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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Charlotte Bront√´'s 'Jane Eyre' is a profound exploration of identity, morality, and the quest for autonomy within the constraints of Victorian society. Through the resilient character of Jane, Bront√´ employs a first-person narrative that intricately weaves emotional depth with Gothic elements, illuminating Jane's struggles against classism and gender inequality. The novel is punctuated by rich symbolism and evocative imagery, reflecting the social turmoil of 19th-century England, making it not only a personal tale of hardship and love but also a commentary on broader social issues. Charlotte Bront√´, a pioneering figure of English literature, drew on her own tumultuous experiences to craft this enduring classic. Growing up in a society where women were often silenced, Bront√´ harnessed her acute observations of injustice and isolation, channeling them into Jane's character. This personal connection to the narrative imbues the text with an authenticity that resonates with readers, revealing Bront√´'s deep understanding of the human spirit's desire for freedom and respect. 'Jane Eyre' is a must-read for anyone seeking a rich exploration of self-discovery and resilience. Its timeless themes and masterful storytelling continue to captivate audiences, encouraging profound reflection on the nature of love, independence, and societal constraints. Bront√´'s novel remains a cornerstone of feminist literature and a vital touchstone for the complexities of the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Jane Eyre (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary conscience tests the limits of passion, duty, and self-respect. From its opening pages, this novel invites readers into an intimate first-person voice that refuses to be silenced or belittled. The story’s energy springs from a fierce insistence on personal dignity, even when social hierarchy, economic dependence, and emotional tumult press hard against it. In a world that often measures worth by rank, wealth, or beauty, the narrator’s clear-eyed resolve redefines what it means to live with integrity. The result is a narrative both tender and uncompromising, a moral coming-of-age that pairs Gothic atmosphere with psychological precision.
Jane Eyre (Unabridged) by Charlotte Brontë is a foundational work of the Victorian era, first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Its unabridged form preserves the full power of Brontë’s voice: the cadences of a confessional narrative, the architectural sweep of a life story, and the fine-grained detail of moral reflection. Blending the traditions of the bildungsroman, the social novel, and the Gothic romance, it follows a heroine who must negotiate limited options with uncompromising principles. This edition honors the original design and intent, allowing readers to experience the novel’s structure, symbolism, and rhetorical immediacy as they first astonished nineteenth-century audiences.
At its core, the book traces the growth of an orphaned girl into a self-possessed woman, charting her education, early employment, and encounters with power, affection, and constraint. Raised with few advantages and fewer advocates, she learns to read the world with a vigilant intelligence, seeking work that grants both survival and self-command. When she becomes a governess at a remote estate, the stage is set for profound tests of character, feeling, and judgment. Brontë crafts a journey in which the protagonist’s inner compass—shaped by empathy, principle, and hard-won self-knowledge—must steer through mystery, temptation, and the social limits of her time.
Charlotte Brontë brings to this narrative the disciplined imagination of a writer who knew the conditions of schooling and service from within. Composing during the 1840s in Haworth, she launched the book into a literary marketplace not always welcoming to women, hence the choice of a gender-ambiguous pen name. The novel appeared with Smith, Elder & Co. in 1847, immediately drawing attention for the intensity of its voice and the boldness of its moral stance. Brontë’s aim was not merely to entertain, but to examine the terms by which a person might claim dignity, affection, and a meaningful place in society without surrendering conscience.
The book’s classic status rests on its pioneering interiority and its audacious union of emotional candor and ethical rigor. Few earlier English novels had so thoroughly inhabited a woman’s consciousness, mapping private thought, social discomfort, wrath, forgiveness, and longing with such persuasive detail. Its influence ripples through the development of the psychological novel and the female bildungsroman, expanding what first-person narration could do. Generations of readers and writers have learned from its balance of confession and critique, its insistence that a heroine be neither saint nor ornament, but a full moral agent whose intelligence and feeling carry the narrative’s weight.
Equally striking is Brontë’s fusion of the Gothic with social realism. Storm-lashed landscapes, shadowed corridors, and whispered rumors intensify the prose, yet the novel never loses sight of bread-and-butter realities: employment, class prejudice, and the economics of dependence. The haunting atmospherics illuminate, rather than obscure, the ethical struggles at the story’s heart. This blend would shape later fiction, informing domestic Gothic and modern romance alike, while challenging readers to interpret symbols—fire, ice, thresholds, and windows—as emblems of temper, boundary, and choice. The Gothic becomes not an escape from reality, but the very language by which reality’s pressures are made legible.
Jane Eyre endures because it articulates a demand for respect that is at once private and universal. Its heroine insists on being seen as a whole person, not a function of class, utility, or desire, and the narrative examines how love, labor, and law can either protect or endanger that wholeness. The novel questions social arrangements that reduce human beings to roles, while maintaining a steady commitment to compassion, responsibility, and earned equality. Its power flows from this moral clarity: the belief that affection without self-betrayal is possible, and that steadfast principles can coexist with fervent feeling without shrinking either to sentimentality or severity.
As a first-person retrospective memoir, the book wields time with uncommon mastery. The adult narrator recalls a childhood marked by isolation and discipline, yet she remembers with discernment rather than self-pity. This double vision—child’s experience weighed by mature judgment—creates a rich dialectic of immediacy and reflection. Brontë’s careful patterns of imagery, recurring motifs, and parallel episodes give the narrative a symphonic coherence. In doing so, she helped open the English novel to an art of interior mapping that later writers would develop in their own ways, from psychological realism to experimentations in voice that center consciousness as the engine of storytelling.
The novel’s ethical reflections include searching engagements with faith, charity, and moral law. It distinguishes between forms of piety that console and those that constrict, between zeal that honors human dignity and zeal that forgets it. Rather than endorsing a single doctrine, Brontë probes how conscience is formed: through suffering, kindness, learning, and the courage to say yes or no. This terrain proves as suspenseful as any physical peril, because the stakes are a life’s meaning. The heroine’s spiritual integrity becomes inseparable from her practical choices, ensuring that every turning point resonates with both emotional consequence and principled resolve.
Brontë’s style marries plainness to lyric intensity. Sentences move with a lucid, speech-like cadence, then ignite into images of weather, light, and landscape that mirror inner weather. This diction makes the voice trustworthy yet capacious, able to carry confession, argument, and wonder in a single breath. Reading the unabridged text matters because its rhythms and proportions are part of its argument; the novel’s moral education relies on long attention, remembered patterns, and the accumulation of earned insights. To abridge is to risk flattening the intricate balance of candor and restraint that gives the book its singular emotional voltage.
Across generations, Jane Eyre has influenced countless authors and artists, inspiring responses that revisit its characters, settings, and moral questions. Its legacy can be felt in modern narratives centered on female autonomy, in reimaginings that probe the edges of the Gothic, and in adaptations for stage, film, and audio that keep its voice in public conversation. The book’s impact also includes literary dialogues, such as works that explore backstories and alternate perspectives, demonstrating how Brontë’s creation invites reinterpretation rather than closure. This ongoing conversation testifies to the novel’s structural resilience and the enduring urgency of its themes.
For contemporary readers, the book remains compelling because it treats love and liberty as mutually necessary, not mutually exclusive. It honors consent, boundaries, and self-worth while recognizing hunger for connection. It challenges social hierarchies without dismissing responsibility, and it dramatizes the difficult work of aligning feeling with principle. Such concerns are timeless, and Brontë’s rendering gives them living voice. Jane Eyre (Unabridged) continues to reward attentive reading with its moral poise, narrative momentum, and atmospheric beauty. It endures as a classic because it speaks to the deep human wish to be known, chosen, and free—on terms that do not betray the self.
Synopsis
Jane Eyre, an orphan, lives with her aunt, Mrs. Reed, at Gateshead. Subjected to neglect and bullying by her cousins, she experiences a formative incident in the Red Room, deepening her sense of injustice. Despite isolation, she develops strong moral awareness, a yearning for education, and a desire for belonging. Her outspoken defense of herself alarms her guardians, leading to the decision to send her away. The opening establishes her vulnerability and resolve, outlining themes of social marginalization and inner principle that guide her choices. This stage sets the trajectory from dependency toward self-reliance in a rigid nineteenth-century English society.
Jane is enrolled at Lowood Institution, a charity school governed harshly by Mr. Brocklehurst. Spartan conditions, public humiliation, and inadequate care define the early experience, counterbalanced by friendships with Helen Burns and the compassionate Miss Temple. An epidemic exposes systemic neglect, prompting reforms that gradually improve life at the school. Through study, teaching, and the example of calm endurance, Jane gains intellectual confidence and ethical clarity. After several years as pupil and teacher, she recognizes her limits within an institution that, though reformed, confines her ambitions. She resolves to seek work elsewhere, aiming to support herself and expand her world.
Answering an advertisement, Jane becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, charged with educating Ade8le, a lively ward. The housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, introduces her to a dignified yet remote estate whose routine is punctuated by curious sounds and closed-off spaces. Janes competence and restraint earn respect, while her inner life remains alert to hints of secrecy. The absent master, Mr. Rochester, is discussed with reserve, adding to the atmosphere of uncertainty. The setting marks a transition from institutional life to private employment, positioning Jane within a household that complicates class boundaries and invites questions about trust, independence, and emotional attachment.
Jane meets Mr. Rochester unexpectedly on the road, an encounter that sets the tone for their unconventional relationship. At Thornfield, their conversations are direct and probing, crossing social lines without abandoning propriety. Janes self-possession contrasts with Rochesters abruptness, while both display intelligence and candor. A late-night emergency brings them into closer confidence, with Jane acting decisively to avert danger. Yet unexplained disturbances continue, suggesting a history that the master keeps guarded. The narrative emphasizes mutual recognition and the testing of character, as attraction coexists with unease, and as Jane weighs affection against her commitment to self-respect and moral clarity.
Thornfields quiet rhythm changes when a group of fashionable guests arrives, including the accomplished Blanche Ingram. Their presence highlights Janes ambiguous social position and the expectations surrounding Rochester. Amid entertainments and conversation, Jane observes patterns of performance and pride, measuring them against her own values. A visitor from overseas appears, and a terrifying incident during the night exposes the households fragility without resolving its mysteries. Rochester manages events with secrecy, leaving Jane to balance concern with restraint. Her feelings deepen, but the narrative preserves ambivalence, presenting a mansion whose elegance overlays uncertainties about the past and the future.
As guests depart and tensions ease, Rochesters attentions toward Jane intensify, culminating in a declaration that promises a new future for her. Plans move swiftly, but on the day of fulfillment, a revelation halts proceedings and forces the truth into view. Faced with a situation that compromises her principles, Jane chooses separation over convenience, guided by a steadfast sense of right. She leaves Thornfield alone, carrying little, trusting only her conscience and desire for integrity. This turning point reasserts the novels emphasis on autonomy and moral judgment, sending its heroine into hardship rather than accepting a life that violates her standards.
Janes flight leads her across the moors to exhaustion and near destitution before she finds refuge with the Rivers siblingsDiana, Mary, and the clergyman St. Johnat Moor House. Recovering her strength, she accepts work as a village schoolteacher, embracing simplicity and service. Gradually, undisclosed connections emerge that link her to this family and alter her circumstances, including an unexpected legacy that grants her financial independence. With newfound security, Jane reassesses her path, grateful for kinship and purpose yet mindful of unresolved affections. The interlude widens the novels scope to duty, charity, and the dignity of earning ones way.
St. John Rivers, disciplined and devout, proposes a partnership founded on mission and sacrifice, envisioning Jane as a companion in distant service. He appeals to duty and renunciation, offering respect yet little warmth. Jane acknowledges the worth of his cause but resists a bond that neglects the heart. In a moment of inward clarity, she senses a pull toward unfinished matters left behind. Confident in her independent means and her right to choose, she decides to return to address what was broken, seeking resolution that aligns both principle and feeling. The narrative prepares for a reckoning shaped by freedom.
Janes return brings her to the consequences of earlier secrets and tragedies, where she must evaluate changed realities and the possibility of renewal. She measures compassion against self-respect, weighing whether love can be reconciled with equality and conscience. The closing movement affirms her growth from vulnerable orphan to self-determining adult, suggesting that true union requires balance, honesty, and mutual regard. Without detailing outcomes, the novels resolution emphasizes inner sovereignty over social prescription, and the power of steadfast character to transform circumstance. Jane Eyre ultimately presents a journey toward integrity, belonging, and a life chosen rather than imposed.
