Jane Eyre Ending

Throughout all of the books we’ve read this semester, I felt that I kind of had some idea of how it was going to end, and it usually did end how I thought. However, with Jane Eyre, that was really the only ending that caught me off guard. I knew that it’s regarded as a romance novel and that those usually end in a happy ending. But, with all of the other elements, I was just expecting something else than what we were given. All of the other books we read kind of had sad endings, so I thought this would be similar to that. I did expect Jane to go back to Thornfield again before the end of the book, but I thought maybe it would be too late to be with Rochester, and she would have missed her chance and that’s how it would have ended. I was caught very off guard when we heard the line, “Reader, I married him” (Brontë, 488). Part of me was happy that Jane got a happy ending after everything she had been through, but another part of me was expecting something entirely different.