Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. The book was an immediate sensation. Readers could not stop talking about the heroine: a small, plain, penniless governess who spoke with the directness of someone who had decided that since the world was going to be unfair to her anyway, she might as well say exactly what she thought. Nobody had met a character like Jane Eyre before. Female protagonists in Victorian fiction were beautiful or they were invisible. Jane was neither. She was visible by force of will.

She Told Rochester the Truth When Nobody Else Would

The central relationship of the novel is between Jane and Edward Rochester, her employer at Thornfield Hall. Rochester is wealthy, moody, charismatic, and hiding a secret that would destroy both of them. Jane falls in love with him. He falls in love with her. The romance is conducted through conversation, and the conversations are extraordinary. Literary scholars at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth have noted that the dialogue between Jane and Rochester was unlike anything in Victorian fiction. They argue. They provoke each other. They are equals in a society that says they cannot be. Rochester tries to test Jane by making her jealous. Jane responds by telling him the truth about himself with a precision that no one in his life has ever attempted. When Jane says to Rochester that she is not talking to him through the medium of custom or convention but as her spirit addresses his spirit, she is not merely declaring love. She is declaring personhood. She is saying that her inner life is as real and as important as his, and that neither wealth nor beauty nor social position changes this fact.

She Left When Staying Would Have Been Easier

On their wedding day, Jane discovers that Rochester is already married. His wife, Bertha Mason, is alive and locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Rochester begs Jane to stay. He explains. He justifies. He offers her everything he has. Scholars of Victorian literature at the University of Oxford have analyzed Jane's refusal as one of the defining moments in the history of the English novel. She loves Rochester. She has nowhere to go. She has no money, no family, no prospects. Staying would give her comfort, love, and security. Leaving gives her nothing except the knowledge that she did not compromise who she is. She leaves. She nearly dies of exposure on the moors. She is taken in by strangers who turn out to be her cousins. She inherits money. She is proposed to by St. John Rivers, a clergyman who wants a missionary partner, not a wife. She refuses him too, because being needed is not the same as being loved. She returns to Rochester on her own terms, after his house has burned, after he has been blinded and maimed trying to save the servants. She does not return out of pity. She returns because she chooses to, freely, as a woman with resources and options who wants this specific life with this specific person. Plain, poor, and the bravest person in any room. That has not changed in a hundred and seventy years.