Becoming Jane Eyre Read online

  When he carried the children into the room—first the eldest, the most pious and brilliant, his favorite, his wife’s namesake, and then her favorite, their only boy—thinking it might comfort her to hold them in her arms, she cried out as though he had affronted her. Only the old servant, with her prosaic gestures, was able to calm her. Maria watched her clean the hearth, the way it was done in Cornwall, or let her softly brush her hair or bring a pillow to lift up her legs. Above all, she brought her the laudanum she craved in increasing quantities. “Give it to me! Give it to me!” she would say, reaching for it. “This is more help to me than your God.”

  In the early afternoon when she lies down to rest and the nurse has gone downstairs for her dinner, Charlotte leaves the door open so she can hear her father’s call. She thinks of him lying immobile in the muted light. She thinks of her two living sisters, back home with their burden, their brother, who is probably drinking or drugging himself into a stupor or fit.

  She takes out the letter of rejection she keeps in her pocket and rereads the curt words. Her novel, The Professor , together with her two sisters’ first novels, has come back addressed to the Messrs. Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms they have chosen to hide their sex. How much of this triple rejection is due to her sisters’ work? She has had her doubts about Emily’s, which seems too somber to her. But Emily would not listen to her counsel. As for Anne’s, it is certainly an honest book, but lacks perhaps the force necessary to engage an editor.

  The letter had arrived on the day of the operation and came to her as a shock. She was surprised at the intensity, the sharpness, of her feelings. Death almost seemed a way out, but it was driven from her mind as she sat with her father through his ordeal.

  How often he has had to still the voice that rises riotously within him. He distinguishes his daughter’s light, fast footsteps, her soft voice, her gentle touch, from the nurse’s with the hush, hush of her stockings rubbing between her languorous legs, the forced cheer of her voice. He hears them come and go. He drinks in the warmth of his daughter’s breath as she leans over him, brushes lightly against his chest, straightens his sheets and blanket. He would like to say: “Lie down beside me. Warm me with your youth. Warm my dry, old flesh and bones.”

  She hears her father shouting her name in his sleep. “Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte!” he calls. She rushes to his side in her white gown.

  He has shadows like a lace of leaves on his face, a dripping candle burning at his head. He looks gray and cold. She feels the shadow of death upon him. He lies like a stone knight on his back, his hands crossed on his chest. She is afraid he has died, her name on his lips. She approaches with the candle. She cannot hear his breath or see the candle flicker.

  She thinks of the story from the Bible of the old king who cannot be warmed until a young virgin is brought to lie beside him. She lies down gently beside him. She stretches an arm above his head. She leans over him to hear his quiet breath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Professor

  That night, she dreams of her professor, Monsieur H. She is sitting on the white sofa, talking to his wife, yet thinking of him so vividly. He has left on an extended voyage. She pictures the thick, black hair, dark eyes, robust body, wide shoulders, and strong legs. He is dressed casually, without any effort at elegance, in his loose old cloak. She says to his wife, who looks pale and is obviously upset by this long absence, “You can replace a husband but not a father,” and she sees a small, delicate child standing in the doorway, bent over with grief. The child looks very much like Charlotte herself. She wakes with a start in tears, all her old sorrow returning.

  How she had trudged through the damp streets of Brussels, half-crazed with longing, lust, and jealousy, reluctant to return to the school. She lingered there in the dark and the rain to escape black thoughts. She walked to forget her Master and beloved friend who had replaced her father and her brother—her black swan, the first to discover her talent and encourage her art. How she has waited for his letters!

  It was his wife whom she and Emily met first when they arrived in Brussels that evening, tired and hungry, having somehow lost a suitcase and their way in the dark cobblestoned streets, which glistened wet in the lamplight. Finally they came to the green door with the bronze plaque in the wall with the name of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles. The great door was opened by a small, hunched woman who ushered them inside the bright parlor with its black-and-white marble floor, where they were immediately confronted by a picture of family life that surprised and delighted them. Madame H. was there with her own mother, Madame Parent, as she was called, and sitting close by her side in her old-fashioned dress was Madame Parent’s sister. Delicious odors wafted in from the kitchens: baking bread and bubbling stew.

  Charlotte and Emily sat side by side on the elegant white sofa so unlike the old dark horsehair one at home. A fat green stove warmed the room. They admired the paintings in their gold frames, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and the folding doors, which led into the petit salon with its piano and enormous draped window.

  As they ate something heavy but delicious in a brown sauce with fresh bread followed by an apple tart, Madame Parent regaled them with an exciting tale. She had very blue eyes and a small mouth, and maintained she had been a beauty in her youth. She was a good storyteller and seemed delighted to have new listeners. Though Charlotte was not certain of the truth of her story, she was immediately drawn into it. She had fallen in love with a man who had escaped to Brussels penniless, with the Comte d’Artois, the king’s brother, during the French Revolution. The old lady told them her husband had been an elegant man, her eyes glistening and a tremor in her voice, who continued to powder his hair, wear knee breeches, and use the formal vous when addressing her.

