Chapter 2 — the red-room

Bessie and Miss Abbot drag Jane upstairs to the red-room and tie her to a stool to keep her from running. The red-room is the largest bedroom in the house — the chamber where Mr. Reed, Jane's uncle, died nine years earlier. It has been kept ceremonial and unused ever since. The bed is a great mahogany four-poster with crimson hangings; the windows are shrouded; the furniture is heavy and old. The servants leave and turn the key.

Jane sits on the stool and thinks. She thinks about John Reed, who is allowed to torment her without consequence, and about Eliza and Georgiana, whose smaller cruelties go unrebuked. She thinks about her dead uncle, who on his deathbed made his wife promise to raise Jane as her own, and about Mrs. Reed, who has kept the letter of the promise and broken its spirit at every turn. The chapter is doing the work the first chapter did not do: it is showing us how this child has come to be the kind of person who would hurl herself at her cousin.

Twilight comes on. The unused room grows colder. A streak of light moves across the ceiling — almost certainly a lamp crossing the lawn outside, reflected through the curtains. Jane, frightened past reason, takes it for her uncle's spirit risen to avenge her. She screams. Bessie and Miss Abbot run to the door; Mrs. Reed comes up; the servants want to release her, but Mrs. Reed, hearing it as a tantrum, locks her in for another hour. Jane screams once more and faints. She wakes the next chapter in her own bed, with the apothecary Mr. Lloyd at her side and a permanent decision made: this household has lost her, and she will tell the truth about it the moment she is asked.