Chapter 1
The window seat
A November afternoon at Gateshead Hall. There is no possibility of taking a walk. Jane, ten years old, the orphaned niece of the widow Mrs. Reed, is grateful for the bad weather — it spares her the walk her cousins Eliza, John, and Georgiana take with their mother. She slips into the breakfast-room, climbs onto the window seat, draws the heavy red curtain across, and reads Bewick's History of British Birds. For a few pages she is alone with the book. Then John Reed finds her. He drags her out, calls her a "rat," and hurls the book at her head. Jane, bleeding, fights back for the first time in her life. Mrs. Reed orders her locked in the red-room.
Chapter 2
The red-room
Jane is dragged upstairs by Bessie and Miss Abbot and locked in the red-room — the chamber where Mr. Reed died nine years before, kept ceremonial and unused. Twilight comes on. Jane, alone, contemplates the injustice of her treatment. A streak of light moves across the wall — moonlight, probably, but to a terrified ten-year-old it reads as her dead uncle's spirit come to avenge her. She screams. Mrs. Reed comes; Mrs. Reed refuses to release her; she screams again and faints. The red-room is the first set-piece of the novel and the first establishment of its gothic vocabulary as moral pressure rather than decoration.
Chapter 3
Mr. Lloyd
Jane wakes in her own bed with the apothecary Mr. Lloyd at her side. He is the first adult in the novel who treats her as a person whose answers might be worth hearing. He asks her gently about Gateshead and listens to the truth. He overhears, that night, the servants discussing Jane's parents — a poor curate who married Mrs. Reed's sister against the family's wishes and died of typhus a year later, leaving Jane orphaned. Mr. Lloyd suggests to Mrs. Reed, before he leaves, that the girl might do better at school. Mrs. Reed, who has been wanting to be rid of her, agrees.
Chapter 4
Brocklehurst
Months pass. In January, Mr. Brocklehurst arrives — a tall, severe clergyman who runs a charity school called Lowood. He examines Jane on the catechism, on hell, on her duty to be humble. Mrs. Reed, before he leaves, takes him aside and tells him Jane is a "deceitful" child who must be watched. Brocklehurst agrees to take her on those terms. After he is gone Jane, almost without intending it, tells her aunt the truth: that she is not deceitful, that she does not love her, that Mrs. Reed has been cruel and that Jane will say so to anyone who asks. Mrs. Reed, for the first time in her life, looks frightened of the child. The chapter is the novel's first set-piece for the voice that will run all the way through.
Chapter 5
Lowood
Jane leaves Gateshead before dawn, alone, on a coach traveling north. The journey takes a day. She arrives at Lowood late at night, in driving rain, and is given a piece of bread and a cup of cold water. The next morning, the bell rings before light. Jane sees the school for the first time: ranks of girls in brown frocks, the porridge is burnt, the food is taken away uneaten. Out in the garden during the recess, Jane sees a tall older girl sitting alone on a bench by the fire-wall, reading a book. The girl is Helen Burns. The conversation that follows is the first kindness Jane has met in years and the beginning of the most important friendship of her childhood.
Chapter 6
The first argument
Lessons. Miss Scatcherd, the teacher of the bottom class, finds blots and a single dirty fingernail in Helen's copybook and orders her to fetch the rod. Helen submits without flinching. Jane, watching, is enraged. That afternoon in the garden the two girls argue. Jane says she would have struck the rod from Miss Scatcherd's hand. Helen says no — that resentment is itself a worse bondage than any flogging, that she would rather endure than become the kind of person who hates. The argument is the novel's first long conversation about Christianity and self-respect, and it does not end with either girl converting the other.
Chapter 7
Brocklehurst at Lowood
Mr. Brocklehurst arrives at Lowood for one of his periodic inspections. He preaches mortification of the flesh — the girls' hair must be cut, their food must be plain, their souls must be humbled. His own wife and daughters arrive that same hour in velvet pelisses and ostrich-plumed hats. Jane, trying to stay invisible, drops her slate. Brocklehurst sees her, recognizes her, and stands her on a stool in front of the entire school as a "liar," repeating the slander Mrs. Reed had planted. Jane stands there for half an hour, in front of every girl in the room. Helen Burns walks past, lifts her eyes to Jane's, and gives her a smile — the smile, Jane will later say, that kept her from breaking.
