Jane Eyre Summary: Charlotte Brontë's Gothic Story of a Governess Who Refuses to Be Small
What it is about
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre: An Autobiography on 19 October 1847 through Smith, Elder & Co. of London, under the pen name Currer Bell. The first American edition followed in January 1848 from Harper & Brothers of New York. It runs to 38 chapters and first appeared in three volumes: chapters 1 to 15, 16 to 27, and 28 to 38. The second edition carried a dedication to William Makepeace Thackeray.
The novel is a bildungsroman, which means it follows one person growing up. Jane tells her own story, in the first person, and the telling is as important as the events. The setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III.
Jane's life falls into five clear stages. She begins at Gateshead Hall, aged ten, living with her maternal uncle's family after both her parents died of typhus. Her uncle, Mr Reed, had been kind to her, and taking Jane in was his dying wish. He is gone. His widow, Sarah Reed, treats Jane as a burden and keeps her own three children away from her. Only the nursemaid, Bessie, offers any warmth. After Jane defends herself against her bullying cousin John, she is locked in the red room where her uncle died, and faints in terror believing she has seen his ghost.
The second stage is Lowood Institution, a charity school for poor and orphaned girls. Mrs Reed arranges the place and warns the school's director, Mr Brocklehurst, that Jane has a "tendency to deceit". Before she leaves, Jane confronts her aunt and tells her she will never call her "aunt" again. Lowood is cold, underfed and cruel, but it gives Jane two people worth modelling herself on.
The third stage is Thornfield Hall, where Jane works as a governess and falls in love with her brooding and mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester. The fourth is Moor House, where her clergyman cousin St John Rivers proposes to her. The fifth is her reunion with Rochester.
The main characters
Jane herself is the reason the book works. She is poor, plain and dependent, and she will not be told she is worth less for it. The red room episode sets up what the novel calls the ambiguous relationship between parents and children, a pattern that shapes every relationship Jane later has with a male figure.
Mrs Reed is the first antagonist, cold rather than loud. When Jane finally tells her and her daughters Georgiana and Eliza that they are the deceitful ones, Mrs Reed is badly hurt but lacks the courage to show it.
Mr Brocklehurst runs Lowood on hunger and humiliation. He makes Jane stand on a stool and brands her a liar and a sinner in front of the school. Miss Temple, the school's superintendent, lets Jane defend herself and publicly clears her. Helen Burns, an older pupil, is the other model: patient, religious, and unwilling to carry grudges. Where Jane burns, Helen accepts. Helen dies of consumption in Jane's arms during a typhus epidemic at the school.
Rochester is the master of Thornfield and the centre of the novel's love story. St John Rivers is his opposite, earnest and cold, offering Jane a marriage built on duty rather than feeling.
The themes
Class runs through everything. A governess sits awkwardly between servant and family, educated but paid, and Brontë uses that position to look hard at the status quo. Much of the novel's social criticism is pointed: the treatment of orphans, the running of charity schools, the way money decides who may marry whom.
Religion is handled with care rather than simple reverence. There is a strong Christian morality at the book's core, but the two most religious men in it, Brocklehurst and St John Rivers, are the two who do Jane most harm. Helen Burns represents a gentler faith.
Love is the engine, and it is tied to self-respect. Jane wants to be loved without being owned. The novel also approaches sexuality and feminism in ways that were well ahead of 1847, and the gothic apparatus of Thornfield keeps a current of dread under the romance.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the book fresh. After leaving Thornfield and refusing St John Rivers, Jane returns to Rochester, and the novel closes with their marriage.
Why it still matters
Jane Eyre changed what a novel could do. It was the first to put the moral and spiritual development of its heroine at the centre through an intimate first-person voice, with every event coloured by psychological intensity. The critic Daniel S. Burt called Charlotte Brontë "the first historian of the private consciousness" and traced a line from her to Proust and Joyce. Alongside Pride and Prejudice, it is among the most famous romance novels ever written, it is widely counted one of the greatest novels in English, and in 2003 the BBC's Big Read poll ranked it the tenth best-loved book in Britain.