Historical Context
Jane Eyre unfolds in northern England between the late Georgian and early Victorian years, roughly the 1810s through the mid-1840s. Its landscapes move from the genteel but loveless Gateshead to the austere charity institution of Lowood, then to Thornfield Hall on the Yorkshire-Lancashire margins, and finally to the moorland isolation of Moor House. The setting aligns manor houses, parish churches, and market towns with rugged moors and emerging industrial districts. Stagecoaches, turnpike roads, and a pre-railway rhythm shape journeys and social distance. The world is Anglican in establishment yet contested by Evangelical zeal, and stratified by a sharp hierarchy of class and gender.
The time and place are marked by rapid change. The Industrial Revolution intensifies nearby in Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford; smoke, capital, and wage labor reconfigure northern society while rural estates sustain older hierarchies. Britain’s empire and Atlantic commerce reach into domestic life, linking the West Indies and Madeira to English fortunes. Law and custom restrict women under coverture, while charitable institutions police poverty. Religious life is plural and urgent, from parish Anglicanism to Evangelical reform and missions abroad. The novel’s houses, schools, and parishes thereby serve as microcosms for the national order, staging conflicts of authority, conscience, and social mobility within a recognizably British geography.
The Industrial Revolution transformed northern England between the 1780s and 1840s. Manchester’s cotton mills, Leeds’s woolen factories, and Bradford’s worsted industry drew migrants, doubled populations, and expanded urban squalor. Mechanization provoked Luddite machine-breaking (1811–1816), while canals and, by 1830, railways like the Liverpool and Manchester line sped goods and people. Haworth, where the Brontë family lived, stood near this industrial belt. The novel’s moors and Thornfield Hall evoke a semi-feudal world shadowed by modernity. Jane’s movement between domestic service, school, and estate mirrors new, precarious pathways for lower-middle-class women amid changing labor markets and widening contrasts between industrial wealth and rural gentility.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 reorganized poor relief, consolidating parishes into unions and promoting workhouses under a doctrine of deterrence. Relief in aid of wages declined; indoor relief in punitive conditions increased. Children without support were often placed in institutions where scant rations and discipline substituted for care. This system interacted with charity schools that trained the poor for service. Jane’s vulnerability as an orphan reflects exposure to the reformed regime, while Lowood’s austerity resonates with contemporary debates on moralizing poverty. Her near-fatal destitution on the moor dramatizes how easily respectable dependents could fall into starvation in the era’s harsh welfare landscape.
The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, founded in 1823 by Reverend William Carus Wilson, profoundly shaped Charlotte Brontë’s critique of institutional care. Intended for daughters of impoverished clergy, it stood near Kirkby Lonsdale and imposed strict Evangelical discipline, early rising, long prayers, and meager diet. In 1824–1825 the four elder Brontë sisters—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily—attended. The buildings were cold and ill-ventilated; routines left little margin for illness or childhood. This real institution is transposed into Lowood School, with Mr. Brocklehurst modeled on the school’s founder. The novel retains the cadences of its routines, and the moral language used to justify privation.
In 1825 a typhus outbreak swept Cowan Bridge, with many pupils sickened amid unsanitary conditions. Concurrently, Maria and Elizabeth Brontë developed tuberculosis; Maria died on 6 May 1825, Elizabeth on 15 June 1825. Later testimony condemned the school’s regimen as contributing to disease and mortality. These facts surface in the novel’s epidemic at Lowood, where fever claims numerous students and the saintly Helen Burns dies. The fictional calamity is not merely atmospheric; it records a documented crisis of early nineteenth-century charity schooling, spotlighting how piety combined with parsimony could prove lethal when ventilation, nutrition, and medical care were neglected.
After public criticism, the institution reformed and moved to Casterton in 1833 under improved oversight. Charlotte Brontë, in a 1850 preface, acknowledged the original’s later ameliorations while insisting on the historical reality of earlier suffering. The Cowan Bridge episode thus supplies the novel’s most searing historical substrate: it anchors Lowood’s scenes in the specifics of 1820s northern philanthropy and disease. By memorializing names, places, and dates through their fictional analogues, Jane Eyre transforms a private bereavement into a public indictment of negligent charity. The school’s story also fed wider Victorian discussions about governance, inspection, and accountability in institutions for the poor.
The Evangelical and missionary movement surged after the Charter Act of 1813 permitted missionaries in East India Company territories. Bodies such as the Church Missionary Society (1799) and London Missionary Society (1795) expanded in the 1820s–1840s. Figures like Alexander Duff reached Calcutta in 1830 to found schools, embodying zeal for education and conversion. Mortality among missionaries was high; calling was intertwined with imperial presence. St John Rivers’s planned departure for India situates the novel within this wave, dramatizing a strain of religious vocation that subordinates personal affection to perceived duty and aligns Protestant reformism with Britain’s governance and cultural projects overseas.
British abolition progressed in two key statutes: the 1807 Act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which emancipated enslaved people in most colonies from 1834, followed by apprenticeship until 1838. The government compensated slaveholders with £20 million, reinforcing planter influence even as estates faltered. Jamaica, Barbados, and other sugar islands saw volatile transitions. In the novel, Rochester’s ill-fated marriage to Bertha Mason is financed by a Creole planter family from Spanish Town, Jamaica. That link situates Thornfield’s fortunes within post-emancipation colonial economies, exposing how English gentility could rest on capital forged in slavery and its aftermath.
Jamaica’s Baptist War of 1831–1832, led by Samuel Sharpe, mobilized as many as 60,000 enslaved people in a general strike and revolt. The uprising was suppressed with extreme violence: more than 500 executions followed, and plantations burned across the island. The rebellion galvanized British abolitionism and hastened the 1833 Act, while damaging planter power and profitability. Within this context, the Mason family’s wealth reflects the precarious status of Creole elites after emancipation, as compensation and declining sugar returns reshaped fortunes. The novel’s depiction of Rochester’s Caribbean alliance and its catastrophic personal consequences mirrors metropolitan anxieties about colonial morality, racialized inheritance, and tainted money.
Marriage in early nineteenth-century England was governed by Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753), requiring banns or license and parental consent for parties under twenty-one, and by ecclesiastical law defining impediments. Civil marriage and national registration arrived with the Marriage Act of 1836 (effective 1837); divorce remained rare, needing a private Act of Parliament until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. Bigamy was a felony. Jane’s halted wedding when Bertha’s prior marriage to Rochester is exposed reflects the canonical impediment of an existing spouse and contemporary practice of investigating lawful impediments. The legal framework heightens the ethical stakes around consent, truth, and legitimacy.
British lunacy law evolved from the 1774 Madhouses Act, licensing private asylums, through the 1808 County Asylums Act enabling public institutions, to stricter inspections in the 1828 Madhouses Act and the 1845 Lunacy and County Asylums Acts establishing the Lunacy Commission and mandating county asylums. Treatments ranged from moral management to coercive restraint. Families of means often confined relatives privately to avoid scandal. Rochester’s sequestering of Bertha at Thornfield exemplifies elite, extra-institutional control of mental illness, raising questions of capacity, guardianship, and marital duties. The novel thus engages with contemporary debates about humane treatment and the legal status of the insane.
Under common-law coverture, a married woman’s property and wages were her husband’s, unless protected by settlement; only later did the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) secure separate ownership. The Wills Act of 1837 standardized testamentary practice, but women’s economic independence remained limited. Jane, as a single woman, can inherit and dispose of property, and her £20,000 legacy from her maternal uncle John Eyre of Madeira reflects Atlantic commerce linking Portugal’s island trade to Britain. This windfall converts her from dependence to autonomy, enabling her to insist on an equitable union. The narrative thereby interrogates property, marriage, and female economic agency.
The governess question became a social problem in the 1840s, as genteel but impoverished women sought employment in private education. The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution was founded in 1843 to provide relief and training. Wages commonly ranged from £20 to £45 per year, with ambiguous status—neither servant nor family—producing solitude and vulnerability. Charlotte Brontë’s own service as a governess (1839–1841) informed her portrayal. Jane’s post at Thornfield situates her within these emerging labor markets for women, dramatizing negotiation over salary, respect, and identity in a household economy where education, affective labor, and class boundaries were under constant, uneasy negotiation.
