An intelligent, hardworking governess gets thrown into a few complicated situations involving an insane murderess, a little French girl, a determined missionary—and Mr. Rochester. What is right and what is wrong? Jane Eyre tries to keep her wits and her integrity as she makes some big decisions.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is not a short book—it’s comparable to Pride and Prejudice or Hard Times for length.
The book does have some excitement (insane murderess and all), but its focus is introspective and the plot rides on the rather complex relationship between Jane and Mr. Rochester, so I don’t expect it to be very intelligible to a young audience. I’ll rank it at a hesitant 15+; 17+ might be more reasonable.
As always, you can jump to the bottom for a brief conclusion or read through for more details.
The Plot [spoiler alert!]
Jane Eyre is an orphan, and with the death of her uncle she’s lost the only person who really cares about her. She’s a small, shy girl who doesn’t command respect or inspire love. Her cousin goads her into open violence—what violence a ten year old is capable of—and then her aunt punishes her. Eventually, Jane bursts out in front of her aunt, tells her just about what she thinks of her, and causes her aunt—not very easy in her own conscience, if all the truth be told—to regard her with almost a superstitious dislike. When the opportunity comes to send Jane away to a school, her aunt is only too happy to be rid of her.
School is a new experience. Jane, plain and small, isn’t instantly attractive, but neither is she repulsive and in this new atmosphere where’s she’s given a fair chance she is able to make friends. Among these friends is Helen Burns, who, despite dying not long after Jane comes to school, makes an intense impression on her (more about this in my analysis of the point of the book).
Jane, love-starved and lonely, finds school a complete relief and grows up content—becoming a teacher at the school in her turn. But when her superintendent and mentor Miss Temple marries and leaves—eight years after Jane first came to the school—Jane suddenly remembers that there’s more to the world. She determines to advertise for a position as governess. Liberty, excitement, enjoyment—that would be too much to hope for, but a new servitude Jane is determined to get.
She finds a position teaching a little French girl of equivocal origin—Adele. Adele’s a little spoiled, but nothing unmanageable. And the best of it is that no one interferes with Jane’s decisions. Mrs. Fairfax is the housekeeper at Thornfield Hall; there is of course a decent complement of servants; but the master of the house, Mr. Rochester (possibly Adele’s father, but that’s never ascertained for sure), only rarely visits.
In short, Jane is in clover… and clover, like other delicacies, begins to pall when enjoyed uninterruptedly. She longs for an interesting change. (Minor aside: Jane goes on a brief tirade here, about how women need excitement as well as men: “they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do”—which is all well and good, but seeing as in the long run that field narrows quite comfortably down to Jane’s marriage… also well and good, but altogether it just gives me a slight feeling of unintentional irony!)
But let’s not keep the interesting change, aka Mr. Rochester, waiting. Business summons him home—a governess keeps him there. Mr. Rochester is a change, certainly. He’s middle-aged, blunt, and a bit masterful; but Jane is quick with her own tongue, and meets his near-rudeness with boldness and originality. As a general rule, whenever Jane gets into an extended conversation you can prepare to be amused; she’s intelligent and a bit mischievous, and fully capable of taking the conversation in unexpected directions. She doesn’t talk about herself much (which is just as well, seeing she spends most of the book writing about herself), but draws Mr. Rochester out pretty well—albeit always with an enigmaticality about him that is virtually impenetrable.
I must hurry to the dénouement; Mr. Rochester and Jane fall in love; they are about to be married—incidentally, Jane has saved Mr. Rochester’s life before this, and her own life has been threatened, so it’s clear that something is amiss—but only at the wedding, immediately before the vows, does Jane learn what it is that Mr. Rochester has been hiding. Mr. Rochester is already married!
Hereupon must quickly follow an explanation. Mr. Rochester was an idiot—and knows he was an idiot—to marry his current wife, Bertha, without really knowing her; but he was a tricked idiot. For the sake of her fortune, his family told him nothing about her; for the sake of his good name and connections, her family said nothing—he married her without any idea that she had inherited her mother’s insanity—and also her mother’s propensity toward drunkenness. Besides that, she has a fair quota of vices all her own. She becomes thoroughly insane (prematurely, due to her immoral behavior) shortly after their marriage, and Mr. Rochester is unable to get a divorce. Disgusted with himself and her, he finally resolves to hide the matter as best he can and go enjoy himself. He returns to England (Bertha was from Jamaica, and so far they had lived together there), installs her in his house with a keeper, and goes roaming.
In his roaming Mr. Rochester is on the lookout for a wife—having decided in his own mind that his insane wife doesn’t count. Of course, he has some show of reason… but at the end of the day, he married her voluntarily. But he’s convinced himself that it would be perfectly reasonable for him to marry again—and he decidedly wants to marry again (to be honest, I’m not sure why he doesn’t just find something else to do with his life besides looking for a wife… but I guess it wouldn’t have been much of a romance if he’d turned into an artist or a politician or whatever). That his self-conviction leaves him with a bit of uncertainty is clear, since he wasn’t willing to tell Jane until after they were married.
Jane labors under no such uncertainty; she’s quite clear on the point that they shouldn’t stay together. This part is all pretty well done, with Jane being wisely firm on sticking to what she knew was right yesterday even though now, with it being applied to her case, she’s tempted to reevaluate. She runs away.
Jane uses all her money to get as far from Mr. Rochester as she can, and then, penniless and homeless, she tries to find work—or barring that, food—or barring that, a comfortable place to die.
Now in my opinion, Jane is not a very wise beggar. First of all, why travel in the coach to the very limit of your money? And then, once you have been fool enough to spend all your money, do a decent job begging. I’ve given begging some thought (from reasons purely literary of course), and if one of my girl characters ever ends up a beggar, she’ll put a bold face on it, say frankly that she’s lost and penniless, and ask for food or whatever fully expecting the reasonable request to be granted. Jane is a pathetic beggar; she quite expects to be turned down every time. She looks suspicious—being well dressed and so forth, obviously not a “real” beggar—and she acts suspicious too. Also she hasn’t got much ingenuity. For instance, once she watches at a window, hears the names of the two girls who live in the house, and then she knocks at the door and asks the servant for shelter. Whereas the smart thing to do would have been to use the girls’ names to get to see them directly, and then frankly explain that you’re exhausted, hungry, penniless and jobless.
Instead Jane gets turned away by the servant and, unable to go farther, sinks on the doorstep with a prayer.
Fortunately, Mr. St. John Rivers is just returning home. Although commending his servant for excluding a suspicious looking beggar, he realizes that Jane is actually in need and lets her in. He and his two sisters take care of her as she recovers, and they put her in the way of earning her own living by taking charge of a school in the town.
St. John is an interesting fellow but not, I imagine, very pleasant to be around. He’s exacting—and exacts every bit as much from himself as from everyone else. He’s rather heartless, in fact. Although he is committed to his work as a pastor and his dream of being a pioneer missionary, his commitment lacks the motivation of love that it should have. He’s ambitious, determined to do great things, and unwilling to see the greatness of small things.
After watching Jane very narrowly for a while, he decides she’d make the perfect missionary wife. He’s not in love with her by any stretch of the imagination—Jane paints him as not having it in him to be really in love (whatever that actually means)—but he’s so convinced that she would be perfect to go with him, that he’s very near telling her that it’s her only hope of salvation. And Jane is fairly near believing him—or at least believing that it would be a grand way to sacrifice her life (being personally convinced that she wouldn’t live long in a foreign climate). But, just when she’s about to agree to marry him and go to India (I think it was), she hears Mr. Rochester’s voice calling her name.
For all her hard-headed practical common sense, Jane is rather superstitious. This has surfaced frequently in the book, but this is the time where it makes the most external impact on the plot (rather than just influencing Jane’s internal development). In other words, in this case, if what Jane heard wasn’t actually real (and it later transpires that Mr. Rochester actually did call her at that time, and heard her response), then the whole plot rather falls apart. So in the world of the book, it was clearly meant to be real.
