What happens in the red

room?

Jane’s incarceration in the red room occupies only

several pages of the book, but, like the window

scene in which Catherine Earnshaw begs “Let me

in – let me in” in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering

Heights – also centred on an excluded child figure

– it is one of the most iconic moments in Victorian

fiction, supercharged with a significance which

haunts the remainder of the book.