices is a moral one. It requires her to choose between her Christian conviction and her human desires. Wrestling with this choice, she realizes, Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour . . . If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? Other choices she faces are those not between right and wrong, but determining what is wise. She meets examples of stoicism, hedonism, and extreme Calvinism and must choose in each case whether these views are compatible with her own understanding of what it means to be a Christian. And twice she must face the decision to forgive—or not—and decide what forgiveness requires—and what it does not.

Even the heavy Romantic influences are transformed in Jane Eyre by Brontë’s Christian faith. For in nature, even in her greatest time of crisis, she sees God and proclaims, We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.

And, yet, ultimately, natural revelation turns out to be insufficient for Jane to find her true calling and her true self. She needs a God who intervenes in her life, one who makes straight her path.

Volume 1

Preface

A preface to the first edition of Jane Eyre being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.

My thanks are due in three quarters.

To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.

To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant.

To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author.

The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.

Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous¹⁵ or carping¹⁶ few who doubt the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre: in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is—I repeat it—a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth—to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.

Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.¹⁷

There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien¹⁸ as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places?¹⁹ I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time—they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead.

Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding:²⁰ they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him—if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger—I have dedicated this second edition of Jane Eyre.

CURRER BELL.

December 21st, 1847.

Note to the Third Edition

I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of Jane Eyre affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.

This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have been made, and to prevent future errors.

CURRER BELL.

April 13th, 1848.

Chapter 1

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.

What does Bessie say I have done? I asked.

"Jane, I don’t like cavillers²¹ or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds:²² the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of the solitary rocks and promontories by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape²³—

"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge

Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."²⁴

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla,²⁵ Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold. Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.

The two ships becalmed on a torpid²⁶ sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela,²⁷ and Henry, Earl of Moreland.²⁸

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room door opened.

Boh! Madam Mope! cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.

Where the dickens is she! he continued. "Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan²⁹ is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain—bad animal!"

It is well I drew the curtain, thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once—

She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.

And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.

What do you want? I asked, with awkward diffidence.

Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’ was the answer. I want you to come here; and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage,³⁰ heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious,³¹ and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, on account of his delicate health. Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.

John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy³² to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.

Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.

That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since, said he, and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!

Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult.

What were you doing behind the curtain? he asked.

I was reading.

Show the book.

I returned to the window and fetched it thence.

You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.

I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.

Wicked and cruel boy! I said. You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!

I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome,³³ and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

What! what! he cried. Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first—

He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me Rat! Rat! and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words—

Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!

Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!

Then Mrs. Reed subjoined³⁴—

Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there. Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.

Chapter 2

I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.

Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.

For shame! for shame! cried the lady’s-maid. What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son! Your young master.

Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?

No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.

They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two pair of hands arrested me instantly.

If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down, said Bessie. Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly.

Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature.³⁵ This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy³⁶ it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of me.

Don’t take them off, I cried; I will not stir.

In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.

Mind you don’t, said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity.

She never did so before, at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail.

But it was always in her, was the reply. I’ve told Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me. She’s an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover.³⁷

Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said—You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse.

I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in—

And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them.

What we tell you is for your good, added Bessie, in no harsh voice, you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you away, I am sure.

Besides, said Miss Abbot, God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.

They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.

The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table,³⁸ the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane.³⁹ Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.

This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The house-maid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room—the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur.

Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.

My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking⁴⁰ the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I returned to my stool.

Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed⁴¹ to the dismal present.

All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid⁴² well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious⁴³ and insolent carriage, was universally indulged.