Jane Eyre Character Quotes

And it is you, spirit – with will and energy, and virtue and purity – that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Rochester says this after seizing Jane and holding onto her with the grasp of a madman. He is desperate and doesn’t want to lose Jane. He expresses his desire to be purified by her virtue and spiritual energy. But Rochester has finally met his match in Jane’s indomitable spirit – she has decided to leave him. This is the fuller quote: “Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit – with will and energy, and virtue and purity – that I want: not alone your brittle frame.”

That night I never thought to sleep…I was transported in thought to the scenes of childhood; I dreamt that I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall…I lifted my head to look; the roof resolved to clouds…the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come…as though some word of doom were to be written on her disk…then, not a moon, but a white human form, shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. On the night after the day of Jane’s canceled marriage, she is troubled by dark supernatural dreams. She has a vision of being in the red room at Gateshead and she remembers all the fear of being imprisoned there. She looks up at the ceiling and it turns to clouds. Using a nature simile, she describes how there is a gleam like the moon gives to vapors she is about to divide. This foreshadows her parting with Mr. Rochester. The moon appears, it bursts through the cloud and is transformed into a white human form – that of her late mother with a message for Jane.

“My daughter, flee temptation.”
“Mother, I will.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Jane dreams of her dead mother, transformed from the moon, whispering in her heart to flee temptation and do what is morally right. She promises that she will. The dream comes after the cancelation of her wedding, when Rochester is found to be already legally married to the madwoman in the attic. Gathering her modest belongings, Jane sneaks out of Thornfield and steals away. Jane’s mother died of typhus when she was a young girl.

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like the world when the deluge was gone by.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Jane looks back on the life she has left at Thornfield, full of comfort and love, and contrasts it to the unknown and uncertain one she is going to. She uses a metaphor to compare her past and future to two very different pages.

I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I believe it was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on when I left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to rising sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the disseverment of bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I thought of drear flight and homeless wandering – and oh! with agony I thought of what I left.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Jane describes her feelings on the morning she quit Thornfield, the home she found for herself with Rochester. Now homeless, she wanders past fields and lanes and hedges. In the midst of nature, with its sunrise and smiling flowers, she finds no comfort. She compares having to leave Thornfield and Rochester to the agony of traveling to her own execution.

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Here Jane addresses the reader, expressing her heartbreak at leaving Rochester and Thornfield. She dreads that her going may be the cause of the downfall of the man she loves. In her anguish she makes an appeal to Heaven with her prayers.

I touched the heath: it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. To-night, at least, I would be her guest, as I was her child: my mother would lodge me without money and without price.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Jane’s relationship with the natural world is explored here. After her flight from Thornfield, Jane finds herself on the heath at nightfall and finds nature kind and nurturing. Even when alone and at her most desolate, Jane relies on nature to take care of her and make her feel loved – it is now her home and family.

A sad heart…It trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom; it bemoaned him with bitter pity; it demanded him with ceaseless longing; and, impotent as a bird with both wings broken, it still quivered its shattered pinions in vain attempts to seek him.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 28. After Jane has fled from Rochester her heart longs for the man she still loves. But because of her moral compass, with Rochester being a legally married man, she cannot act on it. She uses an animal simile to compare her sad heart to a bird with broken wings.

Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky-way. Remembering what it was – what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light – I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits. Mr Rochester was safe: he was God’s and by God would he be guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill; and ere long, in sleep, forgot sorrow.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 28. Alone and wandering in the wilderness, Jane finds spiritual comfort from her faith in the omnipotence and omnipresence of God. Looking up at the cloudless night sky, full of stars and the great Milky Way, she is inspired with new strength and confidence in the benevolence of God and nature. Offering up a prayer of thankgiving, she believes that God will keep safe the man she loves, Mr. Rochester.

This was the climax. A pang of exquisite suffering – a throe of true despair – rent and heaved my heart. Worn out, indeed, I was; not another step could I stir. I sank on the wet doorstep: I groaned – I wrung my hands – I wept in utter anguish. Oh, this spectre of death! Oh, this last hour, approaching in such horror! Alas, this isolation – this banishment from my kind!

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 28. After leaving Thornfield a homeless Jane has been wandering in the wilderness for days in search of food and is weak from hunger and exhaustion. The destitute Jane sees the distant light of a house across the moors and follows a road to it. But when she knocks at the door of Moor House (aka Marsh End) looking for shelter, the elderly servant turns her away. In Jane’s darkest moment of despair, she breaks down and collapses to the wet ground, waiting for death. Her struggle for independence threatens to destroy her.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 29. Jane says this about old servant Hannah, who at first judged her and refused her shelter when she knocked on the door of Moor House. Jane uses a gardening metaphor and simile to compare the heart to soil, where prejudices can grow like weeds if there is no education to fertilize it.

“Mr. Rivers,” I said, turning to him and looking at him as he looked at me, openly and without indifference, “you and your sisters have done me a great service, the greatest man can do a fellow-being; you have rescued me, by your noble hospitality, from death. This benefit conferred gives you an unlimited claim on my gratitude, and a claim, to a certain extent, on my confidence. I will tell you as much of the history of the wanderer you have harboured as I can tell without compromising my own peace of mind – my own security.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 29. After spending three days and nights in bed recovering at Moor House, Jane thanks St. John and his sisters for rescuing her from certain death.

Diana offered to teach me German. I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar pleased and suited me no less. Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection – of the strongest kind – was the result. They discovered I could draw: their pencils and colour-boxes were immediately at my service. My skill, greater in this one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them. Mary would sit and watch me by the hour together: then she would take lessons; and a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 30. Being with the Rivers sisters Diana and Mary rekindles Jane’s love of learning. They share an intellectual bond, with Diana teaching Jane German, and Jane in turn giving Mary drawing lessons. Jane observes that Diana’s nature and hers fit together so well.

