Jane Eyre
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.
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Summary
The novel begins not with action but with a refusal of action — the impossibility of a walk. Already in the first sentence, Brontë binds her narrator's interior life to her surroundings: the cold, the rain, the indoor exile. The voice is first-person, retrospective, written as memoir, and quietly committed to telling the truth even when it is unflattering to the speaker.
Themes to continue
- The first-person retrospective — Jane is older than the events she describes. A continuation can play with what the narrator now knows that the child did not.
- Outdoor exile, indoor power — the Reed household is full of small cruelties masked as routine. The opening's denied walk is itself a clue.
- Class as climate — Brontë makes weather, status, and emotional life inseparable. A continuation that gets the temperature right will get the rest.
Vocabulary
- Mrs. Reed — Jane's wealthy aunt, her guardian after her parents' death. The name suggests both reading and a brittle reed.
- Out-door exercise — Brontë's slightly stiff Victorian phrase. The hyphen is period-correct.
Continuation prompts
- Stay inside the Reed household. What does Jane do, given that she cannot walk?
- Write the same scene from a cousin's perspective.
- Skip a year. What has changed when winter comes again?
About the author
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) published Jane Eyre (1847) under the male pseudonym Currer Bell. The novel was an immediate success and remains a foundational text of first-person women's narrative in English. Brontë died at thirty-eight, pregnant with her first child.