"I am alone" (Jane Eyre at the Whitcross)

H. S. Grieg

Source: Brontë, frontispiece.

See Chapter 28 in the Victorian Web text of Jane Eyre. This is another key episode in the novel, almost at the lowest point for Jane. Leaving Thornfield after her abortive wedding day, she alights from the coach here, at Whitcross, only to realise that she has left behind on it her small parcel of necessities. She is utterly destitute. "Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet," she sees: "it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit: the nearest town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten miles; the farthest, above twenty." [Commentary continues below.]

Image scan and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

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