Jane Eyre Year 9 English Revision Guide

Plot summary: Life at Gateshead Hall

Orphaned as an infant, Jane Eyre lives with at Gateshead with her aunt, Sarah Reed, as the novel opens. Jane is ten years old, an outsider in the Reed family. Her female cousins, Georgiana and Eliza, tolerate, but don't love her. Their brother, John, is more blatantly hostile to Jane, reminding her that she is a poor dependent of his mother who shouldn't even be associating with the children of a gentleman. One day he is angered to find Jane reading one of his books, so he takes the book away and throws it at her. Finding this treatment intolerable, Jane fights back. She is blamed for the conflagration and sent to the red-room, the place where her kind Uncle Reed died. In this frightening room, Jane thinks she sees her uncle's ghost and begs to be set free. Her Aunt Reed refuses, insisting Jane remain in her prison until she learns complete submissiveness. When the door to the red-room is locked once again, Jane passes out. She wakes back in her own room, with the kind physician, Mr. Lloyd, standing over her bed. He advises Aunt Reed to send Jane away to school, because she is obviously unhappy at Gateshead.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Life at Lowood School:

Jane is sent to Lowood School, a charity institution for orphan girls, run by Mr. Brocklehurst. A stingy and mean-hearted minister, Brocklehurst provides the girls with starvation levels of food, freezing rooms, and poorly made clothing and shoes. He justifies his poor treatment of them by saying that they need to learn humility and by comparing them to the Christian martyrs, who also endured great hardships. Despite the difficult conditions at Lowood, Jane prefers school to life with the Reeds. Here she makes two new friends: Miss Temple and Helen Burns. From Miss Temple, Jane learns proper ladylike behavior and compassion; from Helen she gains a more spiritual focus. The school's damp conditions, combined with the girls' near-starvation diet, produces a typhus epidemic, in which nearly half the students die, including Helen Burns, who dies in Jane's arms. Following this tragedy, Brocklehurst is deposed from his position as manager of Lowood, and conditions become more acceptable. Jane quickly becomes a star student, and after six years of hard work, an effective teacher. Following two years of teaching at Lowood, Jane is ready for new challenges. Miss Temple marries, and Lowood seems different without her. Jane places at advertisement for a governess position in the local newspaper. She receives only one reply, from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield, near Millcote, who seeks a governess for a ten-year old girl. Jane accepts the job.

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6 and 7

Chapters 7 and 8:

Chapter 9:

Characters

Jane Eyre

Key quotations for this character:

Jane is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. Jane is an intelligent, honest, plain-featured young girl forced to contend with oppression, inequality, and hardship. Although she meets with a series of individuals who threaten her autonomy, Jane repeatedly succeeds at asserting herself and maintains her principles of justice, human dignity, and morality. She also values intellectual and emotional fulfilment. Her strong belief in gender and social equality challenges the Victorian prejudices against women and the poor.

Mrs Reed

Key quotations for this character:

Mrs. Reed is Jane’s cruel aunt, who raises her at Gateshead Hall until Jane is sent away to school at age ten. Later in her life, Jane attempts reconciliation with her aunt, but the old woman continues to resent her because her husband had always loved Jane more than his own children.

John Reed

Key quotations for this character:

John Reed is Jane’s cousin, Mrs. Reed’s son, and brother to Eliza and Georgiana. John treats Jane with appalling cruelty during their childhood.

Mr Reed

Uncle Reed is Mrs. Reed’s late husband. In her childhood, Jane believes that she feels the presence of his ghost. Because he was always fond of Jane and her mother (his sister), Uncle Reed made his wife promise that she would raise Jane as her own child. It is a promise that Mrs. Reed does not keep. Georgiana Reed

Key quotations for this character:

Georgiana Reed is Jane’s cousin and one of Mrs. Reed’s two daughters. The beautiful Georgiana treats Jane cruelly when they are children.

Eliza Reed

Key quotations for this character:

Eliza Reed is Jane’s cousin and one of Mrs. Reed’s two daughters (along with her sister, Georgiana). Eliza is not as beautiful as her sister.

Bessie

Key quotations for this character:

The maid at Gateshead, Bessie is the only figure in Jane’s childhood who regularly treats her kindly, telling her stories and singing her songs.

Miss Abbot

Key quotations for this character:

Miss Abbot is Mrs. Reed's lady's-maid. Miss Abbot physically drags Jane to the red room. Even though Jane is of the same social class, she treats her as though she is inferior.

