Chapter 31 — the schoolmistress; Rosamond Oliver

Jane takes possession of the whitewashed cottage attached to the village schoolhouse at Morton. Two rooms: a kitchen-parlour and a bedroom above. Hannah from Moor House has made it ready — a fire in the grate, a kettle on the hob, plain furniture borrowed from the parsonage. Jane unpacks her small bundle. She is a schoolmistress in a Yorkshire village, on thirty pounds a year. By the standards of her training it is a step down. By her own standards, she is free.

The work is hard and humbling. The twenty village girls are largely unlettered; many cannot speak grammatical English; the older ones are coarsened by the labor of the local needle-factory. Some have never been taught to write their own names. Jane teaches them slowly, an hour at a time. The first weeks are tiring; the patience required is greater than anything Lowood asked of her. But the girls are quick when reached, and willing, and within a month several of them are reading their first simple texts. Jane finds, against her own expectation, that she is happy.

Rosamond Oliver, the school's patroness, visits often. She is the daughter of Mr. Oliver, who owns the local needle-factory and has built half the cottages in Morton. She is twenty, beautiful, vain, cheerful, and obviously in love with St. John Rivers. She arranges to be at the school whenever he is likely to call. St. John, when she is in the room, will not look at her; he speaks to Jane and to the children and not to her. Jane, watching, begins to understand the man who pulled her in from the moor — in love and refusing it on principle. The chapter is the novel's first long study of St. John as a danger.