  His sister, she said, a nun of both courage and generosity, had left her convent with a friend, both of them disguised as men. They, also arrived in Brussels, were the ones who had founded this school, which her niece—and here she smiled proudly down at her daughter—now continued to run.

  Charlotte, too, admired the ebony-haired and dignified Madame H., a woman in her late thirties who sat very upright, her lace collar perfectly flat. What a relief to be in the company of these hospitable women!

  But how unlike them was Monsieur H., a rude and choleric man. The only jarring note in the scene of harmony and family entente was his sudden entrance and exit. He came into the black-and-white-tiled hall of the house on the rue d’Isabelle in a cloud of cigar smoke. He was obviously in a hurry, had apparently lost something, and seemed in bad humor. Charlotte watched him open a desk lid and rummage about inside, muttering and sputtering under his breath.

  Still, there was something familiar about him. He was like a caricature of a man entering and rummaging about in a desk in a hallway, looking cross. Perhaps she had read such a scene in a book?

  Madame H. called to him through the open glass doors of the salon, “Come, Constantin, dear, and meet our new pupils.” He lifted his head, gave her a stern glance, and strode impatiently into the elegant sitting room.

  A small, spare, bespectacled man, he entered with a preoccupied air. With his black hair closely cropped, his brow broad and sallow, and his nostrils wide and quivering, Charlotte decided he looked like a beetle. He seemed to her in a childish rage.

  Charlotte pitied Madame H., who appeared to be somewhat older than he, though neither of them was yet in their forties. She remembers thinking, What an intensely disagreeable and ugly man, as he bent briefly over her hand with her sister at her side. He hardly took the time to mutter a greeting to his new pupils. Indeed, he seemed to scowl at her particularly and take an instant dislike to both of them.

  Madame H. arose to show the sisters to their dormitory. As they walked through the rooms, Charlotte admired the large school buildings. She stopped a moment before the image of the Virgin in an alcove with a burning lamp at her feet and found a prayer rising to her lips: God give me the courage to live here and d
o my duty.

  In the dormitory, they were placed at the end of the long row of beds, with extra bed space and a washstand between the beds, providing welcome privacy, and spotless white curtains, which lifted in the breeze.

  The next morning they were able to see that the windows overlooked a romantic garden, a haven of quiet and calm in the midst of the city, which would become what she loved more than anything else. She liked to stroll there in the birdsong of early spring mornings or in the calm of the evening, within the shadows of its high walls, its row of pear trees, and its widespread acacia with the fine, feathery leaves, which trembled in the slightest breeze. It made her think of their childhood’s imaginary country, Angria, and long for her brother as he had once been. She would have liked to walk with him within such a sheltered garden as this, with its bright blooms, its graveled walks, and its romantic bower nestled in vines.

  From the start, in those first few February days, she admired the orderly but generous way Madame H. ran her school: the young girls were not starved or overworked or obliged to walk to church in wet boots, as Charlotte had once been. Lessons were at reasonable hours: from nine to twelve and then again in the afternoon from two until four. The excellent food they had eaten that first evening proved to be a sample of what was to come. No burned porridge here. Exercise, too, was provided: fresh air in the garden. Mens sana in corpore sano.

  Or so she thought at first.

  She saw him the next morning in the large, sunny classroom where they took their lessons. He taught literature at his wife’s school and also at the one for boys next door. From the moment he entered the classroom, he seemed transformed. The dark beetle had become a black swan, the rarest of birds. Monsieur H. sailed in fast, wings spread, obviously in an altered, expansive mood. He was already talking fast, moving his hands furiously through the bright air, as though he were on urgent business. Now, as he mounted the platform, she noticed the broad chest, the strength of the legs, the smiling mouth, the intensity of the black eyes.

  He commanded his pupils to sit up and listen. “Ecoutez,” he trumpeted with authority, and his gaze roamed the room fiercely, searching for an inattentive gaze. He was obviously enjoying himself, the admiring looks of this crowd of young women. When he had their complete attention, he proceeded to read from Racine’s Phèdre in a fine, deep, resonant voice. He rendered Hippolyte’s lines with such feeling and so much expression that, despite her limited French, she forgot where she was, swept away. When he came to a breathless halt and looked around the classroom and the silent, awestruck pupils, she thought, I am falling in love, falling in love with language, with these sensuous words.

  She listened to him as he analyzed what he had read, probing and darting with daring and eloquence. Despite her limited understanding of the language, she was immediately aware of this man’s original mind, his deep comprehension of the many layers of the difficult text. She watched him use all his enthusiasm, his strength of mind and body, to claim the attention, and the hearts and minds, of these young women. Suddenly, she became aware, her mouth was open and her breathing shallow.

  Then he handed back the girls’ homework, his pupils coming up to claim their work. She saw his expression change again and again, withering one pupil with the movement of lip or nostril and elevating the next with the upturn of an eyebrow. Some wept; others beamed, their faces lit with delight. Sometimes he would produce a little gift for a favorite student who had pleased him particularly, bringing forth something, a bonbon or gourmandise from one of his numerous pockets, like a conjuror from a hat.

