Jane Eyre

The five stations are each required, and the test finds it. Gateshead gives the child’s rage and the red-room; Lowood gives Helen Burns’s doctrine of endurance, which Jane must outgrow and cannot discard; Thornfield gives passion; Marsh End gives its counter, St John’s cold vocation; Ferndean answers both. Remove Marsh End and the return is a surrender; with it, it is a choice made after refusing a second absorption. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the test does cut: the Ingram house-party runs long, with charades and drawing-room satire beyond what the jealousy needs; the gypsy disguise is a device; and the chain that brings a starving Jane to the one door on the moor that holds her own cousins, and then the legacy from Madeira, is assembled rather than compelled.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a poor, plain, dependent woman has an inner life equal in passion and judgment to any man’s, and her self-respect is a claim prior to love, to religion and to a station’s comforts. It is said outright on the leads of Thornfield, “women feel just as men feel” (ch. 12), and argued in action twice: to Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” (ch. 23), and in the flight, “I care for myself” (ch. 27). The book shows dependence exactly, from the Reeds’ charity to the governess between servant and family. Held below the top because the resolution relies on fortune to make equality possible, and because the book does not see what it discloses in Bertha, the Creole wife from Jamaica.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often and in more than one key. The dreadful: the red-room and the light on the wall (ch. 2); the laugh on the third storey; Rochester’s curtains on fire (ch. 15); Mason’s wound (ch. 20); the torn veil and the face in the glass (ch. 25); the stopped wedding and the creature “whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell” (ch. 26). The ecstatic: the proposal in the orchard and the chestnut split by lightning the same night (chs. 23 to 24). The desolate: the night of decision and the flight across the heath with nothing. The visionary: “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (ch. 35). And Helen’s death in Jane’s arms (ch. 9), told plainly. Held a step below the top because the register is sometimes pitched past what the scene holds, and Marsh End, apart from St John’s proposal, rises less.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The stations are a pilgrim’s progress made by a girl, and the book knows it: Bunyan is in its texture, and St John’s closing words are in Bunyan’s register. The fairy tales bear load: Cinderella in the poor relation; Bluebeard in the third storey, “like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle” (ch. 11), with its forbidden room and its first wife; Beauty and the Beast reversed at Ferndean, where the beast is maimed and the woman comes back with means of her own. Bertha is the double of the rage the red-room first shut up, and the structure turns on the doubling: she tears the veil the night before the wedding, and the house burns only when Jane is gone. Held a step down because the machinery is sometimes too visible, the split chestnut above all.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance: Richardson’s Pamela, where the servant marries the master; Radcliffe’s Gothic, with its castle and its secret; the evangelical memoir and the conversion narrative; the governess novel; the Byronic hero. The turn: all of these bent through one passionate first person that claims the right to judge the master, the clergyman and the reader, and a heroine who is plain and says so. The book refuses virtue’s reward as Richardson gave it: Jane leaves the man she loves on principle, refuses the good man on principle, and returns only when she can come as an equal. The stake was real: a pseudonym was needed, and the book was attacked as coarse and as anti-Christian. Held at this figure because the Gothic and the marriage plot are kept, not broken: the swerve is of voice and moral claim more than of form.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book’s argument is that this woman’s judgment of her own life has authority, and the form is that claim enacted: an autobiography, as the subtitle says, told by the woman herself ten years on, who addresses the reader as an equal and at moments turns to the present tense as if the scene had not ended. Told in the third person, the novel would be a romance about a governess; told in the first, it is a mind refusing its station. The five stations are each a household and each a different order of dependence, and the sequence is the education. “Reader, I married him” (ch. 38) makes the woman the subject of the verb. Held off the top because the narrator rarely weighs her younger self against her later knowledge, and the Marsh End coincidences show the form serving the plot.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: a hundred and seventy-nine years of reading that keeps finding new books in it. G. H. Lewes and Thackeray read it in its first months; the Victorians quarrelled over its morality; Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), charged that anger deforms it; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) took its title from Bertha and made her Jane’s double; Gayatri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) read it from Jamaica; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) was written out of its silence. Its questions stay open: whether Ferndean is fulfilment or a maiming made safe; whether the last words, given to St John, crown the book or undercut it; whether Jane’s religion is the book’s or a costume. Held where it is because the open questions cluster round one figure and one ending.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray and later Eliot and Hardy in it. The intrinsic force: the book made the inner life of an obscure woman, told by herself with full passion and full moral authority, a ground the novel could stand on; Austen’s heroines are seen and judged, and Jane judges. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the female novel of education in the first person, the governess novel, the Gothic romance from Rebecca (1938) to the mass paperback, Wide Sargasso Sea, and much of the feminist criticism of the 1970s, which took Jane and Bertha as its ground. Held below the top because the reorganisation is of voice and claim within the realist and Gothic forms, not of the novel’s form itself, which Eliot and Flaubert moved further, and because part of the reach is into genre, where the moral argument thins.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and seventy-nine years, at the figure the desk gives that span for the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole, as published, with no question of recension. Presence: continuous and as wide as any English novel’s of its century; in print without a break since 1847, set in schools and universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, translated into most written languages, and adapted on the stage, in silent and sound film, in a long run of television serials, in Cary Fukunaga’s film of 2011, and in opera and musical. It has outlived its conditions: the governess, the charity school and the coverture that made Bertha her husband’s property are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. A survival of under two centuries stands below the texts of millennia.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on Brontë’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice: urgent, exact in physical detail, able to move from the child behind the curtain with Bewick’s History of British Birds (ch. 1) to the orchard proposal and the night on the heath without loss of pressure. The opening, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” (ch. 1), is a sentence of confinement, and the book runs on such sentences. The scene-making is strong: the red-room, Helen’s death, the fire, the stopped wedding. Charged: the dialogue of the gentry, Blanche Ingram and her mother above all, is stiff and caricatured; Rochester’s speech is sometimes declamation; the plotting leans on coincidence and on a supernatural voice; and the style in places reaches past the scene. A first novel’s unevenness, in a voice of the first order.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the red-room at Gateshead (ch. 2) and the voice across the moors (ch. 35); or Lowood’s burnt porridge and the burning of Thornfield. One law governs them: passion and conscience must both be kept, and each household tests which one Jane will give up. The red-room is the child’s rage shut up; the third storey is the same room in a grown house; the summons comes when conscience and passion at last agree. The range is wide, from the charity school’s realism to the Gothic and the visionary, and mostly held. Charged: the realist law and the providential law are not one law, and the book needs both; the voice is taken by the narrator as fact and left as fact; and St John’s closing words open a second law, of vocation, death and heaven, that Ferndean has not met.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Many orders, held through one consciousness. The mind: Jane’s from ten to thirty, rage, reason, desire, conscience. The family: three households of kin, the Reeds, the Rivers cousins and the uncle in Madeira, and one unlawful marriage. Institution and class: the charity school, its typhus and its trustee; the governess’s place; the village school at Morton, where Jane teaches farmers’ daughters. The law: bigamy, inheritance, a wife as property. Religion in three forms: Brocklehurst’s, Helen’s and St John’s. Empire: the Jamaican fortune and the Creole wife, the Madeira wine trade, the Indian mission. The natural order: the moors, the weather, the moon. Held where it is because the public world, the state, history and labour beyond the schoolroom, is ground and never agent; empire is present but unexamined; and everything passes through one life.

Score: 8.5 / 10