Chapter 8
Miss Temple's tea
That evening, Miss Temple, the young superintendent, sends for Jane and Helen and brings them to her own small room. She gives them tea and a thick slice of seed-cake and asks Jane gently for her account of Gateshead. Jane, controlling the rush of resentment, tells the story plainly. Miss Temple listens. She says she will write to Mr. Lloyd, the apothecary, and verify what Jane has said. A few days later the answer comes. Mr. Lloyd has corroborated Jane's story in full. Miss Temple, that afternoon, in front of the assembled school, formally clears Jane of Brocklehurst's charge. The slander is undone.
Chapter 9
Helen dies
Spring at Lowood brings typhus. Many girls die. The school is half-empty; the survivors, including Jane, run wild in the woods and on the moors during the long days the teachers cannot supervise. Helen Burns is not in the typhus ward — Helen has consumption, and is dying separately, slower, in a small room near Miss Temple's. One night Jane learns that the end is close. She slips out of the dormitory and into Helen's room. Helen, lucid and gentle, says she is going where she will not suffer. Jane climbs into the bed and holds her. Both girls fall asleep. In the morning the nurse finds Jane asleep with her arms around Helen, who has died in the night.
Chapter 10
Eight years pass
The typhus epidemic brings the conditions at Lowood to public notice. There is a county inquiry; reform follows; Brocklehurst is replaced as resident treasurer; the school becomes a tolerable institution. Jane stays eight years — six as student, two as teacher. Miss Temple is the steadying presence who keeps her there. When Miss Temple finally marries and leaves, Jane realizes she has lost her reason to stay. She advertises in the county paper for a governess position. An answer comes a week later from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield Hall, near Millcote, offering thirty pounds a year for one little girl. Jane accepts.
Chapter 11
Thornfield
Jane arrives at Thornfield Hall on a long October evening. The housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax — gentle, elderly, distantly related to the absent owner — receives her by the fire with mulled wine and a clear plate of bread. Jane realizes, after some confusion, that Mrs. Fairfax is the housekeeper, not the owner. The owner, a Mr. Rochester, is rarely there. The next morning Jane meets her pupil — Adèle Varens, a small French girl, about eight, the ward of Mr. Rochester. On a tour of the upper floors with Mrs. Fairfax, Jane hears, behind a heavy door on the third floor, a strange, low laugh. It is, Mrs. Fairfax says, only Grace Poole, the seamstress.
Chapter 12
The road to Hay
Months pass. Jane settles into the routine of teaching Adèle and is restless under it; she stands sometimes on the third-floor leads and looks at the line of the horizon. One January afternoon she walks alone to Hay, two miles off, to post a letter. The lane is quiet, the moon is rising, the only sound is her own footstep. A horse and rider come down the lane behind her. The horse slips on a sheet of ice and falls. The rider — dark, brusque, lame from a sprain in the fall — accepts Jane's help in remounting and rides on. She walks back to Thornfield; she finds the dog from the lane in the hall; she realizes, only then, that the man on the road was Mr. Rochester. The novel has met its hero.
Chapter 13
The first interview
The next evening Rochester sends for Jane and Adèle to the drawing room. He is gruff and offhand. He examines Jane's portfolio — three watercolor paintings she had made at Lowood: a shipwreck, a moonlit head against a stormy sky, an iceberg with a bird above. He studies them for a long time. He asks her about them; she answers plainly. The conversation is the novel's first set-piece exchange between the two of them, and the asymmetry is exact — he is her employer, she is the governess — and yet he is, transparently, treating her as a mind.
Chapter 14
The long evening conversation
Over the next days Rochester sends for Jane several evenings in a row. They sit by the fire in the drawing room and talk for hours — about Adèle, about Jane's history, about the past Rochester occasionally hints at darkly. He has, he says, made errors he cannot undo; he is looking, he says, for a way to reform himself. Jane, with her habitual directness, tells him that further wrong cannot make right of past wrong, and that reform must come from within. He does not contradict her. The relationship between them — which has no name yet — is being established as a relationship between minds, on terms unusual for the master and a governess.
Chapter 15
The fire in the bed
Late one night Jane is woken by a low strange laugh outside her door. She lights a candle and goes into the corridor. The laugh comes from the direction of Rochester's bedroom; smoke is curling out from under his door. She rushes in. The bed-curtains are on fire; Rochester is unconscious in the bed. Jane douses the flames with the water-jug from the wash-stand and shakes him awake. Rochester, sitting on the edge of the bed in his nightclothes, takes her hand and will not let it go. He thanks her with an intensity that breaks the social rules he has been more or less keeping. He goes upstairs to investigate alone. He returns and tells her, without explaining, to keep the night to herself.
