Orphaned, unloved, and unwanted ten-year-old Jane Eyre lives with her cruel, selfish, uncaring maternal aunt via marriage, Mrs. Reed of Gateshead Hall, and her spoiled, bullying son.
Based on what Mrs. Reed has told him, Mr. Brocklehurst labels Jane a liar in front of her schoolmates and orders her to stand on a stool for hours on her first day of attendance.
Dr. Rivers, a sympathetic physician who periodically checks on the students, brings the girls inside, but it is too late for Helen, who dies that night.
When Jane arrives at Thornfield, a gloomy, isolated mansion, she initially thinks her employer is Mrs. Fairfax, who is in fact the housekeeper for the absent master.
Jane goes for a walk one night only to startle a horse into throwing and slightly injuring its rider, Edward Rochester — who she doesn't realize is her employer.
When a man named Richard Mason of Spanish Town, Jamaica, arrives at Thornfield, Jane sees that Rochester is disturbed.
Rochester assures his guests it is just a servant's reaction to a nightmare, but after he sends them back to their rooms, he has Jane secretly tend to a bleeding Mason in the tower while he fetches a doctor.
During the wedding ceremony, an attorney intervenes and declares that Rochester has a wife by the name of Bertha Antonietta Mason, who is mentally ill and deranged.
Rochester calls off the marriage ceremony and takes Jane and Mason back to Thornfield to reveal Bertha, who is insane to the point of animalistic behavior, and lives in a tower cell guarded by Grace Poole.
Though they admit they still love each other, Jane rejects Rochester's offer to stay as his mistress, and she determinedly departs Thornfield to preserve her principles.
She discovers that her aunt has suffered a stroke, caused by worry over the ruinous gambling habits of her son, who it is revealed has committed suicide.
After Mrs. Reed dies, Jane ponders what to do next, even considering working for Mr. Brocklehurst, when she hears Rochester's anguished voice calling her name during a storm.
Aldous Huxley also contributed to the screenplay, rendering the character of Mrs. Rochester unseen—assuring that she would be more menacing, and circumventing British censorship regulations on the depiction of madness.
Other film projects included The Key to the Kingdom and Claudia, and talent contracts with Stevenson, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy McGuire, George Barnes, Stanley Cortez, Gene Kelly, Alan Marshall, Ingrid Bergman and Joan Fontaine.
When Welles was signed for Jane Eyre in December 1942, he was no longer with RKO,[10]: 358 and was eager to earn money to purchase, develop and cut the footage he had shot for It's All True, an ill-fated project for the U.S. government for which he had received no payment.
[13] The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of September 18, 1938, is lost because Welles used the acetate original to prepare the film and the recording was irreparably damaged.
[14] In early December 1942, Selznick wrote Goetz that he and Welles agreed on the importance of casting character actors who were new to motion pictures.
[10]: 359 Welles and Selznick persuaded 20th Century Fox to hire Bernard Herrmann to compose the score for Jane Eyre.
[8] In an April 17 memo to Goetz, which he blind-copied to Stevenson, Selznick protested that such a credit would be unfair to the director, "who pretty clearly took up the responsibility of producer where I left off.
[8] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, in an ambivalent review, called Jane Eyre a "moody" film in which "[n]o depths of consuming passion are plumbed very diligently", but still spoke of it as "grimly fascinating in its own right", with "continuous vitality as a romantic horror tale" in which Welles's "ferocious performance" was "interesting to observe.