Chapter 24 — engagement; Jane keeps her own ground

The engagement is announced. Mrs. Fairfax is told. Adèle is told. The household, after a brief shock, settles into the new arrangement. Rochester is now in a state Jane has never seen him in: full of plans, expansive, restless, generous. He wants to take her to London for the wedding shopping. He wants to drape her in jewels — sapphires for her dark hair, diamonds for the wedding day. He wants to dress her in silks and velvets. He wants, in short, to remake her into the kind of woman a man of his fortune would conventionally marry.

Jane resists every step. She refuses the silks; she refuses the velvets; she refuses to be taken to London. She tells him, plainly, that he will have to marry the woman he proposed to and not someone else. She insists on continuing to teach Adèle in the schoolroom every morning — at the agreed thirty pounds a year — until the wedding day. She insists, with affectionate firmness, on her right to make decisions about her own dress and her own occupation. He laughs about it; he is also, faintly, troubled. Every refusal is the same refusal. She will not be bought, even by gifts she would otherwise like; the giving is the wrong shape.

She also takes one practical step. She has Mrs. Reed's letter from John Eyre in her trunk, the one that had been answered three years earlier with the lie that she was dead. Jane writes to Funchal in Madeira and informs her uncle that she is alive, and that she is engaged to be married to her employer, Mr. Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall, Yorkshire, England. The letter is short and direct. It is also, although neither she nor Rochester knows it yet, the most important letter in the second half of the novel. The chapter ends with the wedding day approaching and Jane, even in love, refusing to let love override the standing she has spent her life assembling.