Jane Eyre is an orphan living with her maternal uncle and his wealthy wife, Mrs. Reed. After Mr. Reed's death, his wife is left to care for Jane. Jane is mistreated by her aunt who resents, neglects, and abuses her while claiming that the only reason for her care of Jane is charity, which leads to Jane's overall anger towards the Reed family. After a violent argument with her older cousin John, Jane is locked into the Red Room, the room which Mr. Reed died in and which Jane believes is haunted. After Jane believes that she sees her uncle's ghost in the Red Room, she falls ill and faints. This leads to her being sent away to a school on the recommendation of the apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, who attends her, in lieu of a physician. Mrs. Reed then sends Jane to Lowood Institution, a school for poor and orphaned girls. At Lowood, Jane is faced with Mr. Brocklehurst, who funds the school which his mother founded but is abusive in his oversight of the girls. At the school Jane befriends Helen Burns, from whom she learns to be not only patient but also calm. Helen Burns later dies of consumption, while Jane survives a typhus epidemic at the school premises. During her time at Lowood, Jane receives a thorough education and becomes a friend of Miss Maria Temple, the school's principal. After six years of schooling and two years of teaching at Lowood (without once returning to the Reeds' house in Gateshead) Jane decides to go out into the world on her own. She seeks work as a governess and is employed at Thornfield Hall to care for a French born orphan, Adèle. At Thornfield, Jane learns about the absent master, Mr. Rochester, and starts to teach his ward. One evening, when Jane is out walking, she helps a mysterious man when his horse slips and he falls. His harsh and condescending demeanor towards the modest young woman causes immediate friction between the two on the subject of ones place in society. She later learns that this is Mr. Rochester, her master. Jane and Rochester are immediately interested in each other, though Jane controls her desires out of professionalism and respect for his position as her employer until their relationship becomes more serious. She is fascinated by his rough and dark appearance, as well as his abrupt, almost rude, manner, which she thinks is easier to handle than polite flattery. As for Mr. Rochester, he is very interested in Jane's strength of character, comparing her to an
elf or
sprite and admiring her unusual strength and stubbornness. Rochester quickly learns that he can rely on Jane in a crisis. One night, after everybody has retired, strange sounds and smoke lead her to Rochester's room, where she finds Rochester asleep in his bed with all the curtains and bedclothes on fire; she puts out the flames and rescues him. While Jane is working at Thornfield, Rochester invites his acquaintances over for a week-long stay, including the beautiful Blanche Ingram. Rochester lets Blanche flirt with him constantly in front of Jane to make her jealous and encourages rumours that he is engaged to Blanche, which devastates Jane. During the house party, a man named Richard Mason arrives, and Rochester appears to be afraid of him. At night, Mason sneaks up to the third floor and somehow gets stabbed and bitten. Rochester asks Jane to tend Richard Mason's wounds secretly while he fetches the doctor. The next morning before the guests find out what happened, Rochester sneaks Mason out of the house. Before Jane can discover more about the mysterious situation, she gets a message that her Aunt Reed is very sick and is asking for her. Jane, forgiving Mrs. Reed for mistreating her when she was a child, goes back to see her dying aunt, despite Rochester's initial reluctance to her leaving and his reluctance to continue to pay her salary while she is gone - in hopes of keeping her dependent on him and Thornfield. When Jane returns to Thornfield, Blanche and her friends are gone, and Jane realizes how attached she is to Mr. Rochester. Although he lets her think for a little longer that he is going to marry Blanche, eventually Rochester stops teasing Jane and proposes to her. She accepts. On the day of Jane's wedding, two men arrive claiming that Rochester is already married. Rochester admits that he is married to another woman, but tries to justify his attempt to marry Jane by taking them all to see his "wife". Mrs. Rochester is Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic" who tried to burn Rochester to death in his bed, stabbed and bit her own brother (Richard Mason), and who has been carrying out several other unusual acts at night. Rochester was tricked into marrying Bertha fifteen years ago in
Jamaica by his father, who wanted him to marry for money. Rochester tried to live with Bertha as husband and wife, but her behavior due to severe mental illness was far too difficult for him to manage, so he locked her up at Thornfield with a nursemaid, Grace Poole. Meanwhile, he travelled around Europe for ten years trying to forget Bertha and keeping various mistresses. Adèle Varens (Jane's student) is the daughter of one of these mistresses, though she may not be Rochester's daughter - a suspicion that led to his cold demeanor for the girl that led to the hire of Jane to care for her. Eventually he got tired of this lifestyle, came home to England and fell in love with Jane. After explaining all this, Rochester claims that he was not really married because his relationship with Bertha wasn't a real marriage. He wants Jane to come and live with him in France, where they can pretend to be a married couple and live as husband and wife. Jane refuses to be his next mistress and runs away before she is tempted to agree, leaving behind all the nice items he had purchased for her. Jane travels in a direction away from Thornfield. Having no money, she is almost starving to death before being taken in by the Rivers family, who live at Moor House near a town called Morton. The Rivers siblings – Diana, Mary, and St. John (pronounced "Sinjun") – are about Jane's age and well-educated, although somewhat poor. They take whole-heartedly to Jane, who has taken the pseudonym "Jane Elliott" so that Mr. Rochester can't find her. Jane wants to earn her keep, so St. John arranges for her to become the head of a charity school for the poor village girls. When Jane's uncle, Mr. Eyre, dies and leaves his fortune to his niece, it turns out that the Rivers siblings are actually Jane's cousins, and she shares her inheritance with the other three. St. John, who is a devoted clergyman, wants to be more than Jane's cousin. He admires Jane's work ethic and asks her to marry him, learn
Hindustani, and go with him to India on a long-term missionary trip. Jane is tempted because she thinks she would be good at it and that it would be an interesting life. Still, she refuses because she knows she doesn't love St. John, and he does not love her either. He simply believes Jane would make a good missionary's wife because of her skills. St. John actually loves a different girl named Rosamond Oliver, but he won't let himself admit it because he thinks she would make an unsuitable wife for a missionary. Jane offers to go to India with him, but just as his cousin and co-worker, not as his wife. St. John won't give up and keeps pressuring Jane to marry him. As she is about to give in, she imagines Mr. Rochester's voice calling her name. The next morning, Jane leaves Moor House and goes back to Thornfield to find out what has happened to Mr. Rochester. She finds out that he searched for her everywhere, and, when he couldn't find her, sent everyone else away from the house and shut himself up alone. After this, Bertha set the house on fire one night and burned it to the ground. Rochester rescued all the servants and tried to save Bertha, too, but she committed suicide and he was injured. Now Rochester has lost an eye and a hand and is blind in the remaining eye. Jane goes to Mr. Rochester and offers to take care of him as his nurse or housekeeper - a new power dynamic between the two with Rochester's reliance being entirely on Jane. He asks her to marry him and they have a quiet wedding, and after two years of marriage Rochester gradually gets his sight back – enough to see their firstborn son. ==Characteristics and conception==