Chapter 30 — Diana and Mary; St. John offers her a school

A month passes. Jane is fully recovered and has come to love Diana and Mary as if they were the sisters she never had. The three of them read together, walk on the moors together, talk in the parlour late into the evenings. Jane has, for the first time, the experience of intellectual female friendship — Diana especially, who is the more forceful of the two, who reads German with her, who walks the longest walks. The chapter is, against the gloom that surrounds it, one of the gentler in the novel.

The financial situation, however, is finite. The Rivers family's small income has been almost entirely lost through the bankruptcy of the man who held it. The estate at Moor House is leased; the lease is up; the sisters must take positions as governesses in the south of England, where they have offers. St. John himself is to remain at the parsonage at Morton — and is preparing, in private, for what Jane will only later understand: a missionary departure for India. The household must, within the month, scatter.

St. John has been watching Jane for the four weeks of her recovery. He has assessed her, in his calm clinical way, as exceptionally capable. He offers her a position. He has founded, in the parish of Morton, a small free school for the daughters of the local poor — twenty girls, paid for by Miss Rosamond Oliver, the heiress of the local needle-factory owner. The position of schoolmistress is open. The salary is thirty pounds a year; the cottage adjoining the school is rent-free; the work is honest, exhausting, and humble. Jane accepts at once. She values her independence, even at the cost of stepping down in social standing from a governess in a great house to a schoolmistress in a village. The chapter ends with Diana and Mary preparing to leave for their new posts in the south, and Jane preparing to walk the two miles to Morton to take possession of her cottage.