Jane Eyre, morning at Thornfield

Jane wakes to her first morning at Thornfield Hall, in the eleventh chapter of the book. Jane Eyre appeared in October 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. A second edition followed within three months. Charlotte Brontë drew the house from more than one model in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromThe passage is an inventory, and every item in it is evidence. Chintz curtains, papered walls, a carpet on the floor: Jane is reading her own new standing off the furniture, because these are the fittings of a room meant for someone who counts, and nothing she has slept in until now has had them. The narration never says she is pleased. It lists what is there and lets the reader draw the conclusion, which is how the book handles almost everything Jane feels strongly about.

What you might not noticeLowood is the only name in the fragment, and it is the school Jane has left rather than the house she has woken in. Thornfield is never named here: the room is described entirely against the place she came from. Source

What it trainsTwo sentences hold eighty-two words, forty-six then thirty-six, so the average sits at forty-one. Long, but not the longest here: a Walden passage on this shelf runs seventy-six words before it stops. The first sentence accumulates its detail through three of the five commas and never pauses harder than that. The colon arrives only in the second sentence, where it divides the general remark from the private hope that follows. Four capital letters in 434 characters, two of them fall inside sentences: Lowood, and the single letter I. No hyphens, no dashes, no unusual spellings. Nothing here is difficult except staying with it, which is precisely what it tests.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg