A Girl Walks Into a Book

Walking into the Brontës

This is a love story. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters loved to write, and I fell in love with their words on the page, and I have been looking for that kind of love in and out of books ever since. And maybe you too have fallen in love with a Jane Eyre or a Paul Emanuel or, Heaven help you, a Heathcliff, and so you will know exactly what I mean.

Let me be clear, I am not a fairy-tale-magical-wedding-day happy-ever-after sort of person. My favorite fairy tales are the weird ones, where the girl who trod on a loaf gets sucked underground for her hubris, or one of the seven brothers straightens his hat and freezes the world, or dogs with dish-sized eyes wait for the soldier to strike the tinderbox, or the princess weaves coats of flax for her swan brothers. At the end of these stories, the heroine's just lucky not to be dancing herself to death in a pair of bewitched shoes. That spiky strangeness is what I like most about them. When it came to my own ever-after, perhaps my expectations were unconventional, but I had still wanted a storybook ending, one way or another. I had been ecstatic to find someone with a winning smile who laughed at my jokes and wanted me around. I thought we were building a life together. But after one too many disappointed expectations and undelivered promises I finally became suspicious that it wasn't going to happen. Whether I was unworthy, the person I had picked was too flawed, or the story I'd based my dreams on was a lie—something was broken.

As I got ready to leave the apartment that had finally started to feel like "ours," my battered and beloved copy of Jane Eyre was the last book I packed, in the last bag I lined up by the door. I was leaving, taking only what I had brought with me and could call my own. It was a dark, bitter moment with one flicker of solace: Charlotte Brontë would have approved.

When I first came to the Brontës, I was a child, naïve and unwary. The old-fashioned prose and thick spine of Jane Eyre were promising; lots of the books written for kids my age (ten or so) were like potato chips, gone in a flash and leaving nothing behind but a greasy residue. I waded into the opening pages, read about a young girl huddled in a window-seat reading Bewick's History of British Birds, and was intrigued. I'd spent my share of hours curled up reading while adults talked, and I found the notion of a window-sill hidden by curtains especially romantic. My "library" was under the fluorescent lights of a basement playroom where I escaped my toddler brother, who was too little to climb downstairs. Rather than the finely furnished halls of Gateshead that Jane Eyre longed to escape, I had a battered sleepaway couch, a plastic foosball table, a hot pink wooden toy box with a chalkboard, and an array of particleboard bookcases that groaned under the weight of Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, The Brothers Grimm, and Beverly Cleary. Despite these drastic differences in our circumstances, I related to Jane—there's no accounting for the affinity one lonely kid has for another.

Then, as I read on, Jane's villainous aunt sent her to a miserable boarding school, with horrible people, who didn't understand anything that mattered, much less Jane herself. I was appalled. I wrote off Jane Eyre as unpleasant and unfair, a dull story about a plain girl's awful life. That first time, I never made it to Thornfield or met Mr. Rochester. It's possible I never even survived the ignominious "Liar" incident in Chapter VII. I have since gathered this experience is not uncommon—people tend to love Jane Eyre immediately or hate it. High school students made to suffer through it rarely make a return visit, unfortunately, and even adults who encounter it too late in life struggle to connect. London critic Elizabeth Rigby gave it an infamously harsh review in 1848, saying, "A little more, and we should have flung the book aside."¹ After that first attempt, I actually did toss Jane Eyre to the floor and heard the pages skitter as they hit the linoleum.

But the book was so satisfyingly weighty. Even as I hurled it off the bed, it seemed like a book that should matter. I kept picking it back up. I stared down Mr. Brocklehurst. I endured the boarding school. I crossed my fingers when Jane dared to advertise for a new position. Eventually, I found that I liked it, despite its darkness, despite Jane's trials, which I took personally. To despise Jane was to despise me. By the time I finished it, I had come to love Jane Eyre. I was a chubby tomboy with a mushroom cut, who always talked too fast. I liked reading fantasy epics and singing along to show tunes in the car. But Jane Eyre took me somewhere new. Jane's pastimes were ladylike—drawing and sewing; her language was dense and archaic, and I occasionally had no idea what was happening, but she spoke to me. She opened that door that exists inside all devoted readers. She made my heart beat faster and my fingers turn the pages ever more eagerly, hungry to know more.

Charlotte Brontë writes children like the child she must have been—the thoughtful, imaginative kind, with mature powers of observation and broad depths of feeling. Though shy, young Jane was fearless when spurred by oppression or injustice, which we see when she loses her temper with her bullying cousin a few pages into the novel's opening. So what if she inevitably loses the fight and gets locked in her dead uncle's haunted bedroom, bleeding from the scalp—Jane throws herself, nails out, at John Reed's smug, hateful face and does her worst.

