Name: Jane Eyre by Charlotte BRONTË Chapter 01
Uploaded: 2023-07-18T22:27:00.000Z
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CHAPTER ONE of Jane Eyre This is a Librivox recording.

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Recording by Elizabeth Klett Jane Eyre by Charlotte BRONTË Chapter One

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery

an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no

company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so

sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly

afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with

nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie,

the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama

in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with

her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying)

Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, "She regretted to be under the necessity

of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie,

and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in

good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a

more attractive and sprightly manner--something lighter, franker, more natural,

as it were--she really must exclude me from privileges intended only

"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something

truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner.

Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there.

It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself

of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures.

I mounted into the window- seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged,

like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close,

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left

were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the

At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my

book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.

Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene

of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly

I returned to my book--Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress

thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were

certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite

They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of

"the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the

coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the

"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland,

Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast

sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,--that

reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation

of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround

the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold."

Of these death-white realms I formed an idea

of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim

through children's brains, but strangely impressive.

The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes,

and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of

billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the

cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with

its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon,

girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped

understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as

interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings,

when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her

ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and

while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap

borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure

taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I

discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.

I feared nothing but interruption, and that

cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he

"Where the dickens is she!" he continued.

(calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she

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Jane Eyre by Charlotte BRONTË Chapter 01

awkward

vast

immediately

acquire