Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - Classic Bedtime Story

Taesha Glasgow (0:09)

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I started tonight's story in the very early days of the podcast, back in 2021 It's time that we revisited this story.

So tonight, I will be reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

So lie down, close your eyes, and let me read you a story.

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 somber, and a rain so penetrating that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it. I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons. Dreadful to me was succumbing 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 Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed. The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mamma in the drawing room. She lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her, for the time neither quarreling nor crying, looked perfectly happy. Me she had dispensed from joining the group, saying she regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance, that until she heard from Bessie and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavoring in good earnest to acquire 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 for contented, happy little children.

What does Bessie say I have done? I asked. Jane, I don't like cavalers or questioners. Besides, there's something truly forbidding in a child taking up their elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere, and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.

A breakfast room joined the drawing room. I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase. I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be once 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 marine curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand, to the left with a clear paint of glass protecting and not separating me from the drear November day.

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 before a long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book, Bewick's History of British Birds, the letter press thereof I cared little for, generally speaking, and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. There 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, steaded with isles from its southern extremity, the lidness or nays to the North Cape, where the northern ocean in vast whorls boils round the naked melancholy isles, a furthest tool and the Atlantic surge pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic zone. And those furloughed 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 rigors of extreme cold.

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.