 Jane Eyre is among the classic novels written by Charlotte Brontë and it's been termed as a Bill Dungsraman okay and of course if you're not sure what a Bill Dungsraman is and if you've come across this words built B-I-L-D-U-N-G-S-R-O-M-A-N this is essentially a certain genre of writing or storytelling which basically follows a protagonist through the formative years in other words it follows a protagonist from the young age through the education and as they morally and spiritually and educationally develop into adulthood and later years and essentially this is a story it usually tends to be a very long and epic story about the protagonist as they develop through life and Jane Eyre is really the quintessentially Bill Dungsraman type of story which follows Jane Eyre herself from her childhood as a young orphan through her schooling years in Lowood and later on when she becomes a governess and ultimately when she does end up marrying Mr. Rochester at the end of the story. Now this story is a very detailed and very descriptive story it runs almost in excess of 500 pages long so what I thought would be really useful when it comes to revising this story if you're studying it for either your coursework or exams is it would be a really good idea as a starting point especially if you've read the entire novel but you're not entirely sure how to summarize it all in a nutshell it would be good if we looked at the plot and the key events and that's what I've done so as you can see here I've essentially mapped out all the key events in a nutshell as to what happens in Jane Eyre so I'm going to do is talk you through all the major things that you need to understand when it comes to this plot so that especially when you're kind of writing about it in your exams you can have a general idea of just the different touch points in what can be a fairly long novel okay so firstly we're going to first start off at the starting point of the story and this is when we learn Jane Eyre as a young child is an orphan so the story begins with Jane our main protagonist who is an orphan and she lives with the Reed family and we find out that the Reed family is actually particularly cruel to her we've got Mrs. Reed who's a widow her husband died and I was actually on the wishes of her husband that Jane was allowed to stay with them and to be looked after and her husband had asked Mrs. Reed to treat her like a daughter however she doesn't she treats her almost like a servant she treats her very very badly also John Reed her son is especially cruel to her but of course also the other two daughters Eliza and Georgiana especially cruel to Jane Eyre so as an orphan she is mistreated by the Reed family and there's one key turning point where she is sent to the red room when she does stand up for herself to especially to John Reed and this red room is believed to be a haunted room in the house because this is where Mr. Reed died now she really suffers in that red room because she is very terrified she is very horrified to be left in this room and this is really a key turning point because at this stage Mrs. Reed realizes that Jane Eyre can no longer stay with them even if she's quite young she decides that she will have her be sent off to stay in a school for orphans so then the next major event is Jane ends up going to Lowood School and this is where the headmaster Mr. Brocklehurst this is a school that he manages for orphans and children who don't have any homes however we learned that Mr. Brocklehurst in spite of being seemingly very religious is actually quite cruel in the way he treats the girls in this school and during her time in this school she meets a lady a young woman called Helen Burns who is very forgiving she turns out the chick so once when Jane first joins Lowood School she is very spirited she is very unforgiving of Mrs. Reed and how Mrs. Reed treats her and she's very angry however she's really taken by how Helen Burns exhibits very Christian values of patience and even when she's hit in school she is she sees the teacher's perspective as to why the teacher hit Helen Burns and she has a very important effect on teaching Jane the Christian values of duty perseverance and being really the quintessential Victoria woman who's very passive very quiet submissive and very forgiving now in this essentially we learned that the conditions at Lowood School are really really bad and ultimately Helen Burns dies after having a very powerful impact on Jane Eyre now she dies and later on Jane Eyre after finishing school she goes on to become a teacher so she goes on to stay for eight years at Lowood School afterwards after she spent a great amount of time at Lowood she decides to move on and apply for a role as a governess for a young lady called Adele in Thornfield Hall okay so Jane then becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall because she's offered that position and there she meets and falls in love with the head of this hall and this is Mr. Rochester so she meets him she falls in love with him and she's very drawn to him now whilst at Thornfield Hall on one mysterious night a fire breaks out and Jane hears very animalistic noises as before the fire breaks out fortunately she's awake and she rushes and finds the major source of the fire is in Mr. Rochester's room she wakes him up and she asks she saves his life and Mr. Rochester states that it's probably Grace Paul who's been living upstairs she is a servant and he says that she's probably the person who caused the fire but Jane is really puzzled because she's wondering why is she still allowed to stay on in Thornfield Hall if she tried to kill her master so it's something that also intrigues us as readers we wonder why would Mr. Rochester let Grace Paul stay in the same house as him if she tried to kill him