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the lamp and return home from Africa, Jane has to face one last terrifying ordeal, more nearly deadly than anything she has had to contend with before. The iron-willed, evangelical and hypocritical St John Rivers - a 'false Holy Man- uses all his powers to force her to marry him, and to accompany him as a missionary to India, which Jane knows would certainly be fatal to her health. Although she tries to resist, she feels her powers of resistance slipping away and is on the verge of succumbing, when she hears a distant, mysterious voice calling her name, as if from half across the world. It is the voice of Rochester. An extraordinary new strength wells up in her (at last, as she puts it, `my powers were in play'). She flees the house in the middle of the night and rushes across the countryside to Thornfield, where she finds that the house has recently burned down. The shadowy first Mrs Rochester has died in the fire. Her dark rival has gone. Jane finds Rochester, alone and blind, in the middle of a forest. She lovingly nurses him back to health and sight. They are at last married and completely united. They end up presiding over their little kingdom and, as nearly as a novel will allow, living `happily ever after'.

What we thus see in Jane Eyre is a fundamental structure to the story strikingly similar to that of Aladdin: the process whereby a young central figure emerges step by step from an initial state of dependent, unformed childhood to a final state of complete self-realisation and wholeness. Obviously one of the most significant features of this type of story is the way it divides into two `halves, punctuated by the `central crisis. In the first half we see the hero or heroine emerging from childhood to a state where they may seem outwardly successful, except that they are by no means yet fully mature. They then encounter a crisis which leads them on to the harder task of becoming much more fully-developed and self-reliant. This leads up to the ordeal which provides the story's climax, where they have a final confrontation with the dark figures and powers who, in one way or another, have overshadowed them through the story. Only when they have come through this test are they finally liberated to enjoy the state of wholeness and fulfilment which marks the conclusion of the tale.

The longer and more fully-developed a Rags to Riches story becomes, the more likely we are to see these steps to the ultimate goal spelled out in detail; as we do in the many other novels based on this plot such as Moll Flanders, Great Expectations or David Copperfield.

In the first half of David Copperfield, we see the little orphan hero going through essentially all the basic stages of development we have seen in Aladdin and Jane Eyre, up to the point where he marries his first wife, Dora. But from her selfish, infantile nature and the sentimental nature of their marriage, it is clear that the hero has not reached his true goal, because he himself has not yet developed to full maturity, and when his child-wife sickens and dies after a miscarriage, he faces his central crisis. Then begins the second part of his story, where he becomes much more fully developed as a man, as he builds up his career as a successful writer. In this phase we see that his true `other half', corresponding to his new depth and maturity, is the selfless, inspiring Agnes Woodward. But she is under the shadow of Copperfield's `dark rival', the insinuating Uriah Heep, who is scheming to marry her (as a kind of cross between the Sorcerer and St John Rivers). Only when Heep's scheming is exposed and his power overthrown at the climax of the story are hero and heroine at last freed to come together in complete, loving union.

Even in simpler versions of the theme, however, we still see much the same essential structure, with the story dividing into two parts, separated by the central crisis, emphasising that the real task facing the hero or heroine is never a simple one. And in general the Rags to Riches plot can be summed up along the following lines:

Rags to Riches: