Why is Jane off reading alone in the beginning of Jane Eyre?Is it because her Aunt Reed simply prohibited her from playing with her cousins...not...

As a symbolic gesture of her isolation from the other
children and her sense of alienation from the Reeds who express little but antipathy for
Jane, the young orphan moves away to the small breakfast room which adjoins the drawing
room where Mrs. Reed reclines with her beloved children clustered around her.  Little
Jane chooses a book and, sitting cross-legged, she pulls the red moreen curtain before
her as a sort of protection from the coldness of the Reeds toward her.  She reads
there with a window that looks out upon a solitary
churchyard.

Jane has been isolated from the Reed children
because she does not have "a sociable and childlike disposition" or an "attractive and
sprightly manner."  Ironically, Mrs. Reed expects the lonely orphan whom she treats
coldly, to display a cheerful, "lighter and more natural" disposition and speak
pleasantly in an environment that is far from cheerful and
natural.

In this exposition to her novel, Jane
Eyre, Charlotte Bronte introduces the theme of isolation and the lonely
struggle for survival as Jane seeks comfort in the small breakfast room.  Furthermore,
Bronte employs pathetic fallacy, a literary device in which nature reflects the moods of
characters, as Jane reads History of British Birds, describing
seafowls who inhabit "solitary rocks and promontories" on uninhabited and melancholy
isles.