Often grown-up authors seem to assume that children's thoughts are as simple as the words they have at their disposal. Jane Eyre radically departs from this attitude. Young Jane had the same faculties of understanding and sensitivity her grown-up self would, the same resistance to wrongdoing and the same enviable strength of passion. We expect this in our heroines—Charlotte Brontë's contemporary readers did too—but giving this defiance to a kid in 1847 was terrifically subversive. Even at ten, I felt my mind was a morass of new and conflicting and imagined and hoped-for information I didn't quite understand, and it was gratifying to see this complexity acknowledged in print. Until Jane, I had to read grown-up books to be challenged, usually sacrificing the pleasure of someone to relate to in the process. I felt certain Jane would understand my overwhelming feelings, the tidal wave of contradictory thoughts and impulses that barreled through my brain on a given day.

Sometimes we read to find ourselves; sometimes we read to escape ourselves; sometimes we read to see ourselves more clearly. When I read Jane Eyre, the words arranged themselves to form pictures; I could hear the voices, feel the dank drafts whispering through poorly fastened casements. I could hear really old jokes! Charlotte Brontë had meant to be funny when she wrote that Jane had "not a whit" of faith in Mr. Rochester as he tried to propose to her, and I had understood her being funny, and thusly we had communicated. Jane Eyre pulled me inside of it. When I looked back at the clock, it seemed time had gone faster while I read, the cost of living two lives at once. It was almost as good as time travel. Anything outside those pages vanished until, all too soon, I reached the last page, the adventure ended, and I was back on my bed where I started. Learning to speak Brontë gave me a secret power that nobody else had. And Jane Eyre was the key—it's what put me on the path to living my life in sync with the Brontës' work. It inspired a quest to discover as much about Charlotte Brontë as I could. Each Brontë has in turn provided exactly the right illumination for my life, but only when read at the right time. Try a Brontë novel too early, and you'll find yourself scrabbling around the sides, wandering off mid-story distracted, even bored. But open the right book on the right day, and it'll strike a bell you didn't even know needed to be rung.

That's how it was for me, anyway. Jane Eyre moved me to try Wuthering Heights, which I hated, then Villette, which I abandoned for being slow and inscrutable. In my early twenties I turned to Agnes Grey, which gave me a window into the life of a twenty-something woman and a nudge to grow up. I eventually devoured Shirley, savoring its feminism, friendship, and history; Charlotte is silly when she wants to be. After that, I tackled The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which tore my life apart, only to remake it better. By then I was finally ready for Villette, the story it took Charlotte so many tries to get right. These days I reread Jane Eyre once a year, and take doses of the others as necessary. Sometimes I consult them like an oracle or a Magic 8 Ball—I open to a random page and see what they have to say; it's an idiosyncratic art of bibliomancy, a kind of sortes brontënae.

I needed the Brontës to help me figure out how to function in the world around me, and their work is always up to the task. Even though their characters live, think, and speak in outdated and occasionally unwieldy prose, it still startles me to be reminded that they aren't real. It seems much more likely they exist in the ether somewhere, fully formed and waiting for a reader to bring them to life again. Believing that my favorite characters live outside their pages may be why I hear new messages with every read. I have such faith in Jane Eyre that it always seems entirely plausible that this time, the ending might come off differently. There might be a new character to meet. Jane might not have such a hard time after fleeing the grounds of Thornfield. Rochester might come clean at the very start of their romance, or never have married Bertha Mason in the first place. St. John Rivers could let himself live a little and declare his undying love for Rosamond Oliver. All of these potential revisions seem equally possible. But it always happens the same way, as it has to happen, to eventually secure the happy ending I can't live without.

When I'm in need of relationship lessons, the books are all about how partners should be equals. When I'm in need of motivation, I notice they contain an awful lot about women managing their own affairs and getting things done. When I need a boost of self-reliance, when I need to be taught about patience, when I need to rediscover an internal moral compass: whatever I need, it turns out that's what the Brontës wrote. These novels examine women's independence, employment, social values, education, mental illness, alcoholism, adultery, trials of the soul, morality, mythology, and love, especially love. When you're tuned to the right frequency, there's a medicinal power in Emily's stubbornness, Anne's perseverance, Charlotte's sarcasm, and even Branwell's self-destructive dissipation.

I thought I had come to the end of the Brontë shelf, but then I found their poetry, Charlotte's letters, and a plethora of biographies. I read them all and I started over. I read the Brontës' juvenilia and their schoolgirl essays, their novella fragments and forewords to revised editions, their unfinished scraps and diary papers. I examined the doodles in the margins, their illustrations and sketches, Charlotte's watercolors and Branwell's portraits of their neighbors. My life has unfolded alongside the words of the Brontës, sometimes been carried by them. This is the story of that journey—there are advantages to having a literary roadmap, and there are costs. Their lives and their writing and my life and my writing have all come together in an entwining of threads that seems both surprising and inevitable.