Before the poor little girl called Maggie came into Jane’s life, she was a ‘vinegar-tempered wife’ to Joe Thompson. She was “not a woman of saintly temper, nor much given to self-denial for others’ good”, as the narrator comments. As a childless woman she had “nothing to love and care for out of herself, and so became sore, irritable, ill-tempered, and self-afflicting in the desolation of her woman’s nature”.