1 Jane Eyre - Stephanie Poppins

This classic novel by Charlotte Bronte follows the story of Jane, a seemingly plain and simple girl as she battles through life's struggles. Jane has many obstacles in her life - her cruel and abusive Aunt Reed, the grim conditions at Lowood school, her love for Mr Rochester, and Mr Rochester's marriage...
Please note: This chapter contains a scene where Jane is bullied and beaten by a boy she lives with.

Transcript

This is SD Hudson Magic Jane Eyre I was first introduced to Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre when I was in the last year of middle school.

I had won a writing competition and this was my prize.

Bound in red leather,

It certainly was the most fancy novel I had ever seen.

And when I opened the pages and immersed myself in the desperate world of Jane Eyre,

I was enraptured.

And have been by this story ever since.

Chapter 1 There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

We had been wandering,

Indeed,

In the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning.

But since dinner,

Mrs.

Reed,

When there was no company,

Dined early.

The cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre and a rain so penetrating that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it.

I never liked long walks,

Especially on chilly afternoons.

Dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight,

With nipped fingers and toes and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie,

The nurse,

And humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza,

John and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza,

John and Georgiana were now clustered round their mamma in the drawing room.

She lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside,

And with her darlings about her,

For the time neither quarrelling nor crying,

Looked perfectly happy.

Me she had dispensed from joining the group,

Saying she regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance,

But that until she heard from Bessie and could discover by her own observation I was endeavouring to be in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition,

A more attractive and sprightly manner,

Something lighter,

Franker,

More natural as it were.

She really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented,

Little children.

What does Bessie say I have done?

I asked.

Jane,

I don't like cavaliers or questioners.

Besides,

There is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner.

Be seated somewhere,

And until you can speak pleasantly,

Remain silent.

A small breakfast room adjoined the drawing room.

I slipped in there.

It contained a bookcase.

I soon possessed myself of a volume,

Taking care that it should be one stored with pictures.

I mounted into the window seat,

Gathering up my feet.

I sat cross-legged like a Turk,

And having drawn the red marine curtain nearly close,

I was shrined in double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand.

To the left were the clear panes of glass,

Protecting but not separating me from the dreary November day.

At intervals,

While turning over the leaves of my book,

I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.

Afar it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud,

Near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub,

With ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book.

Berwick's History of British Birds.

The letter-press thereof I cared little for,

Generally speaking,

And yet there were certain introductory pages that,

Child as I was,

I could not pass quite as a blank.

They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl,

Of the solitary rocks and promontories,

By them only inhabited,

Of the coast of Norway studded with isles from its southern extremity.

The linderness or naze where the northern ocean in vast whirls boils around the naked melancholy isles of farthest Thule and the Atlantic surge pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland,

Siberia,

Spitsberg and Nova Zembla,

Iceland,

Greenland,

With the vast sweep of the Arctic Ocean and those forlorn regions of dreary space.

That reservoir of frost and snow,

Where firm fields of ice,

The accumulation of centuries of winters,

Glazed in alpine heights above heights,

Surround the pole and concentrate the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.

Of these death-like realms,

I formed an idea of my own,

Shadowy,

Like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains,

But strangely impressive.

The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes and gave significance to the rocks standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray,

To the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast,

To the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cold at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone,

Its gate,

Its two trees,

Its low horizon,

Girdled by a broken wall,

And its newly risen crescent attesting the hour of even tide.

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea,

And I believed to be marine phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him,

I passed over quickly.

It was an object of terror.

So was the black-horned thing seated aloof on a rock,

Surveying a distant crowd,

Surrounding it gallows.

Each picture told a story,

Mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings,

Yet ever profoundly interesting,

As interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings,

When she chanced to be in good humour,

And when,

Having brought her ironing table to the nursery hearth,

She allowed us to sit about it,

And while she got up Mrs.

Reed's lace frills,

And crimped her nightcap borders,

Fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and older ballads,

Or at least a latter period I discovered,

From the pages of Pamela and Henry,

Earl of Moorland.

With Berwick on my knee,

I was then happy at least in my way.

I feared nothing but interruption,

And that came too soon.

The breakfast room opened.

"'Beau!

Madam Mope!

' cried the voice of John Reed.

Then he paused.

He found the room apparently empty.

"'Where the dickens is she?

' he continued.

"'Lizzie!

Georgie!

' calling to his sisters.

"'Joan is not here.

