She qualifies this, saying "I have now been married ten years. We now know, then, that the main events of the story are removed from Jane's present by a considerable length of time, but as the novel is read, especially for the first time when the reader is unaware of this time-frame, Bronte presents Jane's narration in such a way as to bring the story as much into the reader's present as possible. Even within the last passage, Jane narrates experiences ten years old as if they were present ones, in part by using present tenses, such as "[they] were both of that order of people, to whom one may at any time". The use of "may"" rather than "could"" suggests a current opinion: a thought in the present, and when placed in the context of Jane's description of past events, it gives the reader a sense that the events are happening now, as he is reading. At the beginning of chapter eleven, after Jane's departure from Lowood, she tells the reader "I sit in my cloak. I am not very tranquil in my mind."" Again, this use of the present tense creates a sense of events being present: happening as the reader reads, but also confuses the course of the narrative, and confuses the sense of time. Tension is thus created between what a reader who has already read the novel knows to be the overall time-frame, and the individual pockets within that time-frame where events seem to be present ones, and indeed, although in using a first person narrator Bronte does give a great deal of life and emotional strength to the novel that it might otherwise be lacking, there are times like in these pockets of present tense, when we are encouraged to step back, disentangle ourselves from Jane's perspective, and evaluate events for ourselves. .
One such instance occurs in that passage where Jane, having departed from Lowood, awaits her carriage to Thornfield: the next stage of her life. "A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play," she tells the reader.
