A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  We’d moved across the country for the fifth time when I was seven, leaving our extended family of grandparents and beloved aunts and cousins behind. Once school started again, my life at home was dolls and books and musical theater and documentaries on Friday nights, eating pizza with my whole family. My life at school was floundering to keep up with the pop culture references of my classmates who were allowed to watch TV on school nights and vain attempts to corral my innate lack of cool into something my peers might tolerate. As I made my way into middle school, I was always pudgy and awkward, never put-together or capable of doing things the right way. My journals from this period are so lonely and hapless I shudder to reread them: lists of makeup from Seventeen magazine I thought would help me fit in, frantic records of the minutiae of social interactions in search of encouraging subtext, and dramatic fantasy denunciations of the class bullies, who made fun of my chubbiness, my tendency to anger, my obvious crushes, my know-it-all pride.

  In 1835, at the age of nineteen, Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher, while Emily, seventeen, attended as a pupil. The fragmentary journals she kept there illustrate the frustration of being caught between Angria, the rich and vibrant imaginary world she had created at home, and the daily “cheerless” drudgery of life at school. One of Charlotte’s journal pages from this time begins, “I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.”6 Emily’s intense homesickness led her home in October. Anne took her place and remained for two more years.

  This is a common pattern. Charlotte blazes a trail, Emily follows, Branwell strikes out in another direction. Then Emily quits, Branwell gets fired, and Anne steps up to put in a sustained, dedicated, unappreciated effort. Anne fell ill in 1837, prompting Charlotte to leave Roe Head with a good deal of resentment against Miss Wooler for not taking Anne’s condition seriously. They eventually made up, and Charlotte returned to teach for an additional year in 1838. All together, the sisters only had seven years of structured education outside the home, which was enough to equip them for a career in the liminal space between guest and servant, practically the only respectable option for gently born young women. They became governesses. And unsurprisingly, so did many of their characters.

  WE were living on Marquette Street when it all began, in a quiet Virginia suburb just outside of Washington, DC. I had a fort up on stilts in the backyard that I called a treehouse, though it was neither in a tree nor a properly enclosed house. I loved to smuggle pickles and cheese and a stack of books out there and lay under the trees for hours. I read alone a great deal—YA fantasy by Mercedes Lackey, vintage L. M. Montgomery, fairy tales and the D’Aulaires’ books of mythology, stories from American Girl magazine written in the 1950s that advised young women how to let down their hair, be themselves, and still get taken to the sock hop.

  That Easter, underneath the basket of candy and plastic grass the Easter Bunny (aka my mother) had left me, there was a stack of books contributed by my father. I picked up the heaviest one and looked at the cover. A young woman, with the faintly sad expression of someone who has never received a present, gazed calmly off into the middle distance. It sits in a place of honor at my desk now. The back cover has worn off; the glued spine is exposed. My name is written in my mother’s neat handwriting on the title page, probably from when I took it to summer camp. Many pages are dog-eared; favorite passages are annotated in pencil and pen, exclamation points and underlinings and smiley faces and frowns. Makeshift bookmarks and receipts peek out between the pages, mementos from long-ago waiting rooms and car rides.

  A round-trip Metro-North ticket from when I lived in Harlem and commuted to Connecticut every day for my first grown-up job. A stub from a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. An empty white card-sized envelope. A fragment of paper with “Don’t lose it!” written on it. Grains of sand fall out if I gently shake it, from trips to the beach. I’ve collected fancier editions at used book sales and sturdier editions for travel, and even a board book version illustrated with felt dolls that reduces the story to one word per page (girl, red, stand, woman, fall, help, kiss, stairs, leave, cold, hot, care), but this copy is still my favorite. This is what I think of, when I think of Jane Eyre.

  Jane

  I saw a girl sitting on a stone bench near; she had bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seemed intent: from where I stood I could see the title—it was “Rasselas;” a name that struck me as strange, and consequently attractive. In turning a leaf she happened to look up, and I said to her directly:—

  “Is your book interesting?” I had already formed the intention of asking her to lend it to me some day.

  “I like it,” she answered, after a pause of a second or two, during which she examined me.

  “What is it about?” I continued. I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend anything serious or substantial.

  —Jane Eyre, Chapter V

  As self-conscious literature-loving girls love Anne Shirley, as tomboy writers love Jo March, as stubborn girls love Mary Lennox, as dramatic girls love Margaret Thursday, I, who am often anxious and awkward, love Jane. I love her fire. Her fire, and her isolation. Despite the reticence to talk to strangers, which I share, she is full of opinions, and she knows the value of having a place to go off to by herself.

  The passage above is from Jane’s first meeting with Helen Burns, a too-good-to-be-true character (based on Charlotte’s sister Maria) who becomes Jane’s best friend at Lowood. “Strange, and consequently attractive,” encapsulates Jane Eyre almost perfectly. It may not have had any geniis or fairies or pictures, but it introduced me to the coming-of-age genre. Of the dozens of books I read as a child, only Jane Eyre met me where I was and took me with her as we grew up.

