Jane Eyre (character)

Jane Eyre is an orphan living with her maternal uncle and his wealthy wife, Mrs. Reed. After Mr. Reed's death, his wife is left to care for Jane, which was the dying wish of her late husband. Jane is mistreated by her aunt who openly resents, neglects, and abuses her while stating that the only reason for her care of Jane is charity, which leads to Jane's overall anger towards the Reed family. After a fight with her older cousin John, Jane is locked into the Red Room, the room which Mr. Reed died in and which Jane believes is haunted. After Jane believes that she sees her uncle's ghost in the Red Room, she falls ill and faints. This leads to her being sent away to a school on the recommendation of the doctor, Mr. Lloyd. Mrs. Reed then sends Jane to Lowood Hall, a school for the poor and orphaned , where she is to train to be a governess. At Lowood, Jane is faced with Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster, who is a hypocrite and abusive in his teaching of the girls. At the school Jane befriends Helen Burns, from whom she learns to be more patient and to seek solace in prayer rather than seek answers from other people. Helen Burns dies of consumption, and Jane weathers a typhoid epidemic at the school.

During her time at Lowood Jane receives a thorough education and becomes a friend of Miss Maria Temple, the school's principal. After two years of teaching at Lowood (without once returning to the Reeds' house in Gateshead) Jane decides to go out into the world on her own. She seeks work as a governess, and is employed at Thornfield Hall, to care for a solitary orphan, Adele. Jane goes to Thornfield, learns about the distant master, Mr. Rochester, and starts to teach his ward, although she finds Adele to be a poor student.

One morning when Jane is out for a walk, she meets a mysterious man when his horse slips and he falls – this is Mr. Rochester. Jane and Rochester are immediately interested in each other. She is fascinated by his rough, craggy, dark appearance as well as his abrupt, almost rude manners, which she thinks are easier to handle than polite flattery. As for Mr. Rochester, he is very interested in Jane's strength of character, comparing her to an elf or sprite and admiring her unusual strength and stubbornness.[1]

Rochester quickly learns that he can rely on Jane in a crisis – one evening, Jane finds Rochester asleep in his bed with all the curtains and bedclothes on fire, and she puts out the flames and rescues him. Jane and Rochester grow closer and fall in love with each other. While Jane is working at Thornfield, Rochester invites his acquaintances over for a week-long stay, including the beautiful Blanche Ingram. Rochester lets Blanche flirt with him constantly in front of Jane to make her jealous and encourages rumours that he is engaged to Blanche, which devastates Jane.

During the house party, a man named Richard Mason arrives, and Rochester seems afraid of him. At night, Mason sneaks up to the third floor and somehow gets stabbed and bitten. Rochester asks Jane to tend Richard Mason's wounds secretly while he fetches the doctor. The next morning before the guests find out what happened, Rochester sneaks Mason out of the house.

Before Jane can discover more about the mysterious situation, she gets a message that her Aunt Reed is very sick and is asking for her. Jane, forgiving Mrs. Reed for mistreating her when she was a child, goes back to see her dying aunt. When Jane returns to Thornfield, Blanche and her friends are gone, and Jane realizes how attached she is to Mr. Rochester. Although he lets her think for a little longer that he's going to marry Blanche, eventually Rochester stops teasing Jane and proposes to her. She blissfully accepts.

On the day of Jane's wedding, during the church ceremony, two men arrive claiming that Rochester is already married. Rochester admits that he is married to another woman, but tries to justify his attempt to marry Jane by taking them all to see his "wife." Mrs. Rochester is Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic" who tried to burn Rochester to death in his bed, stabbed and bit her own brother (Richard Mason), and who has been doing other creepy things at night. Rochester was tricked into marrying Bertha fifteen years ago in Jamaica by his father, who wanted him to marry for money and didn't tell him that insanity ran in Bertha's family. Rochester tried to live with Bertha as husband and wife, but her behaviour was too difficult, so he locked her up at Thornfield with a nursemaid, Grace Poole. Meanwhile, he travelled around Europe for ten years trying to forget Bertha and keeping various mistresses. Adèle Varens (Jane's student) is the daughter of one of these mistresses, though she may not be Rochester's daughter. Eventually he got tired of this lifestyle, came home to England, and fell in love with Jane.

After explaining all this, Rochester claims that he was not really married because his relationship with Bertha wasn't a real marriage. He wants Jane to go and live with him in France, where they can pretend to be a married couple and live as husband and wife. Jane refuses to be his next mistress and runs away before she's tempted to agree.

Jane travels in a direction away from Thornfield. Having no money, she almost starves to death before being taken in by the Rivers family, who live at Moor House near a town called Morton. The Rivers siblings – Diana, Mary, and St. John (pronounced "Sinjun") – are about Jane's age and well-educated, but somewhat poor. They take whole-heartedly to Jane, who has taken the pseudonym "Jane Elliott" so that Mr. Rochester can't find her. Jane wants to earn her keep, so St. John arranges for her to become the teacher in a village girls' school. When Jane's uncle Mr. Eyre dies and leaves his fortune to his niece, it turns out that the Rivers siblings are actually Jane's cousins, and she shares her inheritance with the other three.

St. John, who is a devoted clergyman, wants to be more than Jane's cousin. He admires Jane's work ethic and asks her to marry him, learn Hindustani, and go with him to India on a long-term missionary trip. Jane is tempted because she thinks she would be good at it and that it would be an interesting life, and that she would be doing God's work. Still, she refuses because she knows she doesn't love St. John, and he does not love her either. He simply believes Jane would make a good missionary's wife because of her skills. To top it off, St. John actually loves a different girl named Rosamond Oliver, but he won't let himself admit it because he thinks she would make an unsuitable wife for a missionary.

Jane offers to go to India with him, but just as his cousin and co-worker, not as his wife. St. John won't give up and keeps pressuring Jane to marry him. Just as she's about to give in, she imagines Mr. Rochester's voice calling her name.

The next morning, Jane leaves Moor House and goes back to Thornfield to find out what has happened to Mr. Rochester. She finds out that he searched for her everywhere, and, when he couldn't find her, sent everyone else away from the house and shut himself up alone. After this, Bertha set the house on fire one night and burned it to the ground. Rochester rescued all the servants and tried to save Bertha, too, but she committed suicide and he was injured. Now Rochester has lost an eye and a hand and is blind in the remaining eye.

Jane goes to Mr. Rochester and offers to take care of him as his nurse or housekeeper. He asks her to marry him and they have a quiet wedding, and after two years of marriage Rochester gradually gets his sight back – enough to see their firstborn son. They adopt Adele Varens.

Jane Eyre is described as plain, with an elfin look. Jane describes herself as, "poor, obscure, plain and little." Mr. Rochester once compliments Jane's "hazel eyes and hazel hair", but she informs the reader that Mr. Rochester was mistaken, as her eyes are not hazel; they are in fact green.

It has been said that "Charlotte Brontë may have created the character of Jane Eyre as a means of coming to terms with elements of her own life."[2] By all accounts, Brontë's "homelife was difficult."[3] Jane's school, Lowood, is said to be based on the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, where two of Brontë's sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died. Brontë declared, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself," in regards to creating Jane Eyre.[3]

When she was twenty, Brontë wrote to Robert Southey for his thoughts on writing. "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be", he said. When Jane Eyre was published about ten years later, it was purportedly written by Jane, and called Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer Bell (Brontë) merely as editor. And yet, Brontë still published as Currer Bell, a man.[3]

The Victorian Era in which Charlotte Brontë wrote her novel, Jane Eyre, provides the cultural framework in which the narrative was developed.[4] The complex role of the woman in Victorian society is highlighted by Bronte's exploration of the appropriate conventions of gender relations in tandem with economic class, marriage, and social status.[4] The woman as a dependent object of a man's economic and social capacity, very much defines the marriage contract as an institution of reproduction and morality.[5] This image of Victorian England is challenged by Bronte's representation of Eyre's relationship with Rochester, as one that is not motivated by calculated obligation to achieve a desirable social status but rather an autonomous choice made by a woman to marry for love.[4]

Jane Eyre has been described by historian David Hackett Fischer as evocative of a cultural and geographic milieu of the North Midlands of England that in the mid-17th century had produced the Religious Society of Friends, a Protestant religious sect. Many members of this sect immigrated to North America and settled the Delaware Valley in the late 17th and early 18th century.[6] This geographical area had for many centuries contained a significant population of Scandinavian-descended people who were oppressed by and resisted the Norman Conquest based in French Catholicism (the Gothic feature in Jane Eyre, represented by Edward Rochester) and had remained distinct from the Anglo-Saxon culture that produced the Puritan sect (the evangelical Calvinist feature in Jane Eyre, variants of which are represented by Brocklehurst and St. John).[7]