Chapter 16
Blanche Ingram
Jane comes downstairs the next morning expecting to see Rochester and is told he has left at dawn for a house party at the Leas, several miles off. Mrs. Fairfax, talking gently, explains that the party will include the famously beautiful Blanche Ingram, and that there has been talk for some years that the two might marry. The news lands. Jane goes upstairs, takes out her drawing materials, and disciplines her own feelings by sketching two portraits side by side: one of "a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain" — herself — and one, in chalks, of an imagined Blanche Ingram, "the loveliest face I could conceive, an accomplished lady of rank." She tells herself, deliberately, which one of these Rochester is more likely to want.
Chapter 17
The house party arrives
Two weeks later the house party itself comes to Thornfield. Blanche Ingram is everything Mrs. Fairfax described — tall, dark, magnificent, openly contemptuous of governesses. Jane is told by Rochester (with a kind of cool brutality) to come down to the drawing-room every evening and sit quietly in a corner. She does. She watches Blanche flirt with Rochester openly, mocking governesses to his face. Rochester barely looks at Jane. But once across the room their eyes meet, and the look that passes is not the look of a man on the verge of marrying someone else.
Chapter 18
Charades and Mason
The house party invents the next day's amusements. They play charades; Blanche and Rochester pair off and act out, of all things, a bridal scene — the bride veiled, the groom mock-serious, the audience clapping. Jane watches with the practiced restraint the previous chapter has trained in her. Then, in the middle of the evening, the door opens and a stranger is announced — a Mr. Richard Mason, just arrived from the West Indies, on his way to call on Mr. Rochester. The party turns at the new name. Rochester, at the card-table, turns visibly pale and grips his wine-glass for support. Jane sees it. She does not yet know why.
Chapter 19
The gypsy
The next afternoon a gypsy fortune-teller appears at Thornfield, asking to read the ladies' fortunes. The party, half mocking, sends them in one by one. Each comes back disconcerted. Blanche comes back looking faintly ill. Jane is sent in last. The gypsy — a hunched figure with a broad-brimmed hat and a black scarf around her face — questions Jane about her feelings, probes whether she cares for Rochester, and reads her unusually well. Jane, eventually, recognizes the voice. The gypsy is Rochester himself in disguise, using the disguise to interrogate her. When he drops the disguise, Jane tells him almost as an afterthought that Mr. Mason has arrived. Rochester turns white again.
Chapter 20
The night with Mason
In the small hours of the morning Jane is woken by a scream from somewhere upstairs and a cry for help. The household stirs; Rochester goes among the guests in his dressing-gown and tells them, smoothly, that a maid has had a nightmare. The guests subside. Rochester then comes for Jane, takes her up to a sealed room on the third floor she has never entered, and shows her Mason — bitten, stabbed, bleeding from the shoulder, half-fainting on a chair. He asks Jane to sit with Mason while he fetches the surgeon. She is forbidden to speak to him. She sits the longest two hours of her life. Rochester returns at dawn with the surgeon; Mason is bandaged and put into a carriage; he is gone before the household is fully awake.
Chapter 21
Mrs. Reed dies
A letter from Bessie. Mrs. Reed has had a stroke and is dying; she has asked, more than once, for Jane. Jane, with Rochester's leave, goes back to Gateshead for the first time in eight years. She finds the house diminished. John Reed has just died, dissolute and ruined; Eliza is on her way to a French convent; Georgiana is on her way to a London marriage. Mrs. Reed, on her deathbed, is unrepentant. She confesses, however, one piece of business: three years before, a Mr. John Eyre had written from Madeira asking after Jane, intending to make her his heir; Mrs. Reed had told him, out of pure spite, that Jane had died of typhus at Lowood. She gives Jane the letter. Jane forgives her. Mrs. Reed dies that night without softening.
Chapter 22
Return to Thornfield
Jane returns to Thornfield after a month at Gateshead. The coach drops her at the gate at twilight. She walks up through the meadow, hears the rooks, and feels — without permission to feel it — that she is coming home. Rochester is sitting in the orchard. He sees her, calls out, asks where she has been. He calls her his "little friend," his "little wanderer." He tells her Thornfield is her home. Jane realizes, walking up to the house behind him, that she loves him completely and that the realization is going to require a discipline she does not yet have.
Chapter 23
The proposal
Midsummer evening in the orchard. Rochester finds Jane and tells her, casually, that he is at last to marry Blanche Ingram and that Jane will need to leave Thornfield within the month — a position has been arranged for her in Ireland. The news lands on her with full force. She breaks. The speech that follows is the most-quoted passage in the novel: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!" Rochester, to her astonishment, takes her hand and tells her the Ireland story was a test. He has loved her all along. He proposes. She, in tears, accepts. That night a great storm splits the chestnut tree under which the proposal happened. The novel records it without comment.
Chapter 24
The engagement
The engagement. Rochester is flooded with the desire to remake Jane — to take her to London for diamonds, to dress her in silks, to install her as the mistress of his life. Jane resists every step. She refuses the velvets and the silks. She insists on her plain governess's gowns and her thirty pounds a year. She insists on continuing to teach Adèle as before. She writes to her uncle in Madeira to inform him of her engagement and her future. Through every gesture she is keeping her own ground; the marriage, she is determined, will be on equal terms or it will not be at all.
Chapter 25
The figure with the veil
The night before the wedding. Rochester is away on business and not expected back till morning. Jane lies awake. The wedding veil is laid out on the chair. She has had two strange dreams. In the small hours, she wakes; a tall, dark-haired figure is in the room. The figure picks up the veil, looks at herself in the mirror in it, and rips it slowly in two. The face is dark, swollen, with red eyes. The figure leans over Jane in the bed. Jane faints. In the morning Rochester returns. He listens to her account; he says, calmly, that it was Grace Poole; he asks her to wait two more days, after which everything will be explained. Jane, exhausted, agrees.
Chapter 26
The wedding interrupted
The wedding morning. The party walks the half-mile to the church. The minister is at the altar; the marriage is begun. At the moment of "any just impediment" the minister pauses by formality — and from the back of the church a stranger's voice answers. There is an impediment. The voice belongs to a London solicitor named Mr. Briggs; with him is Richard Mason. Briggs reads from a paper: Mr. Edward Rochester is already married, fifteen years before, to Bertha Antoinetta Mason, of Spanish Town, Jamaica, who is alive and presently confined at Thornfield Hall. The wedding stops. Rochester, white with fury, leads the entire party — minister, solicitor, Mason, Jane — back through the village and up to the third floor of Thornfield. He unlocks the inner door. Bertha is there.
Chapter 27
Jane refuses to stay
Jane locks herself in her room and does not come out for hours. Rochester, eventually, gets her to listen. He tells her the whole story: married at twenty-three to Bertha in Jamaica, for her thirty thousand pounds, by a family who concealed her hereditary madness; her descent within four years; his decision to bring her to England and lock her up; his fifteen years of wandering Europe with mistresses, none of whom he loved. He begs Jane to leave with him for France and live as his wife in everything but law. Jane refuses. She loves him; she will not live with him. "I care for myself," she says. "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." She kisses him goodbye while he is sleeping at dawn and walks out of Thornfield with twenty shillings in her purse.
Chapter 28
Three days on the moors
Jane gives the coachman every shilling she has and is set down at a place called Whitcross, an unmarked crossroads on a moor with no town in any direction. She walks. She sleeps in heather. She begs for a piece of bread at three farms and is refused. She eats a porridge a swineherd is feeding to a pig. By the third day she is dying. In the dusk, in driving rain, she sees a single light across the moor and walks toward it. She collapses on the doorstep of Moor House. The servant Hannah is about to send her away when St. John Rivers, returning home, overrules her. He brings Jane in. Diana and Mary, his sisters, put her to bed.
Chapter 29
Recovery at Moor House
Jane lies in bed for three days, then recovers slowly over a week. Diana and Mary, the Rivers sisters, are gentle, intelligent, well-read; they nurse her without pressing her for her story. She tells them only that she is Jane Elliott, an educated young woman who has lost her position and her funds and cannot, just now, say more. They accept it. St. John, the brother, is harder to refuse — beautiful, glacial, with a kind of clinical interest in the human spirit; but he, too, decides to wait. By the end of the week Jane is well enough to walk in the garden and to sit at the parlour table with the sisters in the evenings. She has, for the first time since she left Lowood, a household around her.
Chapter 30
A school at Morton
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 financial situation, however, is finite: the sisters must leave for governess positions in the south; the house at Moor House must be shut up. St. John, the brother, who has been quietly watching Jane, offers her a position. He has founded a small village school for the daughters of the local poor in the parish of Morton; the position of schoolmistress is open; the salary is small but the cottage is provided. Jane accepts. The chapter ends with the household preparing to scatter.
