Chapter 10 — eight years pass; the advertisement

The typhus epidemic, by killing many girls and exposing the school's conditions, brings Lowood to public notice. There is a county inquiry; reforms follow. The diet is improved; the dormitories are repaired; Brocklehurst is removed as resident treasurer, replaced by a committee that includes him only nominally. Lowood becomes a respectable, tolerable charity school — neither comfortable nor cruel — and Jane, who is fourteen by the end of the epidemic, stays. She is a student for six years and a teacher for two more.

The presence that keeps her there is Miss Temple. Miss Temple has been, by Jane's description, "mother, governess, and, latterly, companion." Under her example Jane has become educated, disciplined, and self-possessed. When Miss Temple, in Jane's eighteenth year, marries a clergyman from a neighboring county and leaves Lowood, Jane discovers within hours that the institution she has called home for eight years held her only because Miss Temple was in it. She is restless within a week. She does not have any clear idea where she wishes to go; she has only the certainty that she cannot stay.

She advertises in a county paper for a position as a governess. She receives one answer, a week later — a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall, near Millcote, an old country house, offers thirty pounds a year for a young lady to teach a single girl of about ten. Jane accepts. The chapter ends with two scenes. Bessie, now married to a coachman, visits on Jane's last evening at Lowood — they have not seen each other in eight years, and the visit is gentle. Bessie also tells Jane, almost as an afterthought, that her uncle on her father's side, John Eyre, called at Gateshead seven years before looking for her — a businessman who had emigrated to Madeira; Mrs. Reed, presumably, had told him nothing. The detail is filed away. Jane leaves for Thornfield the next morning at four.