Jane Eyre begins with the sentence “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Charlotte Brontë's novel opens by placing Jane with her cousins, the Reed family, at Gateshead Hall, where cold weather prevents the outdoor walk and leaves Jane isolated from the others.
The opening immediately establishes Jane's position as an outsider. Her cousins are gathered comfortably indoors, while Jane is excluded because she is an orphan dependent on her aunt, Mrs Reed. She retreats to a window seat with a book, creating one of the novel's first scenes of inward imagination and emotional separation.
Jane Eyre was originally published in 1847 under Charlotte Brontë's pseudonym, Currer Bell. The Professor was another Charlotte Brontë manuscript, but it was not published during her lifetime. Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights were written by Anne and Emily Brontë respectively, so neither begins with this famous line. The sentence is also sometimes remembered as “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, because it was cold,” but the novel's actual opening continues with a description of the bleak weather rather than that wording.