Chapter 1 — Gateshead, the window seat, the book

A wet November afternoon at Gateshead Hall. Mrs. Reed is in the drawing room with her three children — Eliza, John, and Georgiana — gathered around her. Jane, the orphaned niece treated as an unwanted dependent, has been told to keep her distance until she can acquire "a more sociable and child-like disposition." She slips into the breakfast-room, takes Bewick's History of British Birds down from the shelf, climbs into the window seat, and pulls the heavy moreen curtain across. For half an hour she is alone, reading, half-frightened and half-delighted by the engravings — solitary rocks, the haunts of sea-fowl, "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone."

John Reed finds her. Fourteen, large and heavy, his mother's favorite, the kind of boy a household indulges past correction. He tells Jane she has no business with their books — she is a dependent, with no money — and orders her out. When she comes out, he hurls the heavy volume at her head. Jane falls against the door, cuts her head, tastes the blood. Something in her gives way. She calls him a "wicked and cruel boy," compares him to a "murderer," to a "Roman emperor," and flies at him. The household runs in. Mrs. Reed orders the servants to take Jane upstairs and lock her in the red-room.

It is the first chapter and the novel has already done several things at once. It has placed us inside a child's first-person voice that does not apologize for the rage it reports. It has put a book in Jane's hands as her one solace and used the same book as the weapon her cousin uses to wound her. And it has made the household's hostility material: a curtain pulled across a window seat, a heavy book thrown at a child's head, a door closed and a key turned.