Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre grows up without love. Her parents died when she was an infant and she was taken in by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, who resents her from the very beginning. The Reed children bully her and Mrs. Reed looks the other way. Jane has no friends, no allies, and nothing to call her own except a stubborn, unbreakable sense of her own worth. When she finally fights back against her cousin John Reed, Mrs. Reed has her locked in the red room where her uncle died. Jane is so terrified she faints. When she wakes, she is told she is being sent away to school.

The school is Lowood Institution, a charity establishment for orphan girls, and it is in many ways worse than Gateshead. The food is terrible, the building is freezing, and the man who runs it, Mr. Brocklehurst, preaches suffering to poor children while his own family lives in comfort. But Lowood gives Jane two things Gateshead never did. It gives her a friend, a quiet, forgiving girl named Helen Burns, and it gives her a protector, a teacher named Miss Temple, who treats the girls with genuine kindness. Helen dies of tuberculosis while Jane is still a student, peacefully and without bitterness, and Jane grieves her for years. She stays at Lowood for eight years in total, first as a student and then as a teacher, until the restlessness becomes too much and she advertises for a position as governess.

She is hired at Thornfield Hall, a large old estate with an atmosphere she cannot quite name. The housekeeper is warm and the pupil, a small French girl named Adele, is lively and sweet. But there is something about the house, especially at night, a laughter from the upper floors that belongs to no one Jane has met. The master of Thornfield, Edward Rochester, arrives without ceremony one icy evening and he is nothing like she expected. He is rude and dark and argumentative and he talks to Jane as though her opinions genuinely interest him, which is something that has never happened to her before. She falls in love with him slowly and then completely, while telling herself firmly that she has not.

Rochester brings home a party of fashionable guests and among them is the beautiful and accomplished Blanche Ingram, who everyone assumes he will marry. Jane watches this and is devastated by it in a way she refuses to name. Rochester disguises himself as a fortune teller to draw out her feelings, and when the disguise is revealed Jane is furious, and he is delighted by her fury. Strange things keep happening at Thornfield. A fire breaks out in Rochester's bedroom one night and Jane saves his life by throwing water on the flames. A man named Mason arrives from Jamaica and Rochester goes still with something like fear when he sees him. One night Mason is found bleeding on the third floor and Rochester tends to him urgently and has him carried away before dawn, telling Jane nothing.

Rochester proposes to Jane in the garden on a summer evening and she accepts, and the chestnut tree they stand under is struck by lightning that same night. They are to be married in a quiet ceremony a month later. But at the altar a solicitor rises and declares that the marriage cannot take place because Edward Rochester already has a wife. Her name is Bertha Mason. She is alive and she is at Thornfield. Rochester takes the entire wedding party upstairs to the third floor and shows them a wild and violent woman who does not recognise anyone in the room, who moves like an animal, who laughs the laugh Jane has been hearing in the corridors. Rochester explains that he was tricked into the marriage by a family that concealed Bertha's hereditary madness, that he has been trapped for fifteen years, and that Jane is his true wife in every sense that matters. He asks her to stay with him anyway. He loves her and she knows he loves her.

She leaves Thornfield before dawn the next morning. This is the most important moment in the novel. Jane does not leave because she stops loving Rochester. She leaves because she loves herself equally, because she will not become his mistress and lose the one thing she has always had, which is her own integrity. She walks away from the only home she has ever known and the only person she has ever loved, with almost nothing in her hands.

She collapses on the doorstep of a house on the moor, half starved and exhausted. She is taken in by three siblings named St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers, who ask very few questions while she recovers. She takes a job teaching poor village girls, plain and unglamorous work after Thornfield, and she does it with full commitment while missing Rochester every single day. Then a letter arrives to say that her uncle in Madeira has died and left her his entire fortune. In the same moment she discovers that the Rivers siblings are her cousins, the only family she has ever had. Without hesitation she divides the inheritance equally among all four of them.

St. John Rivers is a man of extraordinary will who is preparing to go to India as a missionary. He wants Jane to come as his wife, not because he loves her but because he believes she is built for the work. He frames his proposal as a religious duty and when Jane hesitates he turns the full weight of his moral authority against her until she nearly breaks. She is on the very edge of saying yes when she hears Rochester's voice calling her name from across whatever distance separates them. She cannot explain it. She does not try to. She goes back.

Thornfield is ruins. Bertha Mason had set fire to the house and moved through it room by room. Rochester had tried to save everyone, including Bertha herself, but she jumped from the roof before he could reach her. He survived but he is blinded and has lost one hand and is living alone at a small manor called Ferndean, broken and convinced that Jane is gone forever. Jane walks to Ferndean and finds him in the garden in the rain, feeling his way along the path with a stick. She puts her hand in his and he knows immediately that she is real. She tells him she is free now, that she has money and family and needs nothing from him. She tells him she loves him anyway. He is no longer the Rochester who held all the power. He is humbled and dependent and her equal at last.

They marry. Ten years later Jane tells us, in the novel's final pages, that they have been completely happy together. And the last line she gives us is the most famous sentence in Victorian literature: Reader, I married him.