“I mean now to open a second school, for girls. I have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of two rooms attached to it for the mistress’ house…Will you be this mistress?”…In truth it was humble – but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum; it was plodding – but then, compared with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent; and the fear of servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron; it was not ignoble – not unworthy – not mentally degrading. I made my decision.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 30. When St. John Rivers arranges a school teacher’s position for Jane, she has a home of her own for the first time in her life.

My home, then, when I at last find a home, – is a cottage; a little room with whitewashed walls and a sanded floor, containing four painted chairs and a table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or three plates and dishes, and a set of tea-things in delf. Above, a chamber of the same dimensions as the kitchen, with a deal bedstead and chest of drawers; small, yet too large to be filled with my scanty wardrobe: though the kindness of my gentle and generous friends has increased that, by a modest stock of such things as are necessary.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 31. Jane has moved to her new home, the schoolroom cottage at the town of Morton. Having accepted the position of running a charity school for poor girls at Morton, the cottage comes with the job. Having been a homeless beggar just weeks earlier, Jane is happy with her new home.

This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant; but others are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me. I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 31. Jane begins her teaching job in Morton. She has twenty students with little education between them. Although they are rough and badly dressed peasants, she believes that they are as good and deserving as the children of the noblest families. She commits to giving them a good education and developing the metaphorical germs of native excellence and intelligence in their hearts.

I felt desolate to a degree. I felt – yes, idiot that I am – I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings: I know them to be wrong – that is a great step gained; I shall strive to overcome them…In a few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing process, and a change for the better in my scholars, may substitute gratification for disgust.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 31. After her first day teaching at the school in Morton, Jane feels conflicted in her feelings about trying to bring learning to a class of poor, uneducated girls. She is dismayed at the scale of their ignorance and roughness. The task seems more than what she bargained for. But she pledges to remain positive and looks forward to seeing progress in a few months.

Which is better? – To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort – no struggle; but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester’s mistress; delirious with his love half my time…But where am I wandering, and what am I saying, and, above all, feeling? Whether it is better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles – fevered with delusive bliss one hour – suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next – or to be a village school-mistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 31. Jane is speaking metaphorically about her relationship with Rochester and her decision not to stay as his mistress. Describing it as a “silken snare,” she believes that it would have brought her down the path of shame and slavery. It would have been wrong to surrender to temptation and passion, she feels. Better to be a free and honest village school teacher, she tells herself. But Jane isn’t completely happy and doesn’t exactly love her new teaching job.

My cottage is clean and weather-proof; my furniture sufficient and commodious. All I see has made me thankful, not despondent. I am not absolutely such a fool and sensualist as to regret the absence of a carpet, a sofa, and silver plate; besides, five weeks ago I had nothing – I was an outcast, a beggar, a vagrant; now I have acquaintance, a home, a business. I wonder at the goodness of God; the generosity of my friends; the bounty of my lot. I do not repine.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 31. After a long series of ups and downs, including being homeless and reduced to beggary, Jane is happy with her new home at Morton. God has been good to her, he believes. Home is a very important theme in Jane Eyre. It isn’t just a place to rest your head at night, but somewhere you can feel safe and comfortable and in a loving relationship with other people. That has been Jane’s lifelong quest. In this passage she is speaking to St. John Rivers.

I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood. Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working-people, is like “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;” serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray…my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sunk with dejection.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 32. Jane is reflecting on her life as a teacher in Morton. Quoting from an epic fantasy and romance poem by Irish writer Thomas Moore, she compares it to “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet.” But when she speaks of feeling valued in the Morton community, she betrays a certain prejudice towards its working class.

I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy – dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him – the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion. By nine o’clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 32. Life in Morton has its compensations for Jane – independence, a teaching job, a house and educating her young scholars. But she is troubled at night by unsettling dreams about Rochester. While St. John Rivers can surpress his true feelings for Rosamond, Jane is unable do the same for her love for Rochester. Jane’s dreams are a window into her emotional mind.

He had not imagined that a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart’s very hearthstone.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 32. St. John is surprised by how direct and outspoken Jane is about his repressed feelings for Miss Oliver. She has told St. John how he is “wasting away” and trembles and becomes flushed whenever Rosamond enters the schoolroom. He was not used to a woman speaking to him so frankly, but Jane continues to defy the expectations of women in Victorian society.

“Well, what did he want?”
“Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead; that he has left you all his property, and that you are now rich – merely that – nothing more.”
“I! – rich?”
“Yes, you, rich – quite an heiress.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 33. Jane is astonished to learn from St. John that she has inherited a fortune of twenty thousand pounds from her late uncle John Eyre. There is a certain irony here, as the despised impoverished orphan child Jane becomes an heiress and more successful than her spoiled Reed cousins.

It is a fine thing, reader, to be lifted in moment from indigence to wealth – a very fine thing; but not a matter one can comprehend, or consequently enjoy, all at once…One does not jump, and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune; one begins to consider responsibilities and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares – and we contain ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow.

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 33. Poor orphan Jane is not one to let her new-found wealth go to her head or change her. After inheriting twenty thousand pounds from her uncle, she takes time to reflect and consider her responsibilites.

“I am cold: no fervour infects me.”
“Whereas I am hot and fire dissolves ice.”

– Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, Chapter 33. This is the first instance of Jane standing up to St. John. Ice and fire are recurring symbols in the novel. He is compared metaphorically to ice, while the rebellious and passionate Jane retorts that she is made of fire. This foreshadows the moment when Jane will confront St. John and his anger, assert her independence and leave him. Jane is not a woman who allows a man dicate the course of her life.
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