Becoming Jane Eyre (20 page)

Anne looks at Charlotte’s flushed cheeks and the harsh glitter in her eyes. Is this really what bothers her sister, or does she not want to be associated with their work? Is she afraid that the unfavorable reviews of their books will influence the reception of her own? Is she tired of their riding on the coattails of her
Jane Eyre
?

For a moment, Anne almost wishes none of them had ever written a book or certainly ever brought their words before the public. Is the game worth the candle?

Despite Charlotte’s disapproval, Anne has been determined, indeed, felt it was her duty, difficult as it might be to render it, to warn her readers of all the dreadful consequences of inebriation. She needed to reach out to others who might be similarly afflicted. She labored hard to reproduce truthfully and without recourse to sentimentality or obfuscation exactly what she has seen at close hand in the houses of the wealthy where she has worked: the swearing and brawling, the maudlin speeches, the boasting and blaspheming under the influence of drugs and drink.

She has wanted to warn the public, too, of allowing a child excessive freedom. She has tried to stress the necessity of bringing up a child, whatever his class or kind, with the sort of discipline that was essentially lacking in Branwell’s life.

And is not her Huntingdon akin to Charlotte’s Rochester? Still, she sees Charlotte’s point and understands her ire.

“What are we to do?” Anne asks her older sisters, as she did the year before. She has no wish to antagonize Charlotte further.

Charlotte continues, “This is just another example of your publisher’s duplicity! It would have been much better to change houses.”

Anne looks across the room at Emily, who is smiling with a defiant coldness that alarms her. Charlotte says, “We will have to straighten this out. This charge will have to be refuted. We will have to reveal our identity, tell George Smith who we are, that we are three—three sisters.”

Emily, who has been sitting very still, now rises and paces in her deliberate and energetic way. Hands behind her back, she is followed by her big dog, who pushes his head into her hand. Her eyes dark with anger, she says, “We all promised never to reveal our identities. We understood that from the start. You cannot strip me of this essential cover! I could never have envisaged writing my book otherwise. First, you forced me to publish my very private poems, for an uncomprehending public. Now you want to expose me to the public. It is all very well for you, with your success, to step out of the shadows, but think about me. You know what the critics have already said about my book. What will they say if they discover it was written by a woman, the daughter of a country parson? Have the kindness to leave me out of this.”

“But everyone thinks our books were written by one person—and that is not true!” Charlotte says.

“What does it matter what the world thinks? We know the truth. When we are dead will be soon enough for everyone to find out,” Emily says, turning on her heels and staring fiercely at Charlotte.

“But I cannot do this to my publishers,” Charlotte replies firmly, looking up at Emily. “It is a practical matter. You must understand that. It’s also a question of my integrity.” She adds, “Besides, there have been other sources of confusion I would like to clear up.”

Anne cannot deny her eldest sister’s reasoning. She says, “She is right about this, Emily. Charlotte and I should go immediately up to London to see her publishers and sort this out. There is no other way.”

“As you wish,” Emily says, eyeing Anne coldly. She turns toward Charlotte and adds, “If you are going ahead with this, you should first tell Papa. Let him read
Jane Eyre
. Let him into the secret, before all the others. Let him share your success.”

“Read him some of the good reviews you’ve had,” Anne urges Charlotte. “He will surely be very proud.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

S
he will tell her father about her book, Charlotte thinks, if not about theirs. Though a few reviewers have attacked her “coarseness, lack of femininity,” these reviews seem only to have spurred the sales. Her only sadness is that her sisters’ books have been compared so unfavorably to her own.

The letter that gave her more pleasure than all the good reviews together came from the great Thackeray, the living author she admires most. When she dedicated the second edition to him, she discovered why he had sat up all night reading her book: she has told his story of a mad wife shut away, a husband tied reluctantly to this burden. This is a coincidence that has worked in her favor. Perhaps fame is always a series of circumstances of this kind.

But now people are saying that she was a governess in his household and the model for his Becky Sharp in
Vanity Fair
. She will have to step out of the shadows of her anonymity. She will have to declare her gender, her name, at least to her publishers, if not to the world at large.

She will always be grateful to George Smith.
The Professor
, though he had rejected it, elicited such a kind letter from him that she had almost preferred it to a cursory acceptance. He asked if she had anything else in hand. Indeed, she told him, a three-volume work, almost finished. Then she had completed
Jane Eyre
, spurred on by these encouraging words and the thought that a receptive publisher was waiting to read it.

She has given her readers a happy but believable ending: “Reader, I married him,” she has written. Mr. Rochester, damaged by the inhabitant of the upper floor at Thornfield, as her father has been by his son, is not the man he was. She has described a happy marriage, one where Edward Rochester, going to consult an eminent oculist, gradually recovers his sight. He is now able to find his way without being led by her hand. Like her father, he can see the sky again, the hills around him, and his darling boy, who has inherited the color of his eyes.

