All 38 chapters — Jane's autobiography from ten to thirty.
The novel is divided, in feeling if not formally, into five movements. Chapters 1-4 at Gateshead, the house Jane is raised in and is hated by. Chapters 5-10 at Lowood, the charity school where Helen Burns dies. Chapters 11-27 at Thornfield, where Jane meets Rochester and the wedding is interrupted at the altar. Chapters 28-35 at Moor House and Morton, where Jane is taken in by the Rivers family and nearly accepts St. John's missionary marriage. Chapters 36-38 at Ferndean, where she returns to Rochester. Five houses, one narrator, and a final chapter that opens with the most quoted sentence in nineteenth-century English fiction: "Reader, I married him."
Ten years old, unwanted, locked in the red-room.
Ten-year-old Jane hides behind a curtain at Gateshead with Bewick's book of birds. Her cousin John Reed finds her, throws the book at her head, and Jane — for the first time — fights back. Mrs. Reed orders her locked in the red-room. The novel's first sentence has already told us how this household feels.
Jane is locked in the red-room — the chamber where her uncle died. Twilight; a streak of moving light; she takes it for her uncle's ghost and screams herself into a fit. Mrs. Reed refuses to release her. Jane faints. The first set-piece of the novel and the first set-piece of its gothic.
Jane wakes from her fit with the apothecary Mr. Lloyd at her side. He is the first adult in the novel who listens to her. He asks her about Gateshead and hears the truth. He suggests, before leaving, that she might do better at school. Mrs. Reed, eager to be rid of her, agrees.
Brocklehurst, the clergyman of Lowood, arrives to interview Jane. He examines her on hell and humility. Mrs. Reed, before he goes, tells him Jane is deceitful. After he leaves, Jane confronts her aunt with the truth — for the first time, out loud. Mrs. Reed looks frightened.
Charity school, Helen Burns, eight years.
Jane travels alone, by coach, to Lowood Institution. Burnt porridge for breakfast; the food is taken away. In the garden during recess she sees an older girl reading a book by the fire-wall. The girl is Helen Burns. The first kindness Jane has met in years, and the beginning of the most important friendship of her childhood.
Miss Scatcherd flogs Helen Burns for blots in her copybook. Helen submits without flinching. Jane is enraged. That afternoon in the garden, their first long argument: should injustice be answered, or borne? Helen says resentment is itself a worse bondage. Jane disagrees. Neither converts the other.
Brocklehurst arrives for an inspection. He preaches mortification while his wife and daughters arrive in velvet. Jane drops her slate; he sees her, stands her on a stool, and brands her a liar in front of the school. She stands there half an hour. Helen Burns walks past and lifts her eyes to Jane's — the smile that keeps her from breaking.
That evening, Miss Temple — the young superintendent — takes Jane and Helen to her own room for tea and seed-cake. She listens to Jane's account of Gateshead. She writes to Mr. Lloyd. A few days later, his letter corroborates Jane's story in full. Miss Temple clears Jane in front of the school. The slander is undone.
Spring brings typhus to Lowood. Many girls die. Helen is dying separately of consumption. One night Jane sneaks into her room, climbs into the bed, and holds her. They fall asleep. In the morning the nurse finds Jane with her arms around Helen, who has died in the night. One of the most quoted scenes in Victorian fiction.
The typhus brings public notice; Lowood is reformed; Brocklehurst is replaced. Jane stays eight years — six as student, two as teacher. When Miss Temple marries and leaves, Jane advertises for a governess position. An answer comes from Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall: thirty pounds a year, one pupil. Jane accepts. Bessie visits on the last evening.
Governess to Adèle, master of the house, the wedding interrupted.
Jane arrives at Thornfield. Mrs. Fairfax, the elderly housekeeper, receives her warmly. Adèle Varens, a small French girl, is her pupil. The owner — Mr. Rochester — is rarely at home. On a tour of the upper floors, Jane hears a strange laugh on the third floor, attributed to Grace Poole. The first signal of what the house is hiding.
January. Jane walks to Hay to post a letter. A rider comes down the lane behind her; the horse slips on ice and falls. She helps the man up. He is brusque, dark, lame from the sprain. She walks back to Thornfield and finds his dog in the hall — and realizes the man on the road was Mr. Rochester.
Rochester sends for Jane that evening. He examines her portfolio — three strange, visionary watercolors she made at Lowood. He studies them for a long time and asks her about them. He is gruff but not unkind. The intellectual connection is established before either of them has named it.
Rochester sends for Jane several evenings running. They talk by the fire about Adèle, about Jane's history, about Rochester's hints at past sins. Jane tells him plainly that further wrong cannot make right of past wrong. He does not contradict her. The relationship between them is being built, evening by evening, as a relationship between minds.
In the night, a strange laugh in the corridor. Jane finds Rochester's bed curtains on fire and douses the flames with the wash-jug. He takes her hand with an intensity that breaks the social rules. He goes upstairs alone to investigate. He returns and tells her, without explaining, to keep what happened to herself.
Rochester has left at dawn for a house party. Mrs. Fairfax mentions that Blanche Ingram — a beautiful well-born heiress — will be there, and that the two might marry. Jane goes upstairs and sketches two portraits side by side: one of herself, plain; one of Blanche, lovely. She tells herself which Rochester is likelier to want.
The house party comes to Thornfield for two weeks. Blanche Ingram is dazzling and contemptuous of governesses. Jane is told to come down to the drawing room each evening and sit in a corner. She watches Blanche flirt with Rochester. Their eyes meet once across the room. The look is not the look of a man marrying someone else.
The party plays charades. Blanche and Rochester act out a bridal scene together. A stranger arrives unannounced from the West Indies — Mr. Richard Mason. Rochester turns pale and grips his wine-glass. Jane sees it. She does not yet know why. The novel has begun to accelerate.
A gypsy fortune-teller appears at Thornfield. She reads each lady in turn; Blanche comes back looking ill. Jane goes in last. The gypsy questions her about her feelings, probes whether she cares for Rochester. Jane recognizes the voice — the gypsy is Rochester in disguise. When he drops it, she mentions Mason has arrived. Rochester turns white.
A scream in the night. Rochester wakes Jane and takes her up to a sealed room on the third floor. Mason is bleeding from a stabbed and bitten shoulder. Jane sits with him for two hours, forbidden to speak. At dawn the surgeon comes; Mason is bandaged and sent away in a carriage before the household wakes.
Bessie writes: Mrs. Reed is dying and has asked for Jane. Jane returns to Gateshead. She finds the house diminished — John dead, the daughters dispersing. On her deathbed Mrs. Reed gives Jane a letter from her uncle John Eyre, three years old, that she had answered with the lie that Jane was dead. Jane forgives her. Mrs. Reed dies unreconciled.
Jane returns to Thornfield after a month away. The coach drops her at twilight; she walks up through the meadow toward the house. Rochester is in the orchard. He calls out to her, calls her his "little friend," tells her Thornfield is her home. She realizes how completely she loves him. The discipline of the next chapters will be required.
Midsummer in the orchard. Rochester tells Jane, casually, that he is to marry Blanche and that she must leave for a position in Ireland. She breaks. "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!" Rochester takes her hand: the Ireland story was a test. He proposes. She accepts. That night the storm splits the chestnut tree.
Rochester wants diamonds, silks, a London trousseau. Jane refuses all of it. She keeps her plain governess's gowns, her thirty pounds a year, her teaching of Adèle. She writes to her uncle in Madeira to tell him of the engagement. Every gesture is the same gesture: she is keeping her own ground. The marriage will be on equal terms or it will not be at all.
The night before the wedding. Rochester is away. In the dark a tall, dark-haired figure enters Jane's room, tries on her wedding veil, and rips it slowly in two. The face is "ghastly... savage." The figure leans over Jane; Jane faints. Rochester says, calmly, that it was Grace Poole. He asks for two more days. Jane agrees.