Chartism, Britain’s mass working-class movement from 1838 to 1848, demanded universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, secret ballot, payment for MPs, and annual Parliaments in the People’s Charter. Three national petitions (1839, 1842, 1848) and waves of strikes shook Lancashire and Yorkshire, unsettling landowners and clergy. Patrick Brontë ministered in Haworth amid this agitation. Although Jane Eyre avoids direct political polemic, it registers chartist-era tensions: a meritocratic ethic challenging deference, skepticism toward unearned privilege, and a stress on personal rights. Jane’s insistence on moral and economic independence resonates with contemporary demands to broaden participation and recalibrate authority in British society.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the cruelty of institutional charity and the sanctimony that rationalized it. Lowood’s regimen, rooted in real 1820s practices, indicts management that prized thrift and obedience over health. Through Mr. Brocklehurst, the narrative dissects religious hypocrisy, while Helen Burns embodies an ethic of charity without domination. The romance refracts legal structures: the impeded marriage dramatizes how ecclesiastical and civil law policed legitimacy and consent. Jane’s inheritance, negotiated employment, and refusal of a loveless missionary marriage test the period’s gendered power arrangements, insisting that moral equality depends upon material independence and truth-telling.
The narrative also interrogates empire, race, and confinement. Rochester’s Caribbean wealth ties English respectability to slavery’s legacies and post-emancipation planter fortunes, while Bertha’s incarceration implicates contemporary lunacy law and patriarchal control over women’s bodies. St John Rivers personifies a missionary politics that can eclipse individual flourishing in the name of imperial vocation. Against these structures, the novel advocates mutual recognition across class and gender lines, exposing the harms of coverture, patronage, and punitive welfare. In choosing an equal marriage only after securing legal and economic autonomy, Jane models a critique of the era’s social order and gestures toward ethical reforms.
Author Biography
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian period, best known for Jane Eyre. Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, she helped redefine the nineteenth‑century novel through intense psychological interiority, moral inquiry, and a distinctive first‑person voice. Emerging from a literary household in the Yorkshire moors, she turned personal observation and wide reading into fiction that challenged contemporary expectations for women writers. Her books traverse realism, Gothic inflection, and social critique, engaging questions of class, education, and conscience. Brontë’s stature has endured, placing her among the central figures of English literature and a touchstone for subsequent novelists.
Her schooling began at a charitable institution for clergy families, an experience later echoed in her depiction of austere schooling. She then attended Roe Head School, where she returned as a teacher, gaining classroom and administrative experience that informed her portrayals of work and discipline. Seeking professional independence, she worked as a governess in various households, observing social hierarchies at close range. In the mid‑1840s she studied languages in Brussels at a girls’ school, an episode that deepened her engagement with continental culture and psychological analysis. These educational passages furnished settings, perspectives, and ethical tensions that would recur throughout her fiction.
From childhood she collaborated with her siblings on elaborate imaginary kingdoms, producing miniature manuscripts that exercised narrative control, dialogue, and description. This juvenilia, much of it influenced by Romantic poetry and popular magazines, trained her in sustained storytelling and dramatic scene‑building. She admired writers such as Byron and Scott, while also absorbing the rhythms of the Gothic and the moral realism of the eighteenth‑ and early nineteenth‑century novel. The habit of intense, inward observation developed early, and the tension between imaginative freedom and social duty became a lasting concern. These formative practices made the later transition to publishable work both natural and purposeful.
In pursuit of publication, she and her sisters issued a small volume of poems under the ambiguous initials Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a strategic masking of gender common among women authors of the period. Her first complete novel, The Professor, drew on her continental experiences but failed to find a publisher and would appear only after her death. Then Jane Eyre was accepted and quickly became a sensation, praised for its forceful narrative presence and ethical complexity. The success enabled her to establish a professional standing, even as debates about propriety and passion trailed the book’s frankness and moral independence.