so there's something that's not quite clear however they move on from this and of course Mr. Rochester ultimately confesses his own love for Jane Eyre and he proposes to her so at first she is really surprised because she thought he was going to marry an upper-class woman called Ingrim Blanche Ingrim however he shows his disdain for these very pretentious upper-class women and he really respects Jane for her spirituality but also for her composure and her intellect and of course they agree to marry and Jane is really really happy however on their wedding day a man comes in and declares that Mr. Rochester is committing a criminal offence of bigamy because he is already married in fact he married when he was in the Caribbean to a lady called Bertha and he brought her back to Thornfield Hall and it's actually a mad woman his wife is a mad woman he's living upstairs in Thornfield Hall and of course that idea of the fire now starts coming the the dots start joining up that's when we start realizing that Bertha is the source of a lot of the mischief that's happening in Thornfield Hall so of course when Jane realizes that to marry Mr. Rochester would be committing a sinful act of bigamy she rejects the marriage altogether even if Mr. Rochester insists that they should marry because his wife is mentally unfit to be a wife however Jane refuses and then she ends up becoming very brokenhearted she cannot live in Thornfield Hall anymore so she decides to run away now this is when the story gets very dark for Jane because she runs away and then she then ultimately becomes very destitute she uses up all her money on her journey away and she only has enough money for even a one-way ticket to leave she becomes poor she becomes destitute and ultimately she falls very sick and really she's at death's door when she almost dies but the rivers another family she meets ultimately come rescue her so she knocks at the door the servant of the rivers first rejects her when she tries to open because the servant thinks that maybe she was a beggar in the middle of the night however Mr. John Rivers who's the man of the household he lets them in and of course we learned that Mr. Rivers lives with his sisters as well as a servant they nurse her back to health and she doesn't necessarily reveal all the details that lead her to be destitute and poor however she's very very grateful and she grows very close to the Rivers family after they rescue her now she then later learns once she's living with the Rivers family that her uncle in Madeira left her a hefty inheritance that Mrs. Reed didn't let her know so her uncle had been looking for her ever since she left for Lowood however Mrs. Reed when she's dying confesses to Jane that he was looking for her but she told him that she had died however ultimately she is found but she never meets her uncle she just realizes that there's been an advert put in her name seeking her and then she realizes she has this massive inheritance from her uncle who's left all of this money to her she uses this in order to not only enrich herself but she also bills out the Rivers family who they have some status but they've lost all their money so they don't have that much money however she rescues the two river sisters who they themselves were working as governesses and Mr. John Rivers who also gets part of inheritance now Mr. John Rivers and the River sisters turn out to be Jane's cousins and the uncle who's left her an inheritance turns out to have stolen and have led the Rivers' dad into a bad business decision that's one of the reasons why they lost so much money so actually Jane is kind of paying them back for what they lost now Mr. John Rivers who is very very very devout he decides that he wants to go to work as a missionary in India and he proposes to Jane he tries to get Jane to marry her however Jane realizes that she does not really love him and she rejects so she's very close to marrying him out of duty but she rejects and then one night in a dream she dreams that Mr. Rochester is vividly calling out to her so she decides to go and seek him and she rejects Mr. Rivers who then goes off to India and then she goes back to Thornfield Hall to look for Mr. Rochester because that dream is so vivid that she feels like he's calling out to her now when she gets back to Thornfield Hall she finds that it has burnt down it's no longer there and then she traces Mr. Rochester who is now disabled to a place in Fern Dean and this is where he used to sometimes escape for you know rest and respite from Thornfield Hall she learns that Adele has also been put in a boarding school and she realizes that Bertha in a fit of madness ended up burning Thornfield Hall and Mr. Rochester became blind and disabled. Now during this period when she does rediscover him of course she realizes that he still loves her in fact he has been crushed ever since she left him by his unrequited love for Jane. Jane decides to forgive him and of course he's now a widow so he's now a widower actually and so he's now free to remarry without committing any crime of bigamy so Jane agrees to marry him and he is basically rescued in the eyes of God and he also takes on many of Jane's Christian values. So that's really it when it comes to understanding the key events that happen in Jane Eyre. As I've mentioned this book is a very detailed book it's a Bill Dunn's roman which essentially follows Jane through her childhood as an orphan her formative years during her educational years in Lowood and ultimately when she meets Mr. Rochester falls in love with him goes through a period of hardship but then ultimately finds Mr. Rochester again and marries him and falls in love with him and lives happily ever after with him okay so that's really it when it comes to understanding the key events in Jane Eyre.