I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever…that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 3. Jane recalls the first time she learned anything about her family and heard the tragic story of her parents. They went against society’s class expectations when her poor clergyman father married her mother, who came from a higher class family. This resulted in them being off by family and friends and they died of typhus, leaving Jane an orphan.