The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  “A book?”

  “You didn’t ever steal anything out of Dad’s library, did you?”

  There was a long pause. “I’m going to have to change phones, will you hold?”

  I held. I held for a long time.

  “I’m back,” came the voice on the other line.

  I took a breath. “Did you ever steal anything out of Dad’s library, before it burned down?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Please,” I said. “I have to know.”

  “No, I did not.” She sounded wounded, and I felt a strange, detached triumph, as though Agnes Grey arriving had been a fortuitous way of enacting punishment for her lengthy and inexcusable absences. There was a distant clatter of dishes in the background.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she prodded, “Sammy?”

  “Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like a sheep.”

  “A what?”

  “A sheep.”

  “Listen, darling—”

  “Baaaaa.”

  There was a pause, and I knew she was pressing her lips together, like she always used to. “Tell me what’s wrong. Are you all right?”

  I glanced back at Agnes Grey. “I’m hallucinating.”

  “I’m switching rooms again so I can hear you.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I should go.”

  “Samantha?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I—”

  “Talk soon.”

  I hung up.

  I flipped open Agnes Grey, the brilliant little devil. I might have been looking at a perfectly preserved corpse. Yes, it was my father’s copy. Instead of underlining key sentences, or elegant phrases, Dad wrote things like Here! and There! and Bah! I read the opening paragraph:

  All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

  God, I had forgotten how much I hated this novel. I made a desperate glance back at The Governess, which was hanging on my wall, watching me like a spy. Help me, I thought. But she was preoccupied with sinking. Once a governess, always a governess. She was holding a book in her hand too—was Agnes Grey drowning her, also? I looked at the book in my palm and wondered if this could possibly be my inheritance. Was my father’s much-debated estate really just a 1997 Penguin edition of a novel that had been sitting on bookshelves for a century?

  My breathing grew quick and shallow. I felt like an amnesia patient whose memory has suddenly been restored, to her great displeasure. All the facts I once knew about the Brontës were coming back to me in a lethal avalanche. The Brontës’ ghosts were rising out of the unquiet earth; I could almost hear them demanding why I had left them alone for so long. I stared at Agnes Grey and I began to remember things I wished I could forget: the madwoman in the attic, Grace Poole, the parsonage fire, Thorp Green. Yes, yes, Thorp Green. Hell, I hadn’t thought of that place in years.

  I pulled out my phone for the second time that evening. Blanche Howard had warned me that discussing my inheritance was a matter of great urgency, but I hadn’t anticipated that a book would appear at my doorstep if I didn’t act fast enough. I had no other choice: it was time to arrange a meeting with the British National Bank.

  CHAPTER 4

  Agnes Grey is, without question, the most boring book ever written. It tells the story of an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess (Agnes) who describes what it is like being an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess for over two hundred pages. The plot is famously dull—a badly disguised autobiography of Anne Brontë’s own less-than-riveting early twenties. Agnes, the daughter of respectable yet poor parents, becomes a governess at a manor suspiciously similar to the one where Anne Brontë herself worked. There, Agnes meets a slew of well-dressed villains: materialistic, frivolous, and rife with satirical potential. But Agnes—and by association, Anne—never offers the sort of biting social commentary that would have upgraded Agnes Grey to Pride and Prejudice. Reading the book leaves only a sense of gasping emptiness, and the disappointing feeling that Anne Brontë missed her opportunity to be truly great. The novel is about a woman who isn’t allowed to speak her mind, and was written by a woman who also wasn’t allowed to speak her mind. It was handcuffed right from the get-go.

  Critics at the time found little fault with it. Agnes was everything a young lady ought to be: moral, weak, waify. Unlike the other Brontë novels, Agnes Grey met with relatively little contempt. “It is infinitely more agreeable” than Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, read one review, leaving “no painful impression on the mind—some may think no impression at all.” Poor Anne. I used to fancy myself as something of her reincarnation, caught in the similarly oppressive shadow of older, illustrious writers. “A queer little thing” was what Charlotte called her youngest sister. George Smith, the Brontës’ publisher, called Anne a “gentle, quiet, rather subdued person.” Her manner, he said, was “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.”

  I was eight or nine when my father first sat me down with Agnes Grey. Dad viewed the Brontë books as private diaries the rest of the world didn’t understand. We started with Agnes Grey because it was the most “coded” of the Brontë novels, as he put it. Then we moved onto Wuthering Heights because it was the most “literal,” and after that came Jane Eyre because it was the most “unfair.” Then, and only then, my father said, would we take a look at The Tenant of Wildfell Hall because understanding it required first reading the other three. Are you ready? he used to ask me. Are you ready for them? My father wasn’t a certified teacher and he didn’t have much of a syllabus. He himself never received a college degree, which I assumed was out of genuine disinterest—Dad loathed modern education and its feel-good teaching methods. In his mind, all teachers should use a combination of the Socratic method and basic training. He did try to create some semblance of a classroom, however. We used the rectangular kitchen table as our desk, a baguette as our pointer. If I received less than eighty-five percent on any of his oral examinations, he made me go outside and play soccer.

  Under Dad’s philosophy, books were not shape-shifting constructions of a reader’s imagination. Novels, he said, offered the specific clues, maps, and guidelines necessary for their own evaluation. By clues, he did not mean metaphors and he did not mean symbolism. He meant actual clues. To him, every book was its own treasure map. A good novel, he said, left the close reader with a useful souvenir. All you needed to do was learn to see what was right under your nose. (This, I remember, was a refrain he enjoyed repeating.)

  I remember our lessons on Agnes Grey. My father explained that the only parts of the book worth reading were the chapter headings.

  “Recite them to me,” he said.

  I asked, “Why?”

  “Read them out loud. You’ll see.”

  We were at our kitchen table. I flipped open the book to the table of contents. Someone (likely me) had spilled something red and sticky on the opposite page. Ketchup? I read the chapter titles out loud. “ ‘Chapter One: The Parsonage. Chapter Two: First Lesson in the Art of Instruction. Chapter Three: A Few More Lessons.’ ”

  “You get the idea,” Dad interrupted.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Lessons. Do you understand?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “They’re lessons.”

  “What are?”

  “Exactly. Are we on the same page?”

  “Metaphorically?”

  “Literally.”

  “What?”

  “Excellent.”

  The discussion went on like this for the rest of the day. “A few more lessons.” Get it, Sam, get it? Why would she write that?

  Now, years later, I thought I understood. What appeared to be meekness and agree
ableness on Anne’s part was deliberate subversion. Her protagonist held the post of governess, one of the least powerful positions a woman could occupy in the nineteenth century. And yet, Anne’s novel immortalizes Agnes, giving a loud, persistent, and permanent voice to one of the most inconsequential figures in history. Almost one hundred and seventy years later, Agnes is one of the only governesses left who is barking orders—and, by extension, so is Anne. “First Lessons,” “A Few More Lessons.” She is the ageless teacher, and we, the readers, are her eternal students. Here is her first lesson, on page one:

  All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself.

  It is a curious opening paragraph, which is perhaps why my father wrote in the margin: CURIOUS. Anne begins a piece of fiction by calling it a