At the altar, the wedding is halted. A London solicitor, Mr. Briggs, with Richard Mason beside him, declares Rochester already has a living wife: Bertha Antoinetta Mason, alive and presently at Thornfield. Rochester takes the wedding party upstairs and unlocks the inner door on the third floor. Jane sees Bertha for the first time. The wedding is over.
Rochester tells Jane the whole story — Jamaica, Bertha's madness, his fifteen years of wandering with mistresses. He begs her to live with him in France. Jane refuses. "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." She kisses him while he sleeps and walks out of Thornfield at dawn with twenty shillings.
Near death on the moors; the Rivers family; St. John's offer.
Jane is set down at Whitcross, a crossroads on a bare moor, with no shilling left. She wanders for three days. She begs and is refused; she eats a porridge meant for a pig. On the third evening, in the rain, she sees a light, walks toward it, and collapses on the doorstep of Moor House. St. John Rivers overrules the servant who would turn her away. Diana and Mary put her to bed.
Jane recovers slowly at Moor House under the care of Diana and Mary Rivers. She gives her name as Jane Elliott and refuses, for now, to tell them more. They accept it. St. John, the brother, is harder to refuse — but he too, after probing, decides to wait. By the end of the week Jane is walking in the garden and sitting in the parlour with the sisters in the evenings.
A month at Moor House. Diana and Mary will leave to take governess positions; the house must be shut up. St. John offers Jane the schoolmistress position at the small village school he has founded at Morton. The salary is small; a cottage comes with it. Jane accepts. The household prepares to scatter.
Jane settles into the schoolmistress's cottage at Morton. The girls are unlettered, the work is humbling, but she is for the first time in her life independent. Rosamond Oliver — the beautiful local heiress and the school's patroness — visits often, transparently in love with St. John. He refuses to acknowledge her in front of others. Jane begins to understand him.
Jane paints a portrait of Rosamond and shows it to St. John. He looks at it long and hard. She asks if he loves Rosamond. He admits, calmly, that he does — and that he will refuse her. She would not suit a missionary's wife. As he leaves, he tears a strip from Jane's drawing paper and pockets it. Jane does not yet know why.
A week later St. John returns. He has discovered Jane's real name from the corner of paper he tore. Her uncle John Eyre is dead and has left her twenty thousand pounds. John Eyre was also the Rivers' uncle on their mother's side — Jane is their cousin. The family she has lacked is suddenly, fully, hers. Jane divides the fortune in four equal parts.
Christmas at Moor House. Jane has renovated the cottage for the cousins' return; Diana and Mary come home; the family is together. By January St. John has decided. He means to leave for India as a missionary and needs a wife to work with him. He proposes to Jane. He does not love her. He asks her to learn Hindustani. Jane offers to go as his fellow worker, not as his wife.
St. John presses Jane through the spring. Scripture, silence, iron self-discipline. One evening she is within an inch of yielding. She steps outside. On the wind she hears Rochester's voice calling her name three times — "Jane! Jane! Jane!" She answers, "I am coming!" The spell breaks. She packs and leaves Moor House the next morning.
The ruin of Thornfield; the reunion on equal terms.
Jane reaches Thornfield and finds a blackened ruin. The innkeeper at the village tells her the story. Bertha set fire to the master's old chamber and threw herself from the roof. Rochester tried to save her; the staircase collapsed; he was blinded and lost his right hand. He has been at Ferndean — a remote manor in the woods, thirty miles off — ever since, alone with two old servants.
Jane arrives at Ferndean at dusk. Rochester is on the bench outside, blind, with the dog Pilot. She walks in. He cannot at first believe she is real. She tells him about the inheritance, about her independence, about her decision. They talk through the night. He proposes again. She accepts. They discover that on the same evening he had cried her name three times in despair, she had heard the voice.
"Reader, I married him." A quiet wedding three days later. Ten years of perfect happiness. Rochester regains partial sight in time to see their first son. Adèle is settled. Diana and Mary marry well. St. John dies a missionary in India. Jane reproduces his final letter in the novel's last paragraph and lets him have the last word that is not hers.