The first thing that caught my eye about this passage was that in the first paragraph there seems to be an abundant use of dashes. To me, the text between the dashes like for example "I doubted not - never doubted - that if Mr. Reed..." & "(Mr. Reed's spirit) might quit it's abode - whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed - and rise before me" sound like a sort of 'aside', something not quite directed at the reader but more like an inward comment made by the narrator to herself. Bronte takes the reader further into Jane Eyre's world by giving us little glimpses of her own thoughts which are not embedded in the rest of the text, emphasising her points very well also by making us feel closer to her.

I noticed that when speaking of the light Jane saw, Bronte writes "...it glided up to the ceiling...". This immediately made me think of a bird. Now, when a bird is trapped in a room (as Jane is) it flies around, swooping, falling and frantically beating its wings and sure enough, a few lines down, just before Jane breaks down and runs to the door, Bronte writes "...a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings". And, of course, all this also ties in with the idea of ghosts and spirits and angels which float and glide about the room.

The excerpt is structured quite simply: the beginning and the end, where Jane is by herself in the room is just in prose, telling us what Jane's thoughts and feelings are whereas when Bessie, Abbot and Mrs. Reed arrive on the scene there is a dialogue. I also thought it quite curious how Bronte makes such a clear distinction between prose and the dialogue: the dialogue is continuous, all the characters' speeches run into each other and one is not told what any of them are thinking except through direst speech. I personally thought one would probably expect that Jane Eyre, being the narrator, would put in a line of what she thought about the whole conversation here and there; she seems to be a by-stander in this particular part of the excerpt. Bronte might have been attempting to show how helpless Jane was, not being allowed to put a word in edge-ways to decide her own fate (she only speaks up at the very end of the dialogue) and

Some common words found in the essay are:
Jane Eyre, Bessie Abbot, Jane Bronte, Reed Reed's, Jane Eyre's, Abbot Reed, jane eyre, filled ears, sound filled ears, ghosts spirits, glided ceiling, bronte writes, reader breath, dangerous duplicity, light jane, bessie abbot, rest text,
Approximate Word count = 1001
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)