From an artistic point of view, I have a problem with this kind of thing in what otherwise purports to be a real-world setting. It always feels a little cheap to invoke the supernatural in order to get your characters out of an impossible dilemma. Even if you’re a reader willing to concede that such things as hearing someone call your name from an extreme distance could happen (and plenty of extraordinary things happen), it’s still a questionable technique and the more integral it is to moving your plot forward, the more unfair it feels to the reader—or at least to me. So I think this event significantly impairs the ingenuity of the plot of Jane Eyre.
Moving on—Jane returns to Thornfield Hall to find Mr. Rochester (having decided that if she can’t find him, she’ll marry St. John and go to India)—and lo and behold, Thornfield Hall is a charred ruin. In a talk with the keeper of a nearby inn, Jane discovers that Bertha died in the conflagration (which no doubt Bertha herself caused), and that Mr. Rochester lost a hand and his eyesight in his rescue attempts. He’s now living at his other house, not very far away. Jane goes there the same night, introduces herself to Mr. Rochester, assures him that his being blind makes no difference to her, and so they marry and live happily ever after. And St. John goes to India alone.
I notice that I’ve completely omitted all the part where Jane gets a fortune. Well, Jane got a fortune from a rich old bachelor uncle, you must just take my word for it, and split it up handsomely with her cousins—who happened to be St. John and his sisters. That was a little coincidental, but it’s one of those clever coincidences that make you forgive the author on the spot.
I have a couple critiques on the end of the plot; first of all, Jane, without having a clue that Mrs. Rochester is dead, returns to Thornfield. Something can be said, I suppose, for the effect of time—something can be said for the fact that with her fortune she’s now independent—but in any case, this seems decidedly like thrusting herself right back into the temptation that she’d run from before. On the other hand, she’s going in order to resist the temptation to marry St. John though she doesn’t particularly love him—so it does make some sense. But, since an integral part of the plot, some more explicit reason why it’s fine for Jane to just go back to Thornfield would have been nice.
Then too, Jane, purely for the sake of the drama, goes to Thornfield before talking to the innkeeper. This way of course you can get the grand reveal—it’s a blackened ruin—oh the horror! But you’ve sacrificed a bit of realism in my opinion—especially when you consider that Jane is a hard-headed practical governess who really ought to be capable of reflecting that if information about Mr. Rochester is what you want you’d get it a deal faster talking to the innkeeper than walking two miles to the house.
To conclude this long section on a complicated plot: the plot’s okay, but not thoroughly believable. Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers are both extreme characters—there seem to be no normal guys in Jane’s world—and neither one of them are completely likeable. Unquestionably Mr. Rochester is more loving at bottom… but he’s got plenty of faults. Jane herself is fairly likeable (particularly when she talks); but I think she would have been more likeable had she not been in love with Mr. Rochester (which, to be sure, would have ruined the plot). Also, in general, ultra-complicated triangles (this one’s almost a square, I guess… maybe a five point star when you add Rosamond Oliver—oh, forget her, it’s too much to explain) are just not my thing; they introduce so many ambiguities and it’s so hard to find out where your sympathies should really lie.
On the whole, I don’t like the plot of Jane Eyre.
3/10
The Point
I must say I am not at all sure why Jane Eyre is such a famous book. Even Wikipedia has been no help; I found no critical discussions, profound or otherwise, that would lead me to conclude that some hidden nugget inside the book had eluded my own observation. It seems to have been the first intensely introspective book (first person narrative)—but to be the first to do decently what others afterwards do well doesn’t strike me as a lasting claim to fame.
Beyond that, I didn’t like the plot very much, and Jane herself is really the only passably likeable character. There are a few minor characters that seem nice, but you don’t get to know them well enough to really enjoy them.
But sometimes a brilliantly integrated, astonishingly profound moral can make up for mediocrity in other areas… so let’s see what the moral of the book seems to be.
Whatever else can be said about it, no main moral instantly jumps out at you. The contrast between St. John Rivers and Edward Rochester is clear enough—but St. John is not a “bad guy” any more than Edward is a “good guy.” However, there are obvious moral points in Jane’s decisions; for instance, that it would be wrong to live with Mr. Rochester as if she were his wife when he already has one—and more profoundly, that although Jane is tempted to reconsider moral truths in the heat of the moment, she realizes that’s a bad idea: the whole point of the rules of yesterday when everything was calm was to hold onto those rules today when everything is confusing and tempestuous. To balance out this moral (that passionate love isn’t everything), Jane later encounters St. John and has to remind herself that what may seem like a call of self-denying duty, might only be temptation in an austere form: that love is essential, and that one must be true to one’s self and to one’s calling rather than sacrificing the right of independent judgement to a third party.
And that is probably the main point of Jane Eyre: balancing law and love—putting each into perspective, showing that lawless love is a black hole and loveless law a monstrosity.
I feel like that point would have benefited from a bit more clarity—less ambiguity. And I think drawing it to a sharper point would have benefited the book as a whole, leaving the reader with less uncertainty as to who to sympathize with.
Part of the reason why this dual (fairly profound, fairly well illustrated) point doesn’t come leaping out at you, is that it’s interwoven with Jane’s own worldview. What Jane’s worldview is—besides confusing—I’m still a little uncertain. Helen Burns (the girl she first made friends with at school) had a rather universalistic “Christianity.” Her idea was that God would never finally destroy (or condemn) anything he had created. By implication, every created being will finally, through some purification process, reach heaven (in fact, Helen went the length of morphing humans into angels). This same basic idea crops up occasionally in Jane’s thoughts—but it’s not consistent. Jane is worried about Mr. Rochester becoming desperate and irredeemable, for instance.
To critique the point: God is a faithful Creator. But to reason from this to the final bliss of everything is an unjustified leap. Take the case of the devil, who chose to hate God. Hating God, how could eternity ever be anything more than impotent regret over past failure, anger over present torment, and misery over future despair? How could there be a heaven for anyone who rejects God?
Also, St. John Rivers’ worldview as it intersects with Jane’s is difficult to thoroughly understand. St. John is ambitious—he wants to do and be something great. It seems like he believes he will merit heaven in this way… or at least, that were he to fail—were he for instance to stay in England, marry, lead a normal life—he’d be doomed. Of course, to disregard God’s leading in one’s life is extremely dangerous—but our hope of heaven doesn’t depend on anything we do. It’s the fine line between, if you’re not doing what God wants you to do, what makes you think you’re actually saved? and, if you are doing what he wants you to do, that’s only because he’s saved you—never in order to be saved. I’m not even quite sure where St. John is on this line—much less where Jane is. But the point is such an important one, so central to the gospel, that confusion on it is a pretty serious issue.
In sum, what seems to me (after a lot of thought and three readings) to be the main point is a really good one, but not clear enough to be strongly compelling—in part because less correct side morals clutter the issue.
4/10
The Style
As previously mentioned, Jane Eyre seems to have been a pioneer book in first-person introspective narrative, and it is among the better first person books I’ve read—Jane is neither an annoying jerk nor is she unrealistic or boring. On the other hand, her personality comes through more strongly when she talks than when she writes. Also, there’s no particular reason assigned for why Jane is writing her life story.
The full title of Jane Eyre is actually Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. A fictional autobiography seems like a contradiction in terms—but it makes more sense when you consider that this was the first one. And some of Jane’s life is similar to Charlotte Bronte’s—but it’s not a real autobiography.
As for the writing style itself, I found it a little slow at times—also a little unrealistic in Jane’s younger days. No ten year old ever talked the way Jane talked! I have my doubts about fourteen year olds talking like Helen Burns either. But in general, it was smooth and enjoyable, prone to description. Hands down the dialogues were my favorite parts.
6/10
Conclusion
4(4.3)/10
After a score like that, there’s no need to say that Jane Eyre isn’t my favorite book. I found the plot too complicated for the reader to clearly sympathize with the characters, the main moral too obscured with less central and more questionable issues, and the style decent but not captivating. That said, there is something a little fascinating about Jane Eyre, if only the fact that it’s considered a classic and the curiosity to find out why. Besides, I have to give full credit to the humorous and well written dialogues throughout the book.
You can find Jane Eyre as an ebook for free on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1260
Let me know if you have any questions, or opinions of your own to share, in the comment section below!
You might also be interested in these other book reviews I’ve written:
Geneva D 
What do you think?