Five Addresses
Full spoilers ahead, including who is on the third floor and how the book ends.
Here is the short answer. Jane Eyre is easiest to follow by address. Jane lives in five places: Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House and Ferndean. At each one I ask three questions. How old is she? Who owns her time? What does she ask for, or refuse? The answers run in one direction. At Gateshead nothing is hers. By Ferndean she says, in her own words, that she is her own mistress.
The counts you will see are mine, from the Penguin Classics Deluxe volume in our library. The summary is in my own words.
The Map in Numbers
First, the size of each place. I counted every word of the novel, skipping the preface and notes, and sorted each chapter into the place where most of it happens. The whole novel comes to one hundred eighty-eight thousand, three hundred ninety-seven words, in thirty-eight chapters.
Gateshead gets about fourteen thousand words, seven percent. Lowood gets twenty-two thousand, twelve percent. Thornfield is the giant, ninety-seven thousand, just over half the book, and more words than the other four places put together. Moor House gets forty-six thousand, nearly a quarter. And Ferndean is the smallest, about nine thousand four hundred words, five percent.
A word on the method. I split on whole chapters, so a place can borrow a few pages from its neighbour. Two sorting notes. The two chapters where Jane goes back to Gateshead, twenty-one and twenty-two, stay inside Thornfield. And Moor House also holds her Morton school and the trip back to the ruins, in chapter thirty-six.
I also counted three words that carry the theme. Liberty appears twenty-six times. Duty, twenty. Independent, fourteen. We will watch where each one lands, because the pattern is the whole argument of this video.
Gateshead: Ten
At Gateshead Jane is ten. The book says so twice. Her aunt, Mrs Reed, rules the house. Her cousin John is fourteen, and he is the one who throws a book at her head. In chapter one she fights back, and Mrs Reed has her locked in the red room.
Chapter two gives the whole place in one line. Told that John is her master, Jane asks how he can be, and whether she is a servant. In my count, the word master appears eleven times at Gateshead, a higher rate than anywhere except Ferndean.
Here is where Mrs Reed owns the clock. Jane eats alone and sleeps where she is told. So her asks are small. In chapter three she tells the apothecary, Mr Lloyd, that she would indeed like to go to school. In chapter four she tells her aunt, send me to school soon.
Then she refuses. I will never call you aunt again, she says, and Jane calls it her first victory. Gateshead has liberty twice, duty twice, and independent never.
Lowood: Ten to Eighteen
On the nineteenth of January, a coach takes Jane to Lowood. She stays eight years, six as a pupil and two as a teacher. Her ruler is now two people. Mr Brocklehurst runs the money and the rules, and Miss Temple stands between him and the girls.
The place is cold and hungry. On the first day the porridge is burnt, and Miss Temple orders bread and cheese on her own responsibility. In chapter seven Brocklehurst calls Jane a liar in front of the school, after she drops a slate, and sets her on a stool.
Her friend Helen Burns preaches patience. Jane answers, in chapter six, that she would resist, and get the rod out of the teacher’s hand. Mostly, though, her resistance stays inside. In chapter nine typhus hits, and forty-five of the eighty girls are ill. Helen dies, and Jane sleeps beside her.
When Miss Temple marries and leaves, Jane stands at the window and longs for something more. At the end of chapter ten, Jane is barely eighteen, her own words. She asks for something, in the one prayer the book spells out. I desired liberty, she says, and then, grant me at least a new servitude. Eight of the twenty-six liberties are in Lowood, and four are in that one chapter. She places an advertisement, signed J. E.
Thornfield: Eighteen, and Master Sixty Times
Chapter eleven puts Jane at Thornfield one October night, and it keeps her for fifty-one percent of the book. She is a governess, paid thirty pounds a year, to teach Adèle. She hears a laugh on the third floor, and meets the master, Mr Rochester, when his horse slips on the ice and he sprains his ankle.
Here the counts jump. The word master appears sixty times. Rochester is the owner of her time, and he rings for her. In chapter twenty-four he is still sending for her the moment the clock strikes seven.
