Jane Eyre
Classic Fiction · No. 74 — Poor, obscure, plain — and nobody's inferior.
- Classic Fiction
- 30 min
- Ages 10–14
- 6 chapters
About this audiobook
Orphaned Jane Eyre is raised cruelly at Gateshead and sent to Lowood School, where hardship, friendship, and the gentle death of Helen Burns shape her independence. As governess to Adèle at Thornfield Hall, Jane meets Edward Rochester and falls in love with him despite their differences in age, wealth, and power. Strange laughter and fires trouble the house. At their wedding, Jane learns Rochester is already married to Bertha Mason, a woman he confines in the attic. Refusing to become his mistress, Jane flees and is rescued by the Rivers siblings, who turn out to be her cousins. An inheritance gives her financial independence, but she rejects St. John Rivers's proposal to join a loveless missionary marriage. Hearing Rochester call her name across the distance, Jane returns to find Thornfield burned, Bertha dead after the fire, and Rochester injured and blind. Free and equal enough to choose, Jane marries him at Ferndean; in time he partially regains his sight.
Why it's worth a listen
Jane Eyre begins life unwanted, survives a harsh school, and becomes a governess in a house of locked doors and midnight laughter. She loves the house's difficult master, but when his hidden marriage turns romance into a test of conscience, Jane walks away with nothing rather than become less than herself. Fierce, gothic, and intimate, her story insists that poverty and plainness do not diminish a person's moral worth.
A question to keep
How can you love another person without surrendering your equality or your conscience?
Chapters
- The Red-Room and the Red Sky
- The Master of Thornfield
- The Chestnut Tree and the Broken Vow
- The Sanctuary of the Moors
- The Ruins of Thornfield
- A Question to Keep