Chapter 31
The schoolmistress
Jane settles into the small cottage attached to the schoolhouse at Morton. The work is hard; the girls are unlettered, often coarse, but quick and willing. She is teaching them to read. The first weeks are humbling — she has come down in the world, and the work is small — but she is also, for the first time in her life, entirely independent. Rosamond Oliver, the school's wealthy patroness, visits the schoolroom often. She is beautiful, cheerful, vain, and obviously in love with St. John, who refuses to look at her in front of others. Jane begins to understand the man she has been taking shelter with.
Chapter 32
St. John refuses Rosamond
Jane has been painting in her cottage in the evenings. She makes a careful portrait of Rosamond Oliver from memory and shows it to St. John when he visits. He looks at it for a long time. Jane, watching him, asks point-blank whether he loves Rosamond. He admits, in a calm flat voice that costs him to maintain, that he loves her with the passion of a young man. He has refused her, however, and will refuse her again. She would not suit the life he has chosen — a missionary's life in India, a life of self-denial. The principle is more important to him than the love. As he is leaving, he tears a strip from a sheet of Jane's drawing paper and pockets it. She does not yet know why.
Chapter 33
The inheritance
A week later, in a snowstorm, St. John walks down to Jane's cottage in the evening. He sits down by the fire. He tells her, slowly and deliberately, that he has discovered her real name. The strip of paper he had torn the previous week had her signature on it, in pencil, where she had absent-mindedly written "Jane Eyre" while practicing. He has, since, made inquiries. Her uncle John Eyre, of Funchal in Madeira, has died. He has left her his entire fortune — twenty thousand pounds. Furthermore, John Eyre was the brother of St. John's mother. They are cousins. Diana, Mary, and St. John are the family Jane has lacked her whole life. Jane, on the spot, divides the fortune four ways.
Chapter 34
St. John's plan
Christmas at Moor House. Jane, with her share of the fortune, has had the house renovated for her cousins' return — new books on the shelves, new curtains, the rooms warm. Diana and Mary come home. The four of them spend a happy month. But St. John, by the end of January, has identified the next stage of his plan. He means to leave for India in the spring as a missionary. He has decided, after a long calm calculation, that he needs a wife who will work alongside him. He proposes to Jane. He does not love her — he is honest about that — but he believes she has the qualities for the work. He asks her to learn Hindustani in preparation. The proposal is, at first, made gently. The chapter ends with Jane saying she will go to India — but only as his fellow worker, not as his wife.
Chapter 35
The voice on the moors
Through the spring St. John presses Jane day after day. He uses scripture; he uses silence; he uses the iron of his own self-discipline. By the end of one long evening Jane is within an inch of saying yes. She steps out of the parlour to compose herself in the moonlight. As she stands there she hears, distinctly, a voice on the wind — a man's voice, hoarse and urgent — calling her name three times: "Jane! Jane! Jane!" It is Rochester's voice, across an impossible distance. She answers aloud — "I am coming! Wait for me!" — and the spell of St. John's influence breaks. She knows what she is going to do. The next morning she packs and leaves Moor House for the south.
Chapter 36
Thornfield in ruins
Jane travels south for two days. At the village inn near Thornfield she asks for the carriage to take her up to the house. The innkeeper looks at her oddly. There is no Thornfield to drive to. The house burned to the ground last autumn. Bertha — the madwoman in the attic, whose existence the village has only recently learned of — set fire to the bed in the master's old chamber, then climbed onto the leads and threw herself down. Rochester tried to save her; he tried to save the servants; he was on the roof when the staircase collapsed under his hand, and the falling timber blinded him in one eye and crushed his right hand. He has been at Ferndean, an isolated manor in the woods thirty miles off, ever since.
Chapter 37
Ferndean
Ferndean is a small dark manor deep in the woods. Jane arrives at dusk. Rochester is sitting on the bench outside the front door, blind in one eye and dim in the other, with a stick at his hand and the dog Pilot at his feet. He cannot at first believe she is real. She tells him she has come back; she tells him about the fortune from her uncle in Madeira; she tells him she is independent and will not be taken in as anything other than what she chooses to be. They talk through the night. He proposes again. She accepts. They discover, in the conversation, that on the same evening he had cried out her name in his despair, three times, she had heard the voice across two hundred miles.
Chapter 38
"Reader, I married him"
"Reader, I married him." A quiet wedding three days after she returned, with John and the parson as the only witnesses. Ten years of perfect happiness. Rochester regains partial sight in his good eye after two years — enough to see their firstborn son. Adèle is settled at a kinder school. Diana and Mary marry well. St. John remains the novel's open question: he goes to India, works ferociously, and dies young in the mission field. Jane reproduces his final letter — calm, certain, with no regret — in the novel's closing paragraph, and lets him have the last word that is not hers.