  Without Jane’s passion, Jane Eyre is basically a series of dismal British buildings populated by mostly unpleasant people with well-stocked libraries. Though technically her sister Anne beat her to it, Charlotte usually gets credit for the first plain, poor heroine in Victorian literature. Jane has neither wealth nor beauty to recommend her, only her own indefatigable moral code and a sharp sense of humor. After being sent to school, where she chafes under the cruelty and deprivation of the administrators, she buries her rage, loses her only friend to consumption, becomes a top student, and finally emerges as a teacher, trained to educate the children of wealthy families.

  In the early days of my relationship with Jane Eyre, I identified first with young Jane and later with her pupil, Adele. I had already been the new kid in school twice when we arrived in Virginia the summer before third grade. At the magnet school where I was enrolled, many kids had attended neighborhood schools together for years. I knew nobody and lacked the social confidence to connect with new people easily. After I struggled bravely through the first few days in Mrs. McEllhatton’s class (I believe what I actually did was cry at my desk), she assigned me a friend, a fellow bookish type who liked to sing, and whose guinea pig had recently given birth to an unexpected litter. That would cheer anybody up. Betsy and I spent weekends under her kitchen table in “Fort Guinea” eating pizza and talking, taking occasional breaks for Nintendo or to dress our American Girl dolls. I also met neighborhood kids who were kind enough to ask why I was sitting on the curb crying in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. We spent that summer and several after that exploring the woods that bordered their backyards and throwing rocks in the creek—we kept busy, but they weren’t what Anne of Green Gables would call “bosom companions.” We mostly confined our conversation to Power Rangers, Sabina’s new Sega, and which cushions protected us from lava and which from ice monsters. I joined local youth basketball and soccer leagues, competed on the swim team, played the viola in the school orchestra, sang in choruses, tried out for plays. I gravitated toward creative, funny peopl
e, and gradually found a social niche where I could relax a little.

  Safe at home, when I wasn’t dancing to Broadway soundtracks in the living room or practicing my jumpshot in the backyard, I spent entire days at Thornfield. One of the secrets I always kept was that I still played with dolls at home—and not just Barbies, which plenty of my peers would have sheepishly admitted to, but baby and toddler-sized dolls that I dressed up and carried with me through make-believe dramas. I pretended I was one of Jane’s classmates, or imagined myself as a second ward of Mr. Rochester’s, being taught alongside Adele. At school, even with a friend like Betsy to lean on, I felt like a freak, awkward, dorky, and out of place, always spoiling for a fight. But inside, in the pages of Jane Eyre, I found sanctuary. And even when something unpleasant happened, I consoled myself that it gave me something else in common with Jane.

  I always lost myself in books on the way to and from school; one afternoon I borrowed the only class copy of Flight 116 Is Down, a YA thriller about a teenage girl who survives a plane crash, which the teacher was reading aloud to us. I borrowed it to finish on the bus because I couldn’t take the suspense, and walked from the bus stop to my house without looking up. But then I was absent the next day, so the class had to wait through a long three-day weekend before they got to finish the story. The sixth-grade boys turned vicious, mocking me for being so weird I’d taken the book home in the first place and so stupid I’d forgotten to bring it back. When I appealed to the teacher for justice, all he said was, “I think you deserve it, Miranda, don’t you?” The entire class laughed, and I knew there would be no protection from the sixth-grade boys that year.

  And there wasn’t. They wanted me to be sure I knew I was fat, my haircut was short and ugly, I was short and ugly. Nobody wanted to be on my team. They didn’t like what I liked, or understand who I was. Every small injustice stung, but I would remember Jane Eyre and how she endured that insufferable Brocklehurst’s accusation, grit my teeth, and stomp off. I may have eventually learned to fake being “normal” in short, controlled bursts, but I was never fully myself in “real life.” I couldn’t be. I wasn’t free to make mistakes, or get excited; I couldn’t count on a generous reception. Most friendships didn’t last—the unlucky target of my friendship would tire of my drowning-girl’s eagerness, and I’d feel alone again.

  THE vivid imagination of my childhood was reborn as fanatical, hopeless romanticism when I reached adolescence. I was constantly falling in and out of love. The objects of my affection were remote, unreachable, disdainful, assuming they knew I existed at all. The patience I demonstrated as I waited to have my heart sufficiently broken may be the only patience I’ve ever shown in my entire life.

  As I outgrew Disney movies and MGM musicals, I studied the romantic comedies of the 1990s like they were Homer and Virgil. I was eager to unlock the secret wisdom of Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s All That and Get Over It and Boys and Girls and any other movie where boy meets girl (lifelong best friendship optional), girl changes herself to appeal more to boy, boy finally falls for her, and they go to prom. One of my irrational regrets was being the only person in my family who didn’t need glasses, as it robbed me of the opportunity to suddenly become more attractive by letting down my hair and removing them.