  She knew she wanted to please this man, to see his expression alter, to delight his eyes. She wanted one of his sweet gifts.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Glimmerings

  Her father stirs beside her. He gropes in his darkness, and she arrests his wandering hand and imprisons it in both of hers.

  “Read me something, dear child, will you? You are my vision. God bless you, child, and reward you,” he says. Gone is the old autocratic tone, the aggravation barely concealed beneath the pious Christian pronouncements, the threats of punishment for sins.

  Sitting by her blinded, silenced father, she dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice. She writes from experience, using what she knows of life, of literature, of love, plunging into the midst of her tale, not wasting the reader’s time or trying her patience with lengthy preliminaries.

  This time, she will not hide behind the persona of a man, as she did in her novel The Professor, with its two brothers in conflict, or as her younger sister has at the start of her book: no Crimsworth, no Lockwood. Nor will she use the Byronic heroes from her early works: no Wellesley, no Townshend, and above all, no Chief Genius Branii, to tell his tale of war, blood, mire, death, and disaster.

  She remembers the direct, engaging voice of Robinson Crusoe—indeed, she feels like Robinson Crusoe, abandoned on her desert island—and she writes as though recounting her own adventures. “An autobiography,” she writes at the top of the page. She will make them think this is the truth, and it will be.

  In their rejection letter, the editors have asked for an exceptional incident. She will give them one—no: many of them. She will give them mystery. She will use compression and little explanation, plunging into action. Above all, no grumbling. She will write out of rage at injustice and arrogance, the religious humbugs, the exploiters.

  She works on the first scene, writing rapidly, seeing it all vividly, the shadowy picture emerging fast from the darkness of her mind, this shadowy room: the rainy, gray November day, the aunt’s bitter words to the child. “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance,” the aunt tells the child, her darlings clustered around her before the fire.

  This new story of an orphan develops with a kind of urgency she has never known before. She has read and written so much, from such a young age. She knows the child’s position in this alien family will yield a steady stream of pathos. She knows how to create suspense by putting a fragile creature in immediate jeopardy and by making her fight back with spirit and justice. “What does Bessie say I have done?” she has the child retort to the aunt. Let the editor, the reader, put this down!

  She contrasts the plain, ten-year-old girl with her richer, better-looking cousins. She invents a bully, a fourteen-year-old boy, John Reed—drawn from her days as governess—a fat child who gorges himself on cakes and sweetmeats. He has sallow skin and two spoiled sisters. How she has suffered at the expense of spoiled children whose doting parents could find no fault in them! She makes her heroine small for her age, delicate, and, like herself, plain. She conjures up a disapproving aunt, a mercurial servant girl.

  Charlotte knows about the structure of stories and novels: her beloved Bunyan, Scott, Byron, the German Romantics, the French novels, the great Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle. She has listened to her teacher’s admonitions to imitate classic works. She remembers the fairy tale, where there is an abandoned child, a Cinderella, the parents absent or dead, the aggressor brought swiftly onto the scene. She knows readers will recognize themselves here, all those who had too many brothers and sisters, who were lost in the midst of the solitude of a large family, as she was—or those who had no family at all. An orphan is not so far from a middle child, a third child, soon to be one of six motherless children, with their remote father shut away in his study, muffled in grief. She will avoid mawkishness by creating the complexity of a real child’s mind: this child will be no angel.

  She remembers her aunt’s preference for the other children. She makes up a child who dares to ask what most would want to ask of the uncomprehending adults around her, had they the courage—a bright, brave, imaginative child, the child she would have liked to be. Like Charlotte now in the somber room, turning the pages of a familiar book, this child is glad of a quiet moment to study the pictures, the words that both echo the loneliness in her heart and carry her away from her solitary place in this family. She dreams
of shadowy realms, frozen wastes, uncharted territories. The child is almost happy.

  The desolate day outside, the loneliness of the child within the heart of the family, leads to the reading of the book, the escape into pictures, into a dream world. She creates a moment of hope, a slight pause before violence. Perhaps things will be better for her heroine in her hideout, in her world of dreams. Perhaps things will be better for Charlotte, too, starting this new book, alone with her father at her side. Her spirit lifts.

  The name of her character and of her book comes to her casually, as she is busy with other things. She thinks of it as she adjusts her father’s blanket and lifts a cup to his lips, as he stirs, mutters something, stretches out a hand.

  “Are you really there, my dear?” he asks.

  “Of course, Papa,” she says, but she is not really there. She plunges on and on into the silvery depths. She floats through the autumn night and leaves this place behind.

  It comes to her out of thin air. She is not sure if she has heard such a name. Was there someone she knew with that name? Does it come from the family arms she once saw in a church, or the river she knows well, the beautiful valley of the Ayre? Or is it a name that comes from air, perhaps, or fire? Fire and ire will be in the book: rage at the world as it is. Unfair! Unfair! Ire and eyer: she is the one who now sees in her father’s place. She has become the voyeur, the observer. Plain Jane, Emily Jane, her beloved sister’s second name, Jane, so close to Joan, brave Joan of Arc, Jane so close to Janet, Jeanette, little Jane. A name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth amid hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.