Becoming Jane Eyre Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  VOLUME ONE - Manchester 1846

  CHAPTER ONE - Father and Daughter

  CHAPTER TWO - Professor

  CHAPTER THREE - Glimmerings

  CHAPTER FOUR - Love

  CHAPTER FIVE - Writing

  CHAPTER SIX - Reality

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Jealousy

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Nurse

  CHAPTER NINE - Hope

  CHAPTER TEN - Awakening

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Origins

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Progress

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Governess

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Thornfield

  VOLUME TWO - Haworth 1846-1848

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Stalled

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Childhood

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Waiting

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Retrieval

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Branwell

  CHAPTER TWENTY - Openings

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Decision

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Anne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Conflagration

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Thorp Green

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Strife

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Rapprochement

  VOLUME THREE - London 1848-1853

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Smith

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Opera

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Fame

  CHAPTER THIRTY - Disappointment

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  AN INTRODUCTION TO

  Questions for Discussion

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  First published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © Sheila Kohler, 2009

  All rights reserved

  PULISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PULICATION DATA

  Kohler, Sheila.

  Becoming Jane Eyre / Sheila Kohler.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15964-4

  1. Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855—Fiction. 2. Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848—

  Fiction. 3. Brontë, Anne, 1820-1849—Fiction. 4. Brontë family—Fiction.

  5. Women authors, English—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.K64B43 2010

  823’.914—dc22 2009033095

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  To the love of my life, my husband, Bill

  VOLUME ONE

  Manchester 1846

  CHAPTER ONE

  Father and Daughter

  He wakes to the scratching of a pencil against a page: a noise out of the darkness. He lies quite still on his back, reaching out for sound. His ears have become wings, straining, stretching, carrying him away. The world comes to him only through sound, and there is precious little of that.

  Even the sounds of quiet Boundary Street on the outskirts of this large industrial town are strange to him. Apart from the scratching, he can hear little except an occasional cry, the rumble of carriage wheels below, the call of a city bird. He hungers for the wild sounds of his hill-village home: the low keening of the wind over moors, the bark of a dog, the cries of crows, the tolling of his church bell.

  He misses the sights of his world: the sweep of a lonely hill; the joy of an eagle, plummeting wildly through the blue air in search of food for his young. Now he is a bird with wounded wing. Is he cast forever into bottomless perdition? Is he to dwell in Adamantine Chains and penal Fire? He learned to recite Milton to himself as a child, and the words come easily to him now. In the darkness he feels the heat of the poem.

  He imagines opening the front door of his parsonage, the light streaming in from the window over the stairs and the mad scrabble of paws coming to greet him across the stone floor. In his mind he holds Keeper or little spoiled Flossy, the black-and-white King Charles spaniel, in his arms. He can smell their wild smells of grass and wind, from the moors. He even misses the canary, singing in its cage, and Emily’s geese. He has walked for hours with the dogs. Striding fast across the hills, through the dark heath, in all sorts of weather has warmed his blood and his heart and become a wellspring of his verse. His children are fond of all kinds of animals, and so is he, but of course the dogs have not followed him here.

  Not even the sound of church bells, chiming the hours, comes to him in this part of town. He imagines the chimes, which have regulated his days and nights for so long, calling him to his God, who has not forsaken him, surely. He will find his way to the light of Heaven again, surely.

  Is it early morning? How long has he been lying here? This immobility, this helplessness, this perpetual darkness, are too hard to bear. God help me!

  All his life he has marched onward, striding upward, acquiring knowledge, position, and distinction, going on with hope and firmness of purpose and conviction in the Army of the Lord, carrying the Word of the Lord like a banner before him to sinners and sufferers, with the belief in his heart that he brings salvation. He remembers how he joined the Home Guard at Cambridge as a young man to protect England from the unruly French—a warrior priest.

  But now they have nailed his sixty-nine-year-old bones to his couch. They have pierced his eyes with a crown of thorns. He has become a blind mouth. How much longer will he have to lie here helplessly in the silence of the late-summer darkness, with nothing but the sound of a scratching pencil in his ears? Will his mind survive its creeping dimness? There is only a thin sheet over his body, but his bones feel heavy. Despite the hot, dry air he is cold, cold.

  He recites the familiar words from the 23rd Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet shall I fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He repeats the words as he did when he lay awake and conscious under the knife.

