Offerton Hall near Hathersage in Derbyshire, seen from the road above the house. It bears the date of 1658, but the heart of the house goes back to the 16th century, and the site is associated with the Eyre family, who could trace their ancestry back to Agincourt and even the Norman invasion in 1066. Charlotte wrote parts of Jane Eyre while staying in Hathersage.
HAD he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.
If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when I addressed him; if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew inquiries: but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease.*
Compare Marianne Dashwood’s first encounter with Mr Willoughby in Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, in Swept off her Feet.
Précis
Jane Eyre feels strangely comfortable in the company of a gruff gentleman injured on the road, and wonders why she feels so uncharacteristically inclined to offer him help despite his repeated refusals. She concludes that had he been handsome and courteous, she would have felt shy and out-of-place, whereas she felt that she belonged with plain looks and plain speaking. (60 / 60 words)
