Chapter 7 — Brocklehurst at Lowood; Jane on the stool

Winter is hardest at Lowood — the cold unrelieved, the food meager, many of the girls sick. One February afternoon Mr. Brocklehurst arrives for one of his periodic inspections. Jane has dreaded this since her first day; the slander Mrs. Reed planted has been waiting for him to deliver. Brocklehurst stands in the schoolroom in his dark coat and lectures the assembled girls on the duty of mortification. Their hair, he says, has been arranged with too much vanity and must be cut. Their meals must not be supplemented after a ruined breakfast. The body must be subdued so the soul may rise. While he speaks, his wife and two daughters enter the schoolroom in velvet pelisses, ermine muffs, and elaborate ostrich-plumed hats. The contrast is exact and Brontë intends it.

Jane, sitting near the back, drops her slate by accident. The crash brings Brocklehurst's eye to her. He recognizes her. He calls her forward. He stands her on a tall stool in front of every girl in the school and tells them Jane is a liar, a "deceitful" child planted in their midst by a benefactor who had hoped Lowood might reform her. The girls are not to speak to her, eat with her, walk with her. The teachers are to watch her closely.

Jane stands on the stool for half an hour after he is gone. She is too humiliated to move. She is, by her own description, ready to die. As she stands there, Helen Burns, walking past on an errand, lifts her eyes to Jane's and gives her a quiet, deliberate smile. The smile is what keeps Jane from breaking. The chapter is the novel's first head-on portrait of institutional Christianity used as an instrument of cruelty, and the first demonstration that Helen's patience is not, as Jane had thought, a weakness — it is a kind of strength Jane will need.