Jane Eyre

Thornfield continues to be a lively household as Mr. Rochester’s guests stay on for several days. The guests compete in a game of charades wherein Mr. Rochester and Blanche pantomime a marriage ceremony. Jane is consumed by sadness at the thought that Mr. Rochester will marry Blanche.

Blanche is not a genuine person, and she lacks intellectual agency: “her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness” (458). Blanche would marry Mr. Rochester not out of love, but for his wealth. Likewise, Mr. Rochester would marry Blanche simply because she is young and beautiful, not because he admires her mind and her spirit.

One evening, a strange foreign man named Mr. Mason visits Thornfield. Mr. Mason comes from the West Indies, where Mr. Rochester himself used to live.

Soon after, a gypsy woman arrives to tell the guests’ fortunes. After the woman predicts Blanche’s future, Blanche seems upset, having “obviously not heard anything to her advantage” (479). 

In the library, the gypsy woman asks Jane if she wants her fortune told. Though the skeptical Jane initially hesitates, she is won over by the woman’s impressive insight into her disposition. The woman declares that Jane is cold, sick, and silly:

You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you. (485)

The woman tells Jane that happiness is very near and within her reach. She also explains that Blanche was disappointed to learn that Mr. Rochester is not as rich as she imagined him to be.

As the gypsy woman begins to speak insinuatingly of Mr. Rochester’s interest in Jane, Jane realizes that the woman is actually Mr. Rochester in disguise. Jane is upset and embarrassed by this trick, accusing, “you have been trying to draw me out—or in; you have been talking nonsense to make me talk nonsense. It is scarcely fair, sir” (500).

When Jane tells Mr. Rochester about Mr. Mason’s visit, Mr. Rochester reacts with deep distress. Jane comforts him, and he tells her, “I wish I were in a quiet island with only you; and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me” (505). Later that night, Jane overhears Mr. Rochester showing Mr. Mason into a room at Thornfield.

That night, a sudden cry for help wakes Jane and the guests at Thornfield. Mr. Rochester reassures them that the cry came from a servant who had a nightmare. After the guests have returned to their rooms, however, Mr. Rochester solicits Jane’s help, inquiring, “You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?” (516).

Mr. Rochester leads Jane to Mr. Mason’s room on the third story of the house. Mr. Mason has been stabbed in the arm, and he is bleeding profusely. Mr. Rochester sternly orders them not to speak to each other. While Mr. Rochester goes to fetch a surgeon, Jane attempts to staunch Mr. Mason’s wound, sponging the blood into a basin. As she cares for Mr. Mason, Jane worries that Grace Poole will burst in on them, believing that she was the perpetrator of this violent act.

After a long while, Mr. Rochester returns with the surgeon. Mr. Mason tells the surgeon, “She bit me […] She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her” (526). Mr. Rochester gives Mr. Mason medicine and ushers Jane into the orchard.

In the orchard, Jane asks Mr. Rochester if Grace Poole will continue to live at Thornfield. He dismisses her concern, and then expresses his eagerness for Mr. Mason to leave England.

Mr. Rochester asks Jane to imagine she were a young man who has made a terrible lifelong mistake. What if the hypothetical young man wishes to correct this error by marrying and living a moral life, but a nonsensical convention prevents him? Jane tells Mr. Rochester to search for answers from God, not from other people.

Mr. Rochester begs Jane to sit up with him the night before he marries Blanche. Mr. Rochester’s desperation and mixed signals confuse her. A servant tells Mr. Rochester that Mr. Mason has left Thornfield. 

Jane recalls that in her childhood, Bessie said it was bad luck to dream about children. At Thornfield, every night for an entire week, Jane dreams of children. Bessie’s superstition proves true when Mrs. Reed’s former coachman, and now Bessie’s husband, brings news that Jane’s cousin John Reed has killed himself after years of alcoholism and depression and that Mrs. Reed is on her death bed.

Jane asks Mr. Rochester’s permission to visit Mrs. Reed. She interrupts him as he sits with Blanche, and he makes a strange grimace when he sees her. At first, he is reluctant to let her leave, but she pleads with him, promising she will only be gone for a week. As she leaves, she coolly bids him “Farewell,” and he is pained that she does not give him a warmer good-bye.

At Gateshead, Jane receives a warm welcome from Bessie. She also sees Eliza, now a plain woman who plans to join a convent, and Georgiana, who is beautiful, but unhappy. Georgiana’s prim, possibly jealous sister has thwarted her plans to elope with a young man.

When Jane enters the room, the disoriented Mrs. Reed begins to babble about Jane Eyre as though she were not present. She expresses her deep resentment toward Jane for being the favorite child of her Uncle Reed. Eventually, Mrs. Reed reveals that three years ago, she received a letter from her uncle John Eyre in Madeira. John Eyre wished to adopt Jane and bequeath his inheritance to her. Out of spite, Mrs. Reed never forwarded this letter to Jane.

Jane tells her aunt that as a child, she was willing to love her, and that “I long earnestly to be reconciled to you now” (595). She then offers Mrs. Reed her full forgiveness. Mrs. Reed refuses to reconcile with Jane and dies that night. 

Despite only having one week of absence, Jane stays at Gateshead for a month, anxious about returning to Mr. Rochester and Blanche.

Eliza leaves for the convent and Georgiana moves to her uncle’s house in London. Miss Fairfax writes Jane that the guests are gone and Mr. Rochester has gone to London to buy a new carriage. Jane takes a coach back to Thornfield, resigning herself to his inevitable upcoming marriage.

Mr. Rochester meets her coach at the station. Jane is so comforted by Mr. Rochester’s presence that she confesses, “wherever you are is my home—my only home” (610). Her pupil and the servants receive Jane warmly. Mr. Rochester now calls on her more often than ever: He has “never been kinder […] never had I loved him so well” (613).