  They propped his eye open with some steel instrument as the cruel work was done. Two of them held on to him, should he struggle, but he did not, lying still as death, in his God’s hands, excruciatingly conscious of the knife’s work in that delicate place, of every sound in
the room, and of the presence sitting quietly in a corner, a comfort to him: Charlotte.

  High on the flat, white bed, her father lies. She sits by his side on a low ottoman near the marble chimneypiece, writing in the silence and the half dark of the early morning. They have found convenient lodgings. Her father’s room opens into hers, and there is a small sitting room to which she can retreat. The nurse, a redheaded woman in her late twenties or early thirties who is lodged upstairs in one of the third-floor rooms, is competent, if annoyingly officious. Charlotte hears her clomping down the stairs. The doctor has been helpful in this, as he has in all things. Though not large, their rooms are comfortable. She props her writing desk on her knees and places a small candle at her side to light her page.

  Against the wall a monstrous wardrobe looms ominously. To her right the curtained windows give onto the street, and between them a dim mirror stands. The doctor has ordered privation of light and perfect silence. The strangeness of these lodgings, the dryness of the dusty air, the hot darkness, and the suffering presence beside her make her shiver.

  Next door she hears the nurse moving about with purpose, dropping things on the floor. Living in such proximity, she has taken a dislike to the large, hard-faced woman who enters the room in her navy uniform, her round, white cap with its ribbons flowing down her back, her black stockings brushing together with a sigh.

  Charlotte nods her head in response to her greeting. The nurse’s presence is an intrusion she attempts to ignore. She prefers to listen to her father’s breathing, to be alone with him. A distant, God-fearing man preoccupied with his Christian duty, his concern for his large, poor parish, his grief, and his only boy, she has never been alone with him like this.

  The nurse asks how she is feeling this morning. She replies that her tooth aches, that sleep seems to have abandoned her. The nurse suggests a walk, in a voice that sounds loud and shrill. Charlotte shakes her head. She has little desire to walk in these charmless, suffocating streets.

  How much walking she has done in her life! She has scampered as a child on the moors for the joy of it, the freedom, the escape from the cramped house, the adults’ oppressive presence. She has walked for necessity, for exercise, for pleasure, and for the beauty of the natural world around her. She has walked to tire herself out. Here, she prefers the time alone with her father in the early morning, before the nurse comes bustling into the room, moments of escape into the world of imagination. Here, she is able to let her mind go where it will, even while her eye is fixed on him.

  She lifts her gaze from the page, where she has written words and crossed them out. She surveys the scene. Things seem very still to her and, oddly, in the darkened room she now seems to see more clearly. It is being alone with her father, being his eyes and his hands and even his voice, his link with life, that brings this clarity.

  She finds herself drifting into a moment of reflection. It is difficult to fix the boundaries between imagination and memory. She absorbs what comes to her, drawing images into this dim, silent space. All the small objects in the room—the bulb-shaped water bottle, the green counterpane, the plant on the windowsill—seem to mean something. She is in a moment of transition. She looks for signs of what she will become.

  She was glad to come here on her own with her father, yet reluctant to leave her brother and her two sisters at home. What will happen there? Will her sisters find the time, the courage, to work on their new books? All through the summer, before she came to Manchester, they took their desks out into the garden, to work in the shade of the cherry tree. What mischief will her brother be making? She sees him, sitting in his study, his head in his hands, an empty bottle before him, raving about a woman called Misery who follows him everywhere, a woman he calls his wife.

  Shudders run through her father’s body, as they did through hers as a child when he would shoot his pistol at dawn, as though a shock has run through him.

  “What?” she asks. “What is it?” She reaches a hand to still his beating heart. She has never been able to stare at him like this, touch him freely in the muted light. He reaches out for her. What does he know of her, or she of him, after all these years? What secrets would he tell her if he could speak? Would she want to hear them? What would he say about his marriage, his parents, his God? Had he chosen her mother for love or for her superior position in society, the fifty pounds a year? Or was it her religion? Did he want her help with his work in the church? Did he think she could advance his career? Was his religion simply a means of advancing socially?

  But he only asks for water, as he does repeatedly. He has always been a thirsty man. Though he is president of the local Temperance Society, she is not sure he has not used alcohol for more than medicinal purposes.

  She pours the water, resumes her seat, and takes up her pencil and her square notebook again, as though tied to her post beside him.

  On her return home from Brussels after New Year’s Day, burdened with her own sadness, she was appalled to find her father so helpless. Blind, like his beloved Milton, he could not venture outside in the snow because the glare hurt his eyes. Full of pity and terror, as well as impatience at his helplessness, she was obliged to lead him through the narrow streets to visit his parishioners and to read and write and see for him, describing the landscape she knows so well, the fields, the sky, and snow. In his thankfulness he showed her more consideration than he had ever done, accepted her help and love, yielded to her attendance on him.

  Each evening when they sat together, she brought up the good chance of having his eyesight improved by the operation. All through the winter and spring she worked on him. He procrastinated, finding excuses. Finally she persuaded him to go through with it. Was this wise? Was she being selfish or merely dutiful? Was her motivation one of revenge?

  She relives the scene: two men in white at his side, like the flaming angels she had seen as a child, standing at the head of her youngest sister’s cradle, but here prepared to wrestle with her father, their hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. The glint of the scalpel. She holds her breath, unable to avert her terrified yet fascinated gaze as the surgeon cuts through the cornea. She watches her father’s face contort with agony and hears the cry escape his lips. Afterward, she needs the arm of one of the assistants to take her from the room.

  Now her mouth is dry, her lips chapped, her bowels blocked. She puts her hand to her cheek, feeling her flaking skin. What will the future bring for them all? Will this let in the light? What would they all do without him, he who provides the rent-free house, the yearly stipend?

  It is this which clothes, feeds, and shelters them. They are entirely dependent on him. Without him they would all be separated again, scattered to earn their bread in the professions they all hate and have failed at abysmally: teaching, tutoring, and, in the brother’s case, clerking on the railways. Their livelihood, the roof over their heads, their beloved parsonage, all will be taken from them at his demise, perpetual curacy holding only so long as the curate lives.

  Will she be the one to save them all from penury with a new book, when her first one, her Professor, has just been rejected? She cannot believe it was without merit. Her soul is marked on every page. She is each one of her characters: the two brothers who are estranged, as were so often the ones in her own brother’s tales. She can still hear their voices, see their faces, feel their forms. She hears the wicked brother’s wife, Mrs. Edward Crimsworth, say with her lively lisp, “You are late.” She hears the swish of Edward’s whip. The child, Victor Crimsworth, has her brother’s fiery glint in his eyes.

  What is she to write about now, in the silence of this darkened room?

  She reads Psalm 119 to her father in the faint light of the candle, “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light to my path.” She watches his familiar face beneath the bandage: the high cheekbones, the decisive nose she has inherited—better on a man than on a woman, she thinks. She stares at the grim mouth, which dips at the corners, the jut of the determine
d chin, even the fine, broken veins in the cheeks. Her words seem to console and revive him. Blind as he is, smiles play over his face, and joy dawns on his forehead.

  She brushes the bristles of white hair, which give him a surprised and unexpectedly roguish air, from his forehead and studies the long oval of his face. She feels a contained elation in the moment, a whisper of self-knowledge. Now that she can be useful to him in his reduced state, she loves him more than ever. She reaches out with the tip of her finger to wipe away a tear, which trickles from his cut left eye, and traces the strong lines of his fine face with her middle finger.

  She makes a rough sketch of him in her notebook.

  He feels small fingers brush his face like a cobweb. He sniffs at them, at the smell of the body. Since the death of his wife, no one has touched him so. He has almost lost the torment of his celibacy. “Who is this?” he asks, straining to see. He conjures up his wife’s small, neat form, the verbena scent of her skin. “Maria, is it you?” he says in his dream, and reaches out to catch at her skirts and her slim waist. “Saucy Pat,” she says, and slaps at his hand.

  He sees his wife as she was at the end, begging for relief from pain. All her life she had been so well balanced, so sensible, pious, and self-effacing. Now at the end, the Great Tempter, envying her life of holiness, no doubt, had come to her and disturbed her mind. He sees her plainly, sitting up, her long hair wild about her shoulders, her face pinched and gray, wasted with illness and repellent to him. In her creased gown she reaches out to him, imploring him to help her. “Where is your damned God now? Where is He?” she screams at him, her hands to her belly where the pain is eating away at her.

  Now, for the first time, he understands what she must have felt during those seven long months she lay dying. Then, he could only warn her that blasphemy was a mortal sin and urge her to think of the Judgment to come. “Help me! Your words are not helping me,” he still hears her scream. He would like to cry out the same words to his daughter, who is sitting beside him, scratching away with her pencil.