Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Chapter 16
186 ‘Vos doigts tremblent comme la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges’ – Adèle notices the symptoms of Jane falling in love.

189 ‘I fancy neither she nor her sister have very large fortunes.’ – Mrs Fairfax provides an important hint as to the source of Blanche Ingram’s interest in Rochester. Brontë has made it abundantly clear that neither Rochester nor Jane are attractive in the convention sense of the word.

Chapter 17
193 ‘Why my hand shook, and why I involuntarily spilt half the contents of my cup into my saucer, I did not choose to consider.’ – Jane’s reaction to a letter received by Mrs Fairfax from Rochester. Her infatuation is obvious, and is related comically to the reader by the Jane of the future who narrates the book.

194 ‘ “Doesn’t she know?” I heard the woman whisper’ – The servants know of Bertha’s presence in the house – thought they do not know who she is. Rochester’s decision to keep Jane in the dark is interesting. He would like to forget Bertha’s existence. In a sense, she doesn’t exist in the fantasy world he is spinning around Jane, and so how could he tell her? He also does not wish to lie to her. He has allowed her to believe that Grace Poole is the source of the strange sounds she hears and the bizarre and dangerous behaviour she has witnessed, but he does not tell her that this is so until the night before his attempt to marry her. If he told her of the lunatic on the third floor, he would have to deceive her with some story, or else risk losing her altogether.

196 ‘rich raven ringlets’ – this is the third time ‘raven’ has been used as a metonym for Blanche’s hair (the other occasions are on pages 189 and 191), and Brontë probably intends the bird’s connotations of doom and ill-omen to be attached to the arrival of Blanche at Thornfield. Jane is expecting her to blight all her hopes.

200 ‘I retired to a window-seat, and taking a book from a table near, endeavoured to read.’ – This is particularly effective. Jane is again exiled and isolated from moneyed society, just as she was at the Reeds, where she also took refuge in a window-seat at the very beginning of the novel. Her infant trauma is repeating itself.