Jane Eyre
...enough to form memories of them. Her father had been an impoverished clergyman whom her mother married over the objections of family members who said the clergyman was beneath her. After the marriage, Jane’s mother was disinherited She was not to receive a single shilling.
.......One year into the marriage, Jane’s father caught typhus while ministering to the poor, and her mother caught the disease from him. Both died within months. Jane’s uncle, John Reed–the brother of her mother–adopted Jane, but he died not long after he brought the infant to his home, Gateshead Hall.
.......Jane has recorded the events of her life, and here is her story, beginning when she is ten years old and under the supervision of Mr. Reed’s widow, Sarah.
.......Mrs. Reed and her children–John, Eliza, and Georgiana–treat Jane cruelly. In fact, John, a stout fourteen-year-old, terrorizes Jane, who recalls that “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."
.......One day, in a room adjoining the drawing room, Jane takes Bewick’s History of British Birds from a bookcase and begins reading it on a window seat. Moments later, John appears, commands her to stand before him, and tells her that "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."
.......Then he brains her with the book. Jane falls and cuts her head on the door. A spunky child, she accuses him of acting like the Roman emperors, whom she had read about in Goldsmith’s History of Rome. He grabs her hair and further bullies her. After Eliza and Georgiana summon...
View Full Essay
