Jane Eyre Quotes

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last…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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Preface. Author Charlotte Bronte wrote a preface to the novel’s second edition, after the moral outrage that followed its publication. In it she defends her book against reviewers who criticized it for its immorality and anti-Christian and anti-authority tendencies. She rejects claims that questioning conventions and self-righteousness is an attack on morality and religion. The morality of Jane and Rochester’s love was criticized by the book’s critics.

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 out-door 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, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. The novel’s opening paragraph sets the tone wonderfully and gives us our first glimpse into the characters of Jane and the Reed family. The child Jane’s loneliness and isolation while living at Gateshead are starkly spelled out. Her position of inferiority among her cousins is immediately evident. The poor weather and leafless shrubs combine to create a melancholic mood, foreshadowing a cold and dreary future for Jane. Throughout the novel Bronte uses nature as a sympathetic background to reflect Jane’s situation and mood.

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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. The orphaned Jane Eyre is viewed as a burden by her cruel aunt Mrs. Reed. She agreed to take Jane in and care for her only because her late husband Mr. Reed made her promise to do so on his deathbed. But Jane is not a welcome member of the Reed household at Gateshead Hall. In this passage Mrs. Reed’s talks about excluding Jane from the privileges enjoyed by her own children until she has a “more sociable” manner.

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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. As Jane reads a book on birds, the author makes striking use of pathetic fallacy, with the images of the natural world accurately mirroring Jane’s own feelings and emotions. Jane is the rock standing alone in the swollen sea, the broken boat on a desolate coast, the ghastly moon peering at a sinking wreck. Each is a metaphorical symbol of her desolation at Gateshead, where she is isolated and unloved. The moon appears as a metaphor throughout the novel, presiding over the different situations Jane finds herself in. The rock here also symbolizes Jane’s strength and her resistance to the abuse she suffers at the hands of the Reeds.

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 night-cap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from the old fairy tales and older 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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. From early in her life Jane is eager to learn about the world and she soaks up knowledge from books and tales told to her by her nursemaid Bessie Lee. Bessie shows some kindness by reading to her. This passage emphasies 10-year-old Jane’s isolation as she sits alone in a window seat reading Bewick’s History of British Birds, where each picture has a story to tell her.

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 on my bones shrunk 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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. The author creates a lot of sympathy for unwanted orphan Jane in the descriptions of bullying and abuse she is subjected to by cousin John Reed. She is meant to be in the care of her aunt Mrs. Reed who promised her dying husband that she would bring her up like one of her own children. But Aunt Reed doesn’t intervene to stop the abuse.

You have no business to take our books; you are a dependant, 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 ear the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my book-shelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 1. As Jane takes refuge from her cruel aunt and cousins in a book on British birds, John Reed tells her that she has no business taking the family books. He torments her for being of a social lower class. He says that she is only in the house on account of his mother Mrs. Reed’s charity. John, himself a child of 14, is obviously parroting his mother’s words when he calls Jane a “dependant.” The upper class Reed family isolate Jane and treat her as an outcast because she is poor. John uses his position as sole male heir to harass Jane, pointing out that he effectively owns everything at Gateshead, as he will inherit it in a few years.

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.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. As Bessie and Miss Abbot drag Jane to the red room, her prison, she sees herself “like any other rebel slave” (simile) and fights her captors. On Mrs. Reed’s orders, they imprison Jane in the room for retaliating after her cousin John Reed throws a book at her and attacks her. The red room is the death chamber where her late Uncle Reed died. In this exchange the cruel maid Miss Abbot tells Jane that she is less than a servant. A second simile is used in this passage by nursemaid Bessie to compare Jane to a “mad cat.”

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 poor-house.”
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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. In her early life with the upper class Reed family, Jane gets a hard time even from the servants. She is constantly reminded of her inferiority to the Reeds and how poor and dependant she is on Mrs. Reed. Here Gateshead maid Bessie talks down to her, not letting her forget that Mrs. Reed could cut her off at any time and consign her the poorhouse.

“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.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Miss Abbot and Bessie scold Jane and lecture her that she must not consider herself as an equal to the other children while living with the Reed family. They are rich and she is poor, she is told. Jane experiences no sense of belonging in the upper class home and is made feel a burden to Mrs. Reed, who will send her away if she doesn’t behave, she is warned.

“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 spare 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 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 similair 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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Jane is threatened with the wrath of God by Miss Abbot after her fight with her cousin John Reed. As punishment Abbot and Bessie imprison Jane in the red room on Mrs. Reed’s instructions. This is the death chamber in which her kindly uncle breathed his last moments nine years before and where she is meant to pray and repent for her misbehavior. But for Jane the red room more signifies hell and divine vengeance. The stern God of the Old Testament and religion are used in this instance to punish children who are seen not to conform. The room has a Gothic spookiness about it. It is red nearly from top to bottom, dark and rarely used, and its tabernacle and pillers conjure up Biblical imagery. The Gothic influences in Jane’s life are foreshadowed here. So too is the fire that Bertha Mason will later start because she is locked away in Edward Rochester’s attic. The red is symbolic of Jane’s fury and passion over her mistreatment and her struggles to find freedom and belonging. The red room is also a symbol for femininity and the more submissive feminine behavior that Jane is expected to adopt.

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 house-maid 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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. When Jane is locked in the red room, the alienation and ostracization she feels while living with her aunt is reflected in the description of the room. The room is depicted as chilly, isolated and abandoned – echoing her own harsh life in the home of her cruel aunt Mrs. Reed, who visits the room on rare occasions to check the contents of a secret drawer.

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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Locked in the red room, Jane looks into the mirror and contemplates the bad situation she finds herself in, now that her kind uncle is dead and she is a ward of a family that despises her. She sees herself as a strange and unnatural figure, a spirit from another world. Using similes she compares herself to the scary phantoms, fairies and imps that populate the evening stories told to her by nursemaid Bessie.

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…John no one thwarted, much less punished.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. While locked in the red room, Jane questions her constant mistreatment by the Reed family. She asked why she could never please them or win their favor. Using a simile she compares all their wrong-doings and tyranny to a “dark deposit in a turbid well.” But while she is made to suffer, Jane protests that the misbehavior of her cousins Eliza, Georgiana and John is left go unchecked and unpunished. The Gothic style that permeates the novel is found in the language of this passage with Bronte’s use of words like “violent,” “disturbed,” “dark.”

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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Looking back at her imprisonment in the red room as a child, Jane describes her mental turmoil over being punished that day by Mrs. Reed for acting in self defense. While she is depressed by her solitary confinement, she is also stirred by the emotions of the rebel slave who wants to fight back – “all my heart in insurrection.”

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 scape-goat of the nursery.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Bronte presents Jane’s life as a dependant child in Gateshead Hall as very isolated. Jane feels that she was like a “nobody” and “noxious” while living there. She is very much an outsider who does not fit in with the Reed family. She neither loves them nor do they love her. The plain-looking and strong-willed Jane believes that had she been a more handsome child and more like the Reeds in temperment, she would have been treated better by them.

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.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 2. Jane recalls the horrific Gothic experience she had on the night her Aunt Reed jailed her in the ominous red room as punishment for her altercation with her son John. Looking back she admits that it was likely a gleam of light from a lantern she saw. But as a 10-year-child child at the time she believed that she witnessed a supernatural vision of her dead Uncle Reed. She imagined him coming to avenge the wrongs of his wife Mrs. Reed for breaking her promise to him to care for Jane as one of her own children. Jane describes the terror that she felt resulting from her aunt’s abuse in imprisoning her in the room, as she screams out in panic, pounds the door and the servants come running.

No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Yes, Ms. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering. But I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Jane muses on the day she was disciplined as a child by Mrs. Reed who had her locked in the red room. Though it left her with pangs of mental suffering to the present day, she feels she ought to forgive Mrs. Reed. Her aunt didn’t know what she was doing and was just trying to fix her bad inclinations and make her a morally better child, she says.

This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Bessie hands Jane some delicate pastry on a bright china plate with a picture of a bird of paradise painted on it. Having always admired the plate Jane had often asked to be allowed hold it, but was refused. Now when Bessie offers her the plate with some tart, it is ironic that Jane no longer wants it. The bird’s plumage are said to be “strangely faded,” representing Jane’s feelings after her traumatic experience of being locked in the red room.

Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the world only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Jane is telling local apothecary Mr. Lloyd why she would refuse to live with caring relatives who are poor. Mrs. Reed has told Jane – falsely – that her Eyre relatives are poor and lower class. She has taught Jane that poverty is associated with unpleasantness and wickedness. It is ironic that Jane rejects the idea of going to live with relatives that she would have discovered are kind, educated and middle-class. She would have saved herself a lot of pain and misery at Lowood institution had she seen past Mrs. Reed’s lie. There is also irony in the fact that Jane is herself poor, even though she is allowed to live with her wealthy aunt.

I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. The wealthy Reed family she is living with may be abusive and neglectful. But Jane believes that to be poor would be be even worse than staying with them. To Jane poverty is “synonymous with degradation.” She doesn’t want to grow up to be one of those poor women nursing children and washing clothes at the cottage doors. So when asked if she would like to live with relations who are kind but poor, she turns that down. To be poor, she has learned, means to be uneducated and without the means of being kind. She has also learned that her mother was disowned for marrying a poor clergyman.

I scarcely knew what school was; Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise; John Reed hated his school, and abused his master: but John Reed’s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of school-discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.
“I should indeed like to go to school,” was the audible conclusion of my musings.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. When apothecary Mr. Lloyd asks Jane if she would like to go to school, she embraces it as an opportunity to escape from the tyranny of Gateshead and begin a new life. She knows little about school, but while John Reed hates it and abuses his teacher, Jane refuses to be ruled by his bad tastes. Instead she learns her understanding of girls’ education from servant Bessie. Bessie’s account of the accomplishments attained by young ladies in school – in painting, singing and studying French books – inspires Jane. Jane sees education as her gateway to freedom from the oppression of the Reeds.

I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever…that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Jane recalls the first time she learned anything about her family and heard the tragic story of her parents. They went against society’s class expectations when her poor clergyman father married her mother, who came from a higher class family. This resulted in them being off by family and friends and they died of typhus, leaving Jane an orphan.
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