"Cliff Notes - Jane Eyre" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

love. In the first part of the novel, Jane is ten years old and
living, none too happily, at Gateshead House with Mrs. Reed,
her uncle's widow, and the three Reed children--Eliza,
Georgiana, and John. John is a bully, and when Jane fights back
after he throws a book at her head, Mrs. Reed blames her for
starting the fight and lying about it. As punishment, Jane is
shut up in an empty bedroom--called the red-room, where she has
a terrifying experience that she interprets as a visitation from
the ghost of her dead Uncle Reed. A few months later, Mrs.
Reed turns Jane over to a gloomy death-obsessed clergyman, Mr.
Brocklehurst, who runs a charity school for the daughters of
poor churchmen. She tells him to watch Jane carefully, because
the girl is a liar.

Lowood, the charity boarding school, is a dismal place.
There is never enough to eat, and the girls are forbidden even
the smallest pleasures in the name of teaching them Christian
humility. Jane makes friends with a sweet-natured, pious girl
named Helen Burns, who tells her that they ought to bear their
sufferings at the school with patience. Helen never shows
resentment, even when she becomes the favorite target of the
school's nastiest teacher, Miss Scatcherd. But when Mr.
Brocklehurst humiliates Jane by repeating Mrs. Reed's charge
against her in front of the whole school, she rebels. She talks
the school superintendent into getting a letter from the Reed
family apothecary (who treated Jane after her ordeal in the
red-room), which clears her name.

When spring comes, the school is swept by a typhus epidemic.
About half the girls fall ill, and some even die. Helen, too,
is ill, but from consumption (tuberculosis). When Jane sneaks
into Helen's room for a visit, she is shocked to find her friend
has only a few hours to live. Helen dies in Jane's arms,
proclaiming her steadfast faith in God.

As a result of the epidemic, Lowood comes under
investigation, and conditions at the school are improved. Jane
stays on, as a pupil and later as a teacher, until she is
nineteen years old. Jane has become a dear friend of Miss
Temple, the school superintendent, and when she leaves her job
to get married, Jane decides that the time has come for her to
leave as well.

Jane is hired as a governess by a Mrs. Fairfax, who lives in
a substantial but rather gloomy country manor-house, Thornfield
Hall. Only after she has moved in does Jane realize that Mrs.
Fairfax is only the housekeeper. Jane becomes quite fond of her
only pupil, a saucy little French girl named Adele Varens. Yet
there is an aura of mystery about the house--the master, Mr.
Edward Rochester, is seldom at home, and from time to time Jane