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.