Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the narrator and title character of Charlotte Bronte's novel, published on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder and Co under the pseudonym Currer Bell. She is orphaned and raised at Gateshead Hall by an aunt, Mrs Reed, who treats her as an imposition; after she fights back against her cousin John's bullying she is locked in the red room where her uncle died and collapses in terror.

She is sent to Lowood, a charity school run on cold, hunger and humiliation by Mr Brocklehurst, who denounces her as a liar in front of the school on Mrs Reed's word until the superintendent Miss Temple publicly clears her. There she meets Helen Burns, whose patient religious acceptance of suffering she admires and cannot adopt, and who dies of consumption in her arms.

Why does Jane leave Thornfield?

She goes to Thornfield Hall as governess to Adele Varens and falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester, who proposes. At the altar it emerges that he is already married to Bertha Mason, who is confined in the attic. Rochester asks Jane to live with him abroad as his mistress, and she leaves instead - not because she has stopped loving him but because staying would require her to abandon her own standing as a person with a self worth respecting. She is taken in at Moor House by St John Rivers and his sisters, who turn out to be her cousins, and St John proposes: not out of love, but to make her useful as a missionary's wife in India. She refuses that too, because a marriage without love would cost her exactly what remaining at Thornfield would have. She inherits money, becomes independent, hears Rochester's voice calling to her, and returns to find Thornfield burned, Bertha dead and Rochester blinded and maimed. They marry, and the novel closes with the four most famous words she says.

Jane is dominant Ni, and the tell is that she knows things before she can justify them. The novel is structured around her perceptions arriving whole and being right - about Mrs Reed, about Brocklehurst, about Thornfield having something wrong with it long before she is told what. Bronte writes her intuition as something close to second sight, and the voice she hears across miles at the crucial moment is the novel's way of insisting that this faculty is real rather than fanciful.

The auxiliary Fe is why the two refusals are the same refusal. Both Rochester and St John ask her to occupy a position defined entirely by what she is worth to them - a mistress, a useful wife - and in each case what she declines is being absorbed into somebody else's arrangement. Fe reads exactly what each man is offering and exactly what it would do to her standing, and says no with total clarity while still loving one of them.

Why does Jane refuse St John Rivers?

Because he is offering her the more respectable version of the same erasure, and she can see it. Marrying Rochester illegitimately would destroy her position; marrying St John without love would destroy the interior, and she is explicit that it would kill her. Tertiary Ti is what lets her argue both cases so precisely - Jane reasons her way through her own crises in long, formal, exact terms - and inferior Se is why she must physically leave, twice, walking out onto a moor with no money rather than stay in a room where her judgement is under pressure. The one thing this stack cannot do is remain in the situation and hold the line.

INFP is the most common alternative and by some distance the more usual reading, given the interiority and the fierce personal integrity. The difference is what her judgements are about. An Fi-dominant heroine measures situations against her own values and withdraws when they are violated. Jane's crises are consistently about her position among people - what she is to Rochester, what she would become to St John, what Mrs Reed made her - and she reasons in relational terms throughout.

ISFJ is sometimes suggested because of the endurance and the sense of duty. But she is not working from precedent or accumulated propriety; she is acting on perceptions that arrive before the evidence and that she cannot fully account for, and the novel treats those perceptions as authoritative. Ni first.