The book fills these chapters with events. A fire starts in his bed curtains, and Jane puts it out. He throws a house party, and a guest, Mr Mason, is stabbed one night on the third floor. A gypsy fortune teller turns out to be Rochester in disguise. Through all of it, Jane is the one who answers when she is sent for.
But this is the first place where Jane argues back. In chapter fourteen she tells him, I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me. Her reason is that being older does not make him her superior. This is also where independent first shows up, in chapter seventeen.
The asks start here. In chapter twenty-one she goes to him with a plain request: leave of absence for a week or two. Mrs Reed is dying. The visit lasts about a month. Mrs Reed confesses that she wrote to Jane’s uncle in Madeira and said Jane had died at Lowood.
Thornfield: The Wedding That Stops
Back at Thornfield, the book turns on three speeches. On midsummer eve Rochester says she must go, and Jane breaks out. I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will. Then he proposes, and she says yes.
In chapter twenty-four, planning the wedding, she sets terms. I will not be your English Céline Varens, she says, which means no jewels and no kept woman. She wants to keep working as Adèle’s governess. In chapter twenty-six the wedding is stopped in church. Rochester is already married. His wife, Bertha Mason, has been on the third floor for fifteen years, and a solicitor, Mr Briggs, is there to say so.
It is the largest refusal in the book. In chapter twenty-seven he offers her a white-washed villa in the south of France, as his wife in all but name. Jane says, Mr Rochester, I will not be yours. She leaves before dawn with twenty shillings. Liberty has appeared twelve times in Thornfield, and independent six.
Moor House: Nineteen
After a two-day coach ride, Jane is dropped at Whitcross with nothing. She sleeps on the heath and begs for work in the village. I want some work, she says, no matter what. A clergyman, St John Rivers, takes her in at Moor House, where she gives the false name Jane Elliott.
Now she is near nineteen, she says in chapter twenty-nine, and the clock belongs to St John. He finds her the Morton school, thirty pounds a year. She takes it with all her heart. Her reason is independence, compared with serving strangers as a governess.
Then she learns St John and his sisters are her cousins. Her uncle in Madeira has died and left her twenty thousand pounds. She keeps five thousand pounds and gives five thousand to each of the three cousins.
St John still wants her time. He teaches her a new language, and she says when he said go, she went. In chapter thirty-four he asks her to come to India as his wife. She answers, I am ready to go to India, if I may go free. She also says, I scorn your idea of love. Duty appears eight times here, more than in any other place.
Ferndean: No Age Given
On a voice in the night, Jane answers, I am coming. In chapter thirty-six she finds Thornfield a blackened ruin. Bertha died in the fire, and Rochester is blind, and living at Ferndean, thirty miles off.
Ferndean is where she is her own owner. She tells him, I am an independent woman now, and, I am my own mistress. She offers to be his neighbour, his nurse, his housekeeper. The book gives no age for her here.
The counts back this up. Liberty and duty, which filled the earlier places, appear zero times in these nine thousand words. Independent appears four times, and independence once.
The famous line is the opening of the last chapter. Reader, I married him. She has now been married ten years. Rochester stays blind two years, then sees a little with one eye, and the first child has his eyes. Adèle gets a gentler school, and St John goes to India, unmarried.
The Ledger
Here is the ledger. Gateshead: ten years old, Mrs Reed owns the clock, she asks for school and refuses to say aunt. Lowood: ten to eighteen, Brocklehurst and Miss Temple, she asks for liberty and a new servitude. Thornfield: eighteen, Rochester, she refuses his right to command her, and later his villa. Moor House: near nineteen, St John, she asks for work and refuses the marriage. Ferndean: no age given, herself.
In my reading, that is the book. Jane does not grow by losing a master. She grows by changing who gets to ask. Every refusal comes with an ask attached, and money gives her the right to say yes, in the end, to the man she picked.
Counts are mine, every reading is my reading. Which place is your favourite Jane, and why? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe, tap like, and the full guide is at book explained dot com.