Tell Mama she's run out into the rain.

Bad animal!

' "'It is as well I drew the curtain,

' thought I,

And I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place,

Nor would John Reed have found it out himself.

He was not quick either of vision or conception.

But Eliza just put her head in at the door and said at once,

"'She's in the window-seat,

To be sure,

Jack.

' And I came out immediately,

For I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.

"'What do you want?

' I asked,

With awkward diffidence.

"'Say,

What do you want,

Master Reed?

' was the answer.

"'I want you to come here.

' And seating himself in an armchair,

He intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old,

Four years older than I,

For I was but ten.

Large and stout for his age,

With a dingy and unwholesome skin,

Thick liniments and a spacious visage,

Heavy limbs and large extremities.

He gorged himself habituately at table,

Which made him bilious,

And gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks.

He ought now to have been at school,

But his mamma had taken him home for a month or two,

On account of his delicate health.

Mr Miles,

The master,

Affirmed he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home,

But the mother's heart turned from an opinion so harsh,

And inclined rather to the more refined idea,

That John's sullowness were owing to over-application and perhaps to pining after home.

John had not much affection for his mother and sister,

And an antipathy to me.

He bullied and punished me,

Not two or three times in the week,

Not once or twice in the day,

But continually.

Every nerve I had feared him,

And every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near.

There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired,

As I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his afflictions.

The servants did not like to offend their young master by taking any part against him.

And Mrs.

Reed was blind and deaf on the subject.

She never saw him strike or heard him abuse me,

Though he did both now and then in her very presence,

More frequently,

However,

Behind her back.

Habitually obedient to John,

I came to his chair.

He spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots.

I knew he would strike soon,

And while dreading the blow,

I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him,

Who would presently deal it.

I wonder if he read that notion in my face,

For all at once,

Without speaking,

He struck suddenly and strongly.

I tottered,

And on regaining my equilibrium,

Retired back a step or two from his chair.

"'That is for your impudence in answering Mama a while since,

' said he,

"'and for your sneaking way of getting between curtains,

And for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since,

You rat!

' Submissive to John Reed's abuse,

I never had an idea of replying to it.

My care was how to endure the blow,

Which would certainly follow the insult.

"'What were you doing behind the curtain?

' he asked.

"'I was reading.

' "'Show the book.

' I returned to the window and fetched it thence.

"'You have no business to take our books.

You are dependent,

' Mama said.

"'You have no money,

And your father left you none.

You ought to beg,

And not to live here with gentlemen's children like us,

And eat the same meals we do,

And wear clothes at our Mama's expense.

Now I'll teach you to rummage my bookshelves,

For they are mine.

All the house belongs to me,

Or will do in a few years.

Go and stand by the door and out of the way of the mirror and the windows.

' I did so,

Not at first aware what was his intention.

But when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it,

I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm.

Not soon enough,

However,

The volume was flung,

It hit me,

And I fell,

Striking my head against the door and cutting it.

The cut bled,

The pain was sharp.

My terror had passed its climax.

Another feeling succeeded.

"'Wicked and cruel boy!

' I said.

"'You are like a murderer,

You are a slave driver,

You are like the Roman emperors!

' I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome,

And had formed my opinion of Nero,

Caligula,

Etc.

Also I had drawn parallels in science,

Which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

"'What?

What?

' he cried.

"'Did she say that to me?

Did you hear her in Ison Georgiana?

Won't I tell Marat?

' But first—' He ran headlong at me.

I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder.

He had closed with a desperate thing.

I really saw him a tyrant,

A murderer.

I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck,

And was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering.

These sensations for the time predominated over fear,

And I received him in frantic sort.

I don't very well know what I did with my hands,

But he called me,

"'Rat!

Rat!

' and bellowed out loud.

Aid was near him.

Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs.

Reed,

Who was gone upstairs.

She now came upon the scene,

Followed by Bessie and her maid,

Abbott.

We were parted.

I heard the words,

"'Dear,

Dear,

What a flurry!

What a fury to fly at Master John!

Did anybody ever see such a picture of passion?

' Then Mrs.

Reed subjoined,

"'Take her away to the Red Room and lock her in there.

' Four hands were immediately laid upon me,

And I was borne upstairs.

"

Reviews

I wanted to hear it till the end. Not really a sleep story for me, too exciting. I loved it.

Eek, what a woeful beginning, poor Jane! Well and darkly read🙏🏽