Mr Lloyd

Key quotations for this character:

Mr. Lloyd, the apothecary, is a visitor to Gateshead Hall. He asks Jane about how she feels and if she would like to go to school. Mr Brocklehurst

Key quotations for this character:

The cruel, hypocritical master of the Lowood School, Mr. Brocklehurst preaches a doctrine of privation, while stealing from the school to support his luxurious lifestyle. After a typhus epidemic sweeps Lowood, Brocklehurst’s shifty and dishonest practices are brought to light and he is publicly discredited.

Miss Temple

Key quotations for this character:

Maria Temple is a kind teacher at Lowood, who treats Jane and Helen with respect and compassion. Along with Bessie Lee, she serves as one of Jane’s first positive female role models. Miss Temple helps clear Jane of Mrs. Reed’s accusations against her.

Miss Scatcherd

Key quotations for this character:

Jane’s sour and vicious teacher at Lowood, Miss Scatcherd behaves with particular cruelty toward Helen.

Helen Burns Key quotations for this character:

Helen Burns is Jane’s close friend at the Lowood School. She endures her miserable life there with a passive dignity that Jane cannot understand. Helen dies of consumption in Jane’s arms. Context

Jane Eyre is primarily of the Bildungsroman genre. It follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine. It is semi-autobiographical and written by Charlotte Bronte.

Victorian Schools

At the start of the 19th century very few children went to school. Most poor children worked. If they went to school, their families lost the money they earned. There were some good schools for boys, for example, grammar schools and public schools. Only richer families could afford to pay the school fees, though some schools gave free places to poor boys. Poor girls did not go to school when the Victorian age began meaning they had little education. Girls from wealthy families would usually be taught at home by a governess. Sometimes, wealthy girls may have attended boarding schools too.

Victorian Children

Life for Victorian Children in Victorian times (1830 to 1900) was nothing like childhood in today’s world. For the wealthy, there was an overwhelming sense of boredom and the constant prodding to be proper and polite with very little parent to child communication. For the poor Victorian Children life was much different. The poor children had to work public jobs for their families to survive. Toys were nothing more than homemade dolls or wooden blocks. On the other hand, their family life was tighter knit and more loving in most cases.

Victorian Christianity

Biblical Christianity was thickly intertwined in the fabric of Victorian society. Victorian England was a deeply religious country, and the religious arena was dominated and monopolized by the religion which has the most number of followers around the globe, the Christian religion. Almost all the people were Christian devotees who visited the church every Sunday without fail. The book of bible began to exert significant influence over the society. Religious truth was accepted as the eternal truth. Text books and games were based on religious dogma and moral standards based on religion.

The Victorian era is often considered religious and serious, but whilst this is true to an extent, it was also an age of social change and intellectual questioning. There were challenges to faith from science, philosophy and Biblical criticism.

The 18th century evangelical revival had had a significant effect on morality, especially among the working classes, and this spread to other sections of society during the early 19th century, partly through the influence of William Wilberforce.

Charlotte Bronte

The inspiration for ‘Jane Eyre’ came from Bronte’s own life. The early sequences, in which Jane is sent to Lowood, a harsh boarding school, are derived from the author's own experiences. Helen Burns's death from tuberculosis (referred to as consumption) recalls the deaths of Charlotte Brontë's sisters Elizabeth and Maria, who died of the disease in childhood as a result of the conditions at their school, the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, near Tunstall, Lancashire. Mr. Brocklehurst is based on Rev. William Carus Wilson (1791–1859), the Evangelical minister who ran the school.

How to structure a paragraph:

Point> Evidence> Technique> Analyse> Link

CHECK YOUR WRITING

•Are all your sentences accurate? Check that there are no run-on sentences or fragments. •Have you used capital letters correctly? You must use them at the start of a sentence and for proper nouns. •Have you used the correct tense throughout? •Do the subjects agree with the verbs? •Have you used apostrophes correctly? •Have you used quotation marks correctly? •Check your spelling, particularly common errors such as there/their and to/too Essay structure

Introduction

The primary purpose of an introductory paragraph is to identify the topic and purpose of the essay.

In your introduction, include:

 The name of text you are studying: ………………………………………………………………………………..  Who wrote the text: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………  A brief sentence saying what the text is about: ………………………………………………………………..  The purpose of the essay: (what character will you be focusing on)……………………………………

For the best introduction, try to:

 Include a bold opening statement  Give a brief overview of the story  List at least three points that will be analysed in the main body of the essay

Writing a paragraph

 When you write a paragraph, it is important to make sure your point matches with your explanation.  Your explanation must also match up with the evidence!  You must also try not to repeat yourself. Your explanation shouldn’t say the same thing as your first point.

Conclusion

Write a conclusion where you sum up all the evidence and make a final judgment about the character.