Becoming Jane Eyre (25 page)

But she leaves George Smith without any promise of marriage or words of love. She is obliged to retreat, breathless, exhausted, to the house of her friend, at Brookroyd near Leeds, where she lies in the guest room and dreams of the couchant crag lion she has seen in Edinburgh. She tells Ellen N. that Edinburgh is to London as a vivid page of history to a dull treatise on political economy. Ellen is left to nurse her in her fragile condition, while her father writes her letters from Haworth, working himself up into a state of extreme anxiety about her health and perhaps even more over her heart. He begs her to come home, insisting that the bracing air of Haworth will soon sweep away what he calls the dust, smoke, and impure malarial air of London.

Then, like Monsieur H., and with a sickening familiarity, the letters from George Smith taper off into trivialities. Waiting for his letters becomes almost unbearable, and she tells herself she would prefer to know that none will ever arrive. But she cannot stop herself from writing to him. She writes him to say that her ability to continue her work depends on his offering her some hope, however small, in return. She needs his friendship, at least, as she once needed Monsieur H.’s. She has mistaken the transitory rain-pool for a perennial spring.

Under his mother’s indomitable pressure, her alarm, Charlotte presumes, he has given her up. She concludes that his interest in her was at best only in a valuable author who needed to be courted for a while.

All that remains is to transform him in her great book,
Villette
, into Graham Bretton, in order to oblige her publisher to read of himself described with all his emotional limitations, just as she obliged her father to read of his blindness in Mr. Rochester. She re-creates for his perusal and that of the world a man of limited passions, and no one besides his beloved mother can lay claim to them. The heroine turns to another, someone clearly modeled on her first passionate love, Monsieur H. In the end she writes the book for him, for the first person to discern her gift, her range, her brilliant verbal promise, with his observant eye, and in her heart she dedicates it to her Master with gratitude.

Finally, George Smith writes no more. He sends a smaller check than she has expected, a much smaller one than he pays certain of his authors.

She waits once again for letters, becoming increasingly depressed and finally ill when all that arrives from London is a simpering epistle from his dear Mama announcing, in a most circumlocutory way, his betrothal to another. She writes a letter of congratulation to George Smith:

Haworth, Thursday,
29
June
1854

 

B
efore breakfast she stands in the dim, early morning light in the little stone church, like her heroine, Jane Eyre, but with her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, at her side. In white embroidered muslin, head drooping like a snowdrop, she glances at him from under her pretty bonnet, trimmed with green leaves. Shyly, and with little hope of happiness, she looks at this tall, handsome, bearded man, part of whose name she has adopted once before.

She says the habitual words. No one protests or finds reasons to gainsay this marriage, not her father, who is not even present, certainly not her old teacher from Roe Head, who has come to stand by her.

At the last minute, already dressed in his wedding finery, her father has pulled out, collapsing into a chair with some imaginary complaint. He has fought this union fiercely from the start, coming up with all sorts of strong arguments. He has invented ailments for Mr. Nicholls from which he has never suffered. In the end, though, he has lost the battle. It has occurred to Charlotte that men are full of petulant nonsense, and that their supposed strength is rather less than a girl’s.

The wedding might never have taken place had not the old servant asked her father, within Charlotte’s ear-shot, whether he wished to kill her by interfering with it. He has relented with the promise that the couple will live with him at the parsonage, that he will be taken care of until his death, and that he will not have to give his daughter away. He has found his curate unworthy of his now famous daughter’s hand, though he comes from a much finer Irish family than his own peasant forebears.

But how could she refuse her Arthur, who remained so faithful at her side through so much tragedy? How could she refuse him, whom she found howling at the gate, begging her to give him some small shred of hope, who wrote her so many desperate letters, just like those she wrote to her teacher and her publisher? How she has recognized this passion, so much like her own had been! He was in love in the worst way: without reason, without pleasure, and without grace. How could she not pity him? She cannot but marry him, reader, despite her fears and misgivings and though her mind is on her ghosts, those absent ones who are ever-present in her heart, dearer to her than life, who are buried in the church, her two elder sisters and her two younger ones, Emily and Anne, who went so fast, one six months after the other, following on her brother, who went so quickly before them.

Again, she recalls Anne’s generous dying words and takes courage standing in the church by her new husband’s side, glad of his support and love. She lets him take her hand, fold back her veil, and kiss her on her lips.

What she does not yet know, of course, is that this will be a surprisingly happy marriage, if all too brief, and that she and her Arthur will truly become of one flesh and one bone, as she has described in her master-piece. They will travel together to Wales and Ireland, where she will be impressed by Arthur’s distinguished family, by their home, Cuba House, and by his discretion and modesty.

Like Jane, she will realize that she is with child. She will not expect to die so soon. Within nine months of this wedding day, her father and her husband will stand together by her corpse. They will remain shackled together, as her father once was with her aunt. They will bury her in the same church.

