Becoming Jane Eyre

by Sheila Kohler

  She is even assigned a personal maid, who is willing to help her undress and manage her hair if she so desires, and who will even bring up her meals if she does not have the courage or the energy to go downstairs and face a room full of guests. She can choose to lie at her ease with a book or sit up at the writing table and correct her proofs.

  Sometimes Mrs. Smith knocks on the door, having carried up the tray herself, bringing some delicious dish she has ordered especially for her. “May I come in?” she says, peering round the door, coming and sitting on the bed beside her and chatting in her comfortable way. “You must bear up, my dear. You must not give way to despair. Your work is so important to us, to everyone.” She speaks and pats her on the cheek. Charlotte feels spoiled, watched over, cosseted, for the first time in her life.

  Sitting at the fine dining table decked with silver, delicious dishes, and peonies mixed with lilac, below a brilliant candelabra and on the left of a white-haired, distinguished member of the aristocracy who is making desperate attempts to draw her into the conversation, she remembers her wretched days as a teacher at Roe Head and as a governess. Here she is the one who sits, half-listening to the man at her side who is trying to impress her with an idea for a book he is attempting to write—“If I only had the time, I’m convinced I could do it,” he says.

  “Perhaps,” she says, looking at him.

  She remembers the large number of ladies and gentlemen sprawled on the velvet sofas of the grand house or sauntering about in the park, coming and going bewilderingly, or presiding in the evening at the dining table in their black ties, jewelry, and décolletés. When the gaze of one of them happened to fall on her as she walked against the walls, it seemed he or she saw nothing, less than nothing.

  She recalls that first dreadful breakfast with the small children who would not sit in their seats and how rudely they shouted at her: “You are a servant and stupid!” How she was spurned and looked down upon. How rude the children were to her.

  Here, George’s younger sisters and brother are extremely polite. They bring flowers for her room, curtsy, and shake her hand. The youngest, a pretty little girl who has taken a particular liking to her, takes her gently by the hand and asks her to read to her from a favorite book.

  When Charlotte rises from the table and goes into the drawing room, all eyes turn to her, not so much with admiration but with interest. They stare at her with curiosity. Some of them appear embarrassed. They notice her in her gray-pink dress, the light in her smoothly coiffed hair. She enjoys this attention in a shameless, childish way she cannot remember feeling since she was a girl. There is something exquisite at being wondered about.

  She spots the children’s governess, the Fraulein, sitting shyly with her sewing in the shadows of an alcove. She makes a point of singling her out, sitting next to her, and talking to her at length, remembering her wretched days in that position. “You must miss your home,” she says. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” she asks with longing. “Tell me about them.” But she is not left on her own with the Fraulein for long. Because of her Jane Eyre, everyone has come to the dinner to converse with her. They seek her out. It is she who has to put at ease the young, pretty woman in a pink dress who has come up to her and is stammering and shaking before her. “Your book was so b-b-b-beautiful,” she tells her. “I felt as if I was reading my own story.”

  “What a lovely thing to say. How kind of you,” she says.

  Her tastes are now consulted; her opinions on all sorts of odd questions are suddenly of value; she is treated as a precious and rather fragile thing. People want to find out who she really is. They want to know the facts behind her book, whether the school is based on a real one, whether someone as good as Helen Burns or as bad as Mr. Brocklehurst really existed. What they really want to know is whether she has written her own story into her novel; how much of it is true? How could she answer such a question? She doesn’t know the answer herself. Yet her own life, the tragic deaths of her sisters and her brother at such young ages, seems to interest people perhaps as much as her book.

  Even with these polite people around her, who try to please, with her obliging young publisher and his welcoming mother hovering near, she cannot help but hear her brother’s final prayers, her father’s final cries for him, and the unexpected last word that came forth from her brother’s lips: “Amen.”