She followed with Shirley, set against industrial unrest, broadening her social canvas while examining work, community, and female agency. Later, Villette returned to a continental setting to probe solitude, memory, and perception with unusual intensity, drawing on her experiences in Brussels without replicating them. Contemporary criticism mixed admiration with unease, especially over the novels’ emotional candor and religious undertones, yet their artistry earned lasting notice. Across these works she refined a method that fused close psychological scrutiny with external social pressures, advancing the English novel toward greater interiority while retaining structural discipline and a keen sense of public morality.
Although she began under a pseudonym, her identity became known within publishing and literary circles, and she navigated the mid‑Victorian marketplace with care. Her correspondence and prefaces show a commitment to sincerity in narration, skepticism toward fashionable sensationalism, and concern for moral responsibility. Religious reflection, shaped by the Anglican milieu in which she was raised, informs many ethical conflicts in her fiction without prescribing doctrinal answers. She read contemporaries attentively and engaged critical responses, defending artistic autonomy for women writers. By asserting a serious, principled artistic stance, she helped legitimize the novel as a vehicle for profound psychological and social exploration.
Her life was brief; after the successes and controversies of her major novels, she died in the mid‑1850s in Yorkshire. The Professor appeared posthumously, rounding out a compact body of fiction that remains widely read. Brontë’s legacy rests on the authority of her narrative voice, her analytic rendering of conscience, and her insistence that women’s inner lives merit public art. She influences subsequent traditions in the bildungsroman, psychological realism, and feminist criticism, and her books continue to inspire adaptations and scholarly debate. Read today, they reward attention to voice, structure, and moral nuance, sustaining their power across generations.
Jane Eyre (Unabridged)
TO
W. M. THACKERAY, Esq.,
This Work
is respectfully inscribed
by
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
A preface to the first edition of “Jane Eyre” being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant.
To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author.
The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as “Jane Eyre:” in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry — that parent of crime — an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is — I repeat it — a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth — to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose — to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it — to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.
Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital — a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time — they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead.
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day — as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him — if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger — I have dedicated this second edition of “Jane Eyre.”
CURRER BELL.
December21st, 1847.
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of “Jane Eyre” affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have been made, and to prevent future errors.
CURRER BELL.
April13th, 1848.
CHAPTER I
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner — something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were — she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.”
“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returned to my book — Bewick’s History of British Birds:[1] the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape —
“Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space, — that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room door opened.
“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
“Where the dickens is she!” he continued. “Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain — bad animal!”
“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once —
“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”
And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.
“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward diffidence.
“Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’” was the answer. “I want you to come here;” and seating himself in an armchair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, “on account of his delicate health.” Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.
“That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since,” said he, “and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!”
Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult.
“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.
“I was reading.”
“Show the book.”
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
“You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.”
I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first — ”
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words —
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!”
“Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined —
“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
CHAPTER II
I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.”
“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s-maid. “What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son! Your young master.”
“Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?”
“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.”
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two pair of hands arrested me instantly.
“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said Bessie. “Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly.”
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature. This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of me.
“Don’t take them off,” I cried; “I will not stir.”
In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.
“Mind you don’t,” said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity.
“She never did so before,” at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail[2].
“But it was always in her,” was the reply. “I’ve told Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me. She’s an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover.”
Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said — “You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse[3].”
I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in —
“And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them.”
“What we tell you is for your good,” added Bessie, in no harsh voice, “you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you away, I am sure.”
“Besides,” said Miss Abbot, “God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.”
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The housemaid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room — the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur.
Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.
My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I returned to my stool.
Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present.
All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged. Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks, set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off the choicest plants in the conservatory: he called his mother “old girl,” too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own; bluntly disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk attire; and he was still “her own darling.” I dared commit no fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon to night.
My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium.
“Unjust! — unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression — as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question — why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of — I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child — though equally dependent and friendless — Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery.
Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o’clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my own uncle — my mother’s brother — that he had taken me when a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her; but how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not — never doubted — that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls — occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaning mirror — I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode — whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed — and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it — I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot entered.
“Miss Eyre, are you ill?” said Bessie.
“What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!” exclaimed Abbot.
“Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!” was my cry.
“What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?” again demanded Bessie.
“Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come.” I had now got hold of Bessie’s hand, and she did not snatch it from me.
“She has screamed out on purpose,” declared Abbot, in some disgust. “And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks.”
