The Story of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Synopsize it, and the story of Jane Eyre immediately becomes nonsense. For years Mr. Rochester has kept a lunatic wife on the third floor of his country house in the charge of a gin- drinking servant, and none of the other servants, or Jare Eyre, the governess of Rochester's illegitimalc child, in the least suspects her existence.
The house resounds with demoniac laughter; she attempts to burn ber usband in his bed; she bites her brother when he visits her; and on the eve of Jane's marriage to Rochester she comes into Jane's room at the dead of night and tears her bridal veil in half.
Again, Rochester has no scruples about bigamy;he calmy proposes-having wooed her under the guise of a fortune telling old gipsy woman at one of his own dinner parties to marry Jane, who is eighteen years old and when he has failed to trick her into a bogus marriage, proposes that she should become his mistress.
She refuses, and still adoring him and Unresentful of his behaviour, runs away, spends her last coin on her coach fare, and scours the Country on foot until worm out, half starved and soaked to the skin, she drops down at the front door of the house of her three cousins, whose existence she has no known before.
There she finds she is the heiress of an uncle who has left her 20,000 pounds which she promptly shares between her cousins and herself. One of them, the Rev.St. John Rivers, is going to India as a missionary and decides Jane must accompany him, and, though neither is in love with the other, marry him.
Jane, with no interest in missions, agrees to go with him, but not as his wife. Rivers insists on mariage, and just as she is on the point of yielding Jane hears a phantom voice calling oul of the night, “Jane! Jane! Jane!” She recognizes Rochester's voice and runs into the garden crying. “Where are you?”
There is no reply -
“Down superstition!” she tells herself. “This is not only deception, nor ihy witchcraft, it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did-no miraclc-but her best.”
Jane hastens back to Thomfield, learns that Mrs. Rochester has again set fire to the house and that a burning beam has fallen on Rochester and blinded him, the wretched woman having been killed jumping off the roof. Jane finds Rochester and marries him. He partially recovers his sight, and they have a child.