  He had been ill for so long, so debilitated by his drunkenness, they had not realized the end was near. Yet a change had come over him as he neared his demise; he seemed suddenly filled with all the affection he had once felt for his family as a boy. She hears her father’s inconsolable cry at the death of his only son, calling out like David for his Absalom, “My son! My son!” She hears, too, her father’s ardent pleas not to abandon him. When she fell ill after the death of this brother she had loved and admired so much as a girl, “You must bear up for me!” her father said over and over again, as he had when he lay in the dark room in Manchester.

  She sees, too, her darling Emily, staggering down the stairs, a poor shadow in the last days of her life, insisting even then on fulfilling her household duties, feeding her Keeper, who followed her coffin and sat silently in the pew with the rest at her funeral and lay at her door waiting and howling, night after night. She has found Emily’s last lines: “No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere; I see Heaven’s glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.”

  She sees dear Anne, too, who, despite her firm faith in God, continued to hope for more time, valiant Anne who longed to do something good with her life and who in the end had asked to go back to the sea, to Scarborough. She hoped it might restore her, that she might be brought back to life in the place where she had spent a few happy moments and imagined an even happier moment for her Agnes Grey, who meets the curate she loves on the beach. It was a place where she sat at the window, the sun lighting up her face, looking across the bay, a place where she died with words of encouragement on her lips: “Take courage, take courage, Charlotte.”

  Charlotte tries to take courage, sitting here in the Smiths’ grand drawing room, surrounded by these elegant people—God give me courage to continue!—but she cannot help feeling alone, almost as much in her fame as she had once felt in her anonymity as a poor governess in the families who mocked and tormented her. Then, at least, she could think of her sisters, her brother, write to them when she retreated alone to her room or store up in her mind details of her life to recount at Christmas. Now she has to be careful what she tells her father, presenting only what he would want to hear about her life.

  How extraordinary and a little absurd it all seems, looking around the beautiful room at the company in their fine clothes. She is the same person, after all, yet suddenly here she is courted, praised, and flattered. Suddenly her life has become interesting to others because of Jane Eyre.

  At the same time, she is aware that George Smith’s mother, in her mauve dress—she seems to favor mauve—has her lively brown eyes on her, that she watches her closely with the same wariness as Madame H. did. Mrs. Smith stays close beside her all through the dinner party, hovering, to see if she needs anything, she says, but at the same time watching her especially if there are men, especially her boy, at her side. She brings her a cup of coffee in the drawing room herself, which Charlotte refuses. Surely the woman can see she presents no threat? Surely the mother is aware of her integrity, her shyness in company, her pure morals?

  She senses once again that she is being discussed. She is not even sure that someone has not gone through her things in her fine room, though perhaps it is only the maid who has pressed her dresses, washed her under-things, scented the folds of her gowns. She notices how the mother and son stop their whispering when she approaches them in the drawing room, and how they turn and lean closer to each other, sitting together on the sofa before the fireplace, when the guests have left.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Disappointment

&nb
sp; The mother enters her son’s bedroom to bring him his early morning tea and the newspaper herself.

  “You shouldn’t be up. It’s too early,” he says sleepily, stretching out a hand toward her and reclining on his plump pillows as she wakes him, coming into the room crooning, “Rise and shine, my boy.” She comes with the tray and sits beside him on his bed, smooths the embroidered linen sheets, pours the milk from the little silver pitcher, and drops in the sugar lumps, as she has done so often. As she stirs, round and round, she speaks to him in a low, dulcet voice. She says she knows it is early and he has much on his mind, but she needs to talk to him on a serious matter before he leaves for work.

  “And what matter could that be, Old Lady?” he says playfully, turning her ring around her ring finger. She looks at him lovingly, shakes her head and strokes his hair back from his handsome forehead. She takes an indirect approach, “Such a lovely person, so honest and well meaning, so serious, so earnest.”

  He knows whom she is talking about, of course. He pulls himself up slightly in the bed against the plump pillows and nods his head. He adds, “Such a gifted writer and an important one for us at the firm. She has brought in others, you realize: Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell, for example. I’m optimistic about the new book she’s working on, too. From what I have read so far, it may well be her best.”

  The mother says she understands that as an author, she needs to be courted to a certain extent. Certainly she has done her best to make the woman feel at home. Still, she goes on to voice the danger of too much intimacy with an earnest, intellectual woman of this kind. “It’s not so much the fact that she has no fortune to speak of, my dear—I wouldn’t bring that up, you know well—or even that she is so much older than you and really quite plain. You must have noticed, well . . . the teeth! for one. Poor thing! All of this I might be able to overlook, indeed, would overlook, but what really terrifies me, my darling—and I have only your good at heart, you must know that—is that there is such a stain of illness in that family, my dear, both the sisters dying one after the other like that, not to speak of the dreadful brother, whom they say was quite mad, quite mad, you know,” the mother murmurs in a low voice.

  “There’s nothing of that kind to worry about, Old Lady, I assure you,” he says gaily, propping himself up further and pressing her plump fingers between both his hands. Then he takes the tea she has brought him as she always does in the mornings and drinks the cup down quickly. She adjusts a curl on his forehead lovingly. “Be careful, my darling, be careful. You don’t want to get yourself inadvertently into a compromising position,” she counsels as she leaves him to face his day.

  Still, the mother hears about the invitation to a trip up the Rhine and, more alarmingly, a project to pick up her youngest boy from boarding school in the Highlands of Scotland with the author. She will have to take the matter in hand.

  She calls Charlotte into the blue drawing room. “Come and sit near me, dear child,” she says, patting the silk-covered sofa. She looks her in the eye, takes her hand in both of hers, and says, “I hear George has asked you to accompany him on his trip to the Highlands.” Charlotte nods without a word, just staring ahead with her rather small brown eyes. She does have pretty eyes, the mother will admit. She truly likes this woman, knows she is good, and admires her work, but the mother must protect her son at all costs. She looks at Charlotte directly, squeezes her hand between her own tenderly, leans toward her, and whispers, “Surely, darling, you are not seriously considering going on your own to the Highlands with him? Think of what people might say! Would it not put you in a compromising situation?” She adds, when Charlotte apparently finds nothing to say in response, “I’m only saying this because I am so very fond of you,” and puts her hand to Charlotte’s cheek and gently lets her fingers tap her playfully. “Think it over, my dear,” she adds.

  In the end Charlotte does not go to the Highlands, but she does visit Edinburgh in romantic Scotland, the country of her beloved Scott. She visits Scott’s monument and walks up to Arthur’s seat in Holyrood Park with her publisher at her side. Here she finds George Smith at his best: with his fine figure, his youthful spirit, his good face, his even temper, his charm. There are moments of rare happiness, despite her recent losses. With this engaging, energetic man at her side, listening so attentively, bending his head toward her to listen to her responses, deferring to her, she forgets her own sorrows, her father anxiously waiting for her return. George Smith makes it clear that she is important to him, that he wants at least to divert her, to amuse her.

  They visit the castle in Edinburgh and listen, fascinated, to the guide who tells tales of murder and points out what is thought to be the bloodstain from the body of the Catholic courtier, Rizzio, stabbed again and again as he tried to hide behind his queen.

  They stand on a terrace overlooking the city. The mist clears and the sun shines through the cloud for a moment as she surveys the scene. She feels that she has invented it all, that the city belongs to her, to her with this young, attractive man at her side, her publisher, a man who, like her black swan, believes in her genius. She looks up at him and realizes that she half-believes this young, enterprising man might take her for his wife. She might move into the lovely house in London, with the mother and the son, make the pale-green bedroom all her own. She might have a new family with him. Does she not have the right to such happiness? Suddenly she remembers Madame H.’s warm baby in her arms, the nurse who spoke with such longing of her little girls.

  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:

  My dear Sir,


  In great happiness, as in great grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulations—and believe me,

  Sincerely yours,

  Charlotte Brontë

  Epilogue

  Haworth, Thursday, 29 June 1854

  Before 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.