She cannot know that her father will outlive her by six years, with the husband he never wanted for her, never respected. The indomitable old man will die at the age of eighty-four. God will continue to protect him from illness and bodily harm, as he had prayed that He would do. He will spend his days alone, shut up in the silence of his study, with his medical dictionary and his clay pipes.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation.

In the long darkness of his dreary nights, he will lie awake, straining to hear his children’s footsteps, as he has heard them so often, walking round and round the dining room table, making up their stories, speaking them aloud into the dark, laughing, hushing one another for fear of waking him, their voices rising up the stairs as they come to him. “Hush, you will wake Papa,” he will hear them say in his mind. He will lie awake in the dark and strain to hear the sound of their voices, or even the thump of old Flossy’s tail on the stone floor. He will think he hears the sound of a pencil scratching.

T
hough this book is a novel and its characters fictive, I remain indebted to the great Brontë biographers, Gaskell, Gérin, and Gordon, and to the many others who have written on the Brontës, as well as the Brontës’ letters, reviews, and, of course, their books, from which I have quoted freely.

The spark for this novel came from a line in Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Charlotte Brontë: “What happened as she sat with Papa in that darkened room in Boundary Street remains in shadow.” I have tried to imagine what might have happened during the writing of
Jane Eyre
in Manchester and Haworth, and how the book changed the lives of the Brontës and all the rest of us.

I am also, as always, grateful to my three beloved girls, Sasha, Cybele, and Brett, who have read my work over the years with such attention and love; to my agent of many years and many books, Robin Straus; to my friend Marnie Mueller; to my colleagues at Princeton and Bennington, and particularly to Joyce Carol Oates for her encouragement and support; and to my editor at Viking Penguin, Kathryn Court, for her vision and good judgment; and to Katherine Telischak.

In 1846, while tending to her sick father, Charlotte Brontë sits in a dark corner of their shared room and begins to write a novel about a young governess—a penniless woman desperate to find purpose and acceptance; a woman of hidden passions who falls deeply in love with the dark and brooding man who employs her; a woman who through faith and fortitude achieves her goals and proves her worth to herself and to the world. This is the story of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s classic heroine, but it is also the story of Charlotte herself, as imagined by Sheila Kohler. Using the biographies, letters, and literary works of the entire Brontë family, Kohler has crafted an engrossing and deeply moving vision of a life that melds fact and fiction, suffering and success in equal measure.

The daughter of a poor but respectable village parson, Charlotte knows tragedy from an early age, growing up in isolated North Yorkshire, where she witnesses the deaths of her mother and two of her sisters. Headstrong and smart, Charlotte is the oldest of the four remaining Brontë siblings, each of whom finds a way to deal with the family’s misfortunes: her sisters Emily and Anne harbor literary aspirations of their own, and her brother, Branwell, falls into drinking, drugs, and debt. In Charlotte, Kohler spotlights the frustrations of an ambitious and talented young woman in the oppressive and class-conscious world of the nineteenth century. With no prospect for marriage, no income or inheritance on which to live, and having failed at becoming a teacher and a governess, Charlotte is faced with a future where her only certainties are poverty and insignificance. But rather than crumbling under her own disappointment and the disapproval of others, Kohler’s heroine becomes more determined to achieve success, convinced of her talent as a writer and unafraid to challenge the conventions of society.

Full of exquisite detail, Kohler’s novel brings to life the hopes and dreams of the Brontë family, especially those of the three young women who would each become literary luminaries, producing the novels
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Agnes Grey
. Kohler is a perceptive and subtle writer, and digs deep into Charlotte Brontë’s psyche as she weighs her responsibilities to her family and to her art; she delivers an intimate and thoughtful account of the years 1846 through 1854, from the inception of
Jane Eyre
to Charlotte’s own untimely death.

Sheila Kohler is the author of the novels
Cracks
,
Crossways
, and
The Children of Pithiviers
, among others, and she has contributed articles to a wide variety of magazines and literary journals. Born in South Africa, she currently lives in New York City and teaches at Princeton. This is her seventh novel.

Of the biographies that you used in your research, which would you recommend to readers looking for more information on the life of Charlotte Brontë? Beyond
Jane Eyre
, which of the Brontës’ novels would you recommend to a reader wanting to become more familiar with the sisters’ work?

I would particularly recommend Lyndall Gordon’s
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
, which was really the inspiration for my book, as well as
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic biography. As for the Brontës’ novels,
Villette
is one of my great favorites, such a modern novel it seems to me, where Charlotte Brontë describes the loneliness of her life in Belgium with poignancy.
Wuthering Heights
, too, is a great favorite of mine and such a beautiful description of the passions of childhood. I would also recommend the lesser known
Agnes Grey
by the youngest Brontë girl. It is a precise and sensitive description of the life of a governess, the humiliations and trials of a young woman in love.