After Jane returns from visiting with her brother and sister, several days elapse in which Nico spends "much more time with Maddy and [Jane] than usual" (Lindner 199). They spend time at the local seafood restaurant, playing guitar and singing together, and playing in the pool, leading Jane to remark that she'd "never spent so much time in his company and --sadly enough-- had never loved him so well" (Lindner 200).

It is against this backdrop that this hypertext returns to the scenes and allusions of the hypotext. Jane and Nico find themselves at the bench beneath the "enormous horse chestnut tree" where Nico toys with her about his affections and plans for Bianca, cruelly, just as Rochester did about Blanche (Lindner 201). One difference though, is that rather than being a gold-digger, since Bianca is independently wealthy and successful, Nico scorns her for trying to "butter [him] up and get [him] to lower his guard. She wanted to get the best, most intimate photo spread she could pull off, so she flirted with [Nico]" (Lindner 208). 

He proclaims his love for Jane with lines like "let me love you the way you deserve" and "[w]ho made you believe you aren't pretty?" which undoubtedly would make the intended YA audience swoon (Lindner 206, 208). Next comes a radical divergence from the straight-laced, Victorian Jane Eyre when Nico says, "[c]ome inside with me...and let me make love to you...all night long" (Lindner 209). Lindner could have left it at that and allowed readers to accept the implications of that sentence and Jane letting him "lead [her] back to the house" but instead, she includes sensual and erotic details of their sex, including references to Nico undressing her to her "plain cotton bra and panties," kissing "his way down [her] body," and "the nerves of [her] body [singing] out all at once, till something inside [her] burst like a soap bubble" (209-12). This uncensored, raw depiction of sex and passion would have never been published in Victorian England, making the scene feel wholly alien to its hypotext, since the most Jane and Rochester are ever explicitly mentioned doing is making out. 

The wish-fulfillment, sexual agency, and sexual liberation that Jane Moore experiences make this scene one of the few aspects of Jane which attempts to make the hypertext more feminist than the original, by rejecting the premise of chastity as a measure of a woman's value and morality. Simultaneously though, the seemingly feminist bent of the sequence of events must be tempered and considered critically. The age gap, power imbalance, and emotional manipulation inherent to this scene create a predatory feeling that calls Nico’s intentions and the legitimacy of Jane's consent into question.

Katie Kapurch. “Unconditionally and Irrevocably: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre.” Vol. 37, no. 2, 2012, 164–187. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/chq.2012.0014.

Kapurch, Katie. “‘Why Can’t You Love Me the Way I Am?’: Fairy Tales, Girlhood, and Agency in Neo-Victorian Visions of Jane Eyre.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2012, 89. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=90539781&site=eds-live.

Lindner, April. Jane. New York, Little Brown, 2011.