Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Chapter I / CHAPTER IV

The wind howled off the moors on that grey November afternoon at Gateshead Hall, rain lashing the leaded windows of the drawing-room where ten-year-old Jane Eyre stood excluded from the warm circle of her aunt, Mrs. Reed, and her cousins Eliza, John, and Georgiana. Mrs. Reed had declared Jane unwelcome until she cultivated a “sociable, childlike disposition” lighter and franker than her usual quiet, defiant self, and Jane was secretly glad of the storm: she hated long walks home in the raw twilight, her fingers and toes nipped by cold, her pride pricked by the awareness of her physical inferiority to her plump, favored cousins.

She retreated to the adjoining breakfast room, climbing into the window seat hidden behind a heavy red curtain with a tattered copy of Bewick’s History of British Birds. She lost herself in the book’s descriptions of remote Arctic coasts, lonely sea-bird haunts, and shipwrecks on desolate shores, the bleak, isolated landscapes echoing the hollow ache of her exclusion. Her peace was shattered when John Reed, her bullying fourteen-year-old cousin, burst into the room, taunted her for being a dependent with no claim to the family’s books, and beat her so hard he cut her head open with a flung volume. Years of unpunished abuse boiled over: Jane called him a tyrant and a slave-driver, fought back when he lunged at her, and only the intervention of Mrs. Reed and the servants pulled them apart. Enraged, Mrs. Reed ordered Jane locked in the red-room, the cold, seldom-used chamber where Jane’s uncle, Mr. Reed, had died nine years prior.

Jane fought every step of the way upstairs, and was thrown into the drafty, crimson-adorned room, haunted by the ghost stories Bessie had told of the house. As the light faded, her fear spiraled: she convinced herself a strange darting light was Mr. Reed’s ghost come to avenge her, screamed until her throat was raw, and had a fit from terror and distress. She woke in the nursery under the care of Mr. Lloyd, the family apothecary, who tended her cut head and listened quietly when she admitted she was miserable, that John beat her and her aunt locked her in haunted rooms. When he asked if she would like to go to school, Jane seized on the idea: school would mean escape from Gateshead, a new life far from the Reeds’ cruelty. She later overheard Bessie and the maid Miss Abbot discussing her parentage: her father was a poor clergyman who married her mother against her family’s wishes, both died of typhus within a month of each other, leaving her an orphan with no known relatives, and Abbot dismissed her as a “toad” no one could pity even if she were pretty.

Jane’s health returned, but her isolation deepened. Mrs. Reed forced her to sleep in a small closet alone, ate her meals apart from the family, and forbade her cousins from speaking to her. John taunted her at every turn, and when he tried to strike her one afternoon, Jane punched him hard enough to make him run to his mother crying that she “flew at him like a mad cat.” Mrs. Reed scolded John for acknowledging Jane’s existence, and Jane, leaning over the banister, yelled that the Reeds were not fit to associate with her. Mrs. Reed dragged her to the nursery, shook her, boxed her ears, and Jane, half out of her mind with rage, blurted that Mr. Reed was in heaven and saw how cruel Mrs. Reed was, that she wished her dead. Mrs. Reed was momentarily shaken, then left her, and Bessie lectured Jane for an hour on her wickedness.

The winter wore on, Jane excluded from all Christmas and New Year festivities. She watched her cousins dress in silk and curls for parties, listened to piano music drift up from the drawing room, and passed lonely evenings with only a tattered doll for comfort, waiting for Bessie to come up with small treats of cake or stories, wishing the nursemaid would be kind to her always. Then one frosty January morning, a carriage pulled up to Gateshead, and a grim, austere man named Mr. Brocklehurst arrived: he was the head of Lowood School, summoned by Mrs. Reed to take Jane off her hands. In the breakfast room, Mrs. Reed told Brocklehurst Jane was deceitful, that he must watch her closely to stamp out her bad character, to keep her humble and suited to her lowly station. Jane stood silently, her heart breaking, as Mrs. Reed planted the seed that she would be hated and punished at Lowood for a fault she did not have.

When Brocklehurst left, pressing a religious tract about a lying child who died suddenly into Jane’s hand, Mrs. Reed ordered her back to the nursery. All the rage Jane had carried for years erupted: she told Mrs. Reed she did not love her, would never call her aunt again, would tell everyone at Lowood how cruel she was, that it was Mrs. Reed who was deceitful, not her. Mrs. Reed was shocked into silence, her work slipping from her lap, and Jane felt a brief, fierce surge of triumph at finally standing up to the woman who had tormented her for a decade. But the high faded fast, replaced by cold remorse: she knew she had ruined any chance of kindness at Gateshead, that there was no going back from her outburst. She wandered out into the frozen grounds, head hung, asking herself what she would do, until Bessie found her, called her in for lunch, and told her the good news: Mrs. Reed had decided to send her to Lowood in a few days, and she could have a small cake and pick whatever toys she wanted to take with her. Jane hugged Bessie tightly, the first warm moment she had had in months, and that evening Bessie sang her soft songs and told her sweet stories, leaving Jane with a flicker of hope for the new life waiting for her at the school, even as she dreaded the unknown.