She has ended her book with an account of the curate, St. John, who has continued resolutely along the way he has chosen as soldier in the army of the Church. “Firm, faithful, and devoted; full of energy and zeal and truth, he labors for his race,” she has written about the man Jane refused to marry, who is dying in India while she lives on happily with her Edward at Ferndean in England. She has taken her revenge on all the narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and self-righteous curates in her life, who have used religion as a way of controlling others, of proving they are better than the rest. Yet, prophetically, she has given him the last word. She ends her book with St. John’s words, which are also the last in the Bible, from the Book of Revelation, “My Master,” he says, “has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly,—‘Surely I come quickly!’ and hourly, I more eagerly respond, ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.’ ”

Thanks to this book, she has reached the large public she has always dreamed she might reach. When Anne asked her if she was surprised by this success, she told her she was not entirely surprised. The emotions she has felt writing this book have been such that she felt her readers, too, would experience them.

She will let her father know that all those hours she sat writing by his side in the half dark in Manchester and the days she worked on her return to Haworth have not been in vain. She fears her father might hear of it from another source. Were he to read this book, would he not recognize parts of his daughter’s life, perhaps even different facets of himself in its pages? She must be the one to take off the mask, to speak up and declare her identity.

“I’ll tell him after dinner,” she tells her sisters.

But she stands before the door of his study for a long moment with her book in her hands. What if it were to anger him? Can she really step out of the shadows of her childhood, her deference to him, and admit she has written not just the light poetry that he has done himself or even a novelette like his own
Maid of Killarney
, which he might have condoned, but this book that has been both acclaimed and denounced as shocking, coarse, anti-Christian, and antiestablishment? Can she own these words, which speak of the longings of a woman for fulfillment, for love, for the same rights as a man? How will her father, an eighteenth-century man, a parson from a backward Irish village, respond to such a cry for liberty and love from a woman, his daughter, the one who nursed him in the blindness she has reproduced in these pages?

Then she realizes that she will follow Anne’s suggestion. She will have recourse to his snobbery, to his pride. She will read him the glowing reviews, where her work has been compared favorably to the great writers of the day. He will respond to the praise from the world of letters, if not to the words of her book.

She knocks on his study door, and awaits his summons to enter, holding her book behind her back, the best reviews folded in its pages. She finds him sitting at his writing table, bent over in the pool of light from the lamp, making notes in the margin of his
Modern Domestic Medicine
in his strong hand, crossing his t’s widely, his two clay pipes and his spittoon before him. She is filled with pity at the sight of him straining his eyes, no doubt, to find some hope for his beloved son.

She approaches quietly and looks over his shoulder at the open page on
delirium tremens
, which he is studying with the help of his large magnifying glass. She is suddenly filled with rage. Is his only concern, then, still his boy? Why does the prodigal get the feast and not the dutiful child? She has always disliked this parable, felt its injustice. Her brother has always been her father’s obsession, a sore he continues to lick at, as a dog would. He has never felt the same way about his dutiful girls, who have struggled so valiantly, have taken care of him and his household, and have suffered so painfully from their lungs. Why is he not studying a page on asthma, which afflicts poor Anne? Does he not hear her struggling to breathe all through the night?

“What is it?” he asks curtly, looking up at her. He has had another bad night with his boy, and his blue eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot.

Again, she hesitates to bear news that may not bring him joy. Her success will only make his son’s life seem more lamentable. Perhaps his own as well? He has sold few copies of his books. Since the death of his wife, he has not published a word. But now she cannot retreat. Also, she wants him to read this book. Her written words settle all accounts. She tells him she has been writing a book, and she would like him to read it. He responds without any apparent surprise, saying, “I’m afraid the manuscript, my dear, would try my eyes.”

All that scribbling, he thinks. He remembers the scratching of the pencil in the dark, day after day, as he lay in that room in Manchester. Is this the product? He has been blinded like Saul and then regained his sight, but his eyes are still not strong. How can she expect him to read her illegible, cramped hand? He knows her tiny script discourages any perusal, indeed, was probably invented for that reason as a child. Why is she not content to show her sisters her work, as she usually does?

As if he didn’t have enough on his mind with her brother begging him for money to spend on drink and drugs or wrestling with him in the night for the gun on the wall, so that he never knows which one of them will emerge alive in the morning to stumble down the stairs. Last night he had sat up until late in the parlor, his head in his hands, listening to the shouting and cries, the beating on the upstairs door, the screams coming from the locked bedroom where the boy had been confined upstairs. He thinks of it as a kind of madness that comes upon his son and takes him away from him. Suddenly he is elsewhere, this beloved boy, a stranger to him.

Charlotte protests and says that this book is not just a manuscript. It will not be difficult to read. It has been printed. She takes it from behind her back and lifts it up toward him, a gift.

“Printed!” he exclaims, appalled, putting down his magnifying glass. Now, he suspects, the girl has lost her mind, too. He had had such dreams once. But he has faced reality, curtailed his efforts. He has not tried to publish or even write anything for years apart from his letters, his weekly sermons—and even those are often composed on the spot.

He has suspected that his poor girls were trying to publish something from time to time. What is this mania for fame and glory in his family? Why can they not, as good Christian women, accept their poverty, their insignificance, as their mother did? What folly! Who would be interested in their words? Still, he knew that there had been letters sent off from the parsonage and packages received. He saw the brown paper with its many addresses, one after the other crossed out. Poor, misguided girls—who did they think would publish their work?

He recalls a time when the postman had asked him about a Currer Bell, for whom so many letters had arrived—a pseudonym, he presumes. He wonders why they chose that name and hopes it has nothing to do with his Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, a good man, perhaps, but poor and undistinguished and certainly not good enough for any of his daughters.