  I imagined I had outgrown Jane Eyre, too—that is, until I discovered an entirely different book when I reread it in between romance novels at sixteen. Suddenly I understood that the really significant plot points did not involve young Jane reading books and resenting her relations, but teen Jane falling in love! It’s a Gothic rom com! Suddenly aware that he was not just rude to Jane, he was in love with her, I fixated on Edward Fairfax Rochester like a lovelorn baby duck. Their meet-cute alone was enough to send me into raptures, lighting a torch I carry still, but that proposal? The devastation of a canceled wedding? Jane’s heroic departure into an uncertain night? The sweet, teasing reunion that leads us to one of the most famous four-word phrases in literature?* How had I missed this?!

  As a kid I would have been perfectly happy to follow Jane into some sort of wild fantasy adventure after she befriends the spectral beast called a Gytrash she thought she was about to meet on that misty country lane. But older and wiser, I was glad to find that the horse tramping out of the fog bore Mr. Rochester upon its back. When Rochester is thrown to the ground and Jane rushes to assist him, we get our first glimpse of the man himself:

  He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked.1

  However unpolished his manners, Rochester was a very appealing alternative to the polar opposites that defined my world—he was neither too godlike to notice Jane (and by egocentric extension, me) nor too average to be enticing. And what a departure this was from the typical romance I’d been stuffing myself with—our hero is not handsome and this plain heroine confidently shrugs off any sense of insecurity because gorgeous, charismatic people have nothing to offer her anyway. Jane’s first reaction to this legendary literary lover is, “Oh, he’s rude. What a relief.” She answers his questions frankly and honestly, unashamed by any disparity in their stations. She doesn’t try to be anyone she’s not. I have still never had a conversation with a stranger where I spoke unapologetically about myself, and I have been attempting to live my life asking “What Would Jane Eyre Do?” for years.

  Rochester represented all the brusque, mature manliness that I had never encountered off of a stage or screen but dearly hoped awaited me in real life. He was John Wayne in The Quiet Man, Yul Brynner in The King and I, Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, Humphrey Bogart in everything. He was everything I imagined I wanted—older, world-wise, smart, curious, witty, and intensely interested in me (well, in Jane). I ignored the gruff surliness and the fact that he was clearly hiding a gigantic secret in his garret. I thought, as everyone who idolizes an enigmatic stranger thinks, “Oh, he’d never be that way with me.” As Jane and Rochester commence their Beauty and the Beast–style friendship, Rochester sees Jane for the diamond (well, perhaps a really well-formed pearl) in the rough that she is, and speaks to her like an equal. Jane is won by his intelligence, his humor, and the dark, twisty past for which she believes he can find redemption.

  Rochester looms so large in my romantic pantheon that Mr. Darcy is positively bloodless by comparison. Romeo seems like a quitter, and Teddy “Laurie” Lawrence a mere child. When Jane Eyre was first published, critics found him equally compelling and alarming. The North American Review observed, “The hero, Mr. Rochester… became a great favorite in the boarding schools and in the worshipful society of governesses. That portion of Young America known as ladies’ men began to swagger and swear in the presence of the gentler sex, and to allude darkly to events in their lives which excused impudence and profanity.”2

  Like most geeky, pudgy kids, I was well aware of the popular cream of the crop—they were shiny, they were poised, they were slender and well dressed and we had as little in common as the sea does with a plastic bag that floats in it. My dating pool consisted of dorky, polite guys who were already my friends, and, if I could have only realized it then, offbeat, funny girls who found my enthusiasm engaging instead of embarrassing. They were all sweet and respectful, with braces just like mine, but there was no mystery, no magnetism, no pulsating dark heart to uncover and tame. I related to Jane and Rochester in different ways, but it was their dynamic together that I admired most. Together, they were everything I aspired to and had no hope of having for years. Being as compelling and distant as Rochester would require age, maturity, and sustained emotional dysfunction. Becoming Jane would mean acquiring a sturdy backbone, a sense of self, inexorable personal discipline, and
a naïveté that could survive even the most taxing adversity. At least the naïveté I had covered. Everything else was as mysterious as whatever was going on with Grace Poole in the attic at Thornfield.

  Neither Jane nor I had ever been in love before, so when Rochester, already smitten, leads her to believe that he will marry a wealthy, shallow woman named Blanche Ingram, we were both convinced by his performance. Jealous and depressed, Jane decides to end the prolonged agony of living with someone she believes cannot love her, and find a new position. You might expect a poignant goodbye scene, full of unshed tears and unspoken feelings, in the proud British tradition of emotional understatement. Think of the scene in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth and Anne Eliot finally get their quiet moment to reconcile. Barely anyone says anything, but a hand is fervently pressed, and voilà, they are engaged. Here is what we get instead:

  First Mr. Rochester solemnly agrees that Jane must leave Thornfield, that she cannot stay Adele’s governess once his bride arrives. He mentions he has found her a place with some friends in Ireland (Jane is appalled), asks her what she thinks of his Blanche, who has shown herself to be selfish and cruel. Jane holds back her scorn, with difficulty. Rochester wonders, oh so nonchalantly, if Jane will perhaps be a little sad to leave, for any little old reason at all. Would she miss the company of the venerable Mrs. Fairfax? Think fondly of the architecture, or the landscaping, perhaps? Fed up with his trolling, Jane lets him have it: