Jane Eyre

Characters · Jane Eyre

The cast — who they are, and what they carry.

1. 01

   Jane Eyre

   Protagonist

   Plain, poor, passionate, and principled. She is the narrative voice and the novel's moral compass. Her great quality is her refusal to lie to herself about what she feels or what she values.

2. 02

   Edward Rochester

   Deuteragonist

   Complicated, secretive, capable of great warmth and great selfishness. He loves Jane genuinely but he also tries to possess her. His blinding and injury at the end are sometimes read as the novel punishing him into equality.

3. 03

   Bertha Mason

   Foil

   Rochester's legal wife, locked in the attic of Thornfield. She is presented through Rochester's account as a madwoman but she is also the novel's most silenced figure, the person whose story is never told from her own point of view.

4. 04

   St. John Rivers

   Antagonist

   Cold, handsome, ambitious in the service of God. He is in many ways more dangerous to Jane than Rochester because he does not appeal to her passion but to her conscience.

5. 05

   Helen Burns

   Mentor

   Jane's first friend and moral teacher. Her acceptance of suffering and death without bitterness is both admirable and troubling. She represents a kind of Christianity that the novel respects but ultimately moves beyond.

6. 06

   Mrs. Reed

   Villain

   Jane's aunt, the first villain of the novel. Her deathbed confession, that she told John Eyre that Jane was dead out of spite, shows how deep her cruelty goes and how much it cost Jane.