Jane Eyre III

Jane's cousin, Mrs Reed is very ill and asks her to visit and Jane does so. Mrs Reed is dying and tells her that she did her a wrong. Some years ago, Jane's uncle Mr Eyre wrote to her to ask her to come and live with him, and Mrs Reed, hating Jane, wrote back to him to tell him that Jane had died at school. Jane forgives her cousin and when she dies she attends the funeral. Rochester then tells Jane that he was just joking about marrying Blanche, and that he has no intention of doing so. He asks her to marry him. She agrees and they make plans for a very quiet wedding. Mrs Fairfax seems uneasy about the marriage. Jane writes to her long lost uncle to tell him she's being married. A short time before the wedding, someone breaks into her bedroom and tears her veil in half. She is unnerved, but Rochester tells her it is one of the servants, Grace Poole, who drinks. On the day of the wedding, the couple are in the church when someone stands up to say that there is an impediment to the marriage. It is Mr Mason, the man who was attacked at Thornfield... It turns out that he was visiting Thornfield as his sister is married to Rochester and she is confined to the attic of the house because she has become mad. When he went to see her, she had one of her maniacal fits and attacked him violently. Rochester tells Jane that he is married to Bertha Mason, during a trip to the West Indies, and then found that she was immoral and becoming insane. He had to keep her confined and she was looked after by Grace Poole, but Grace sometimes gets drunk and Bertha can escape to cause chaos in the house. Mr Mason is a friend of Jane's uncle Eyre and he learned from Eyre that Jane was marrying Rochester. He hurried to stop the wedding. Rochester tries to persuade Jane to go abroad with him where she can live as his wife, though they cannot marry. She refuses, as she is a strict Christian. She decides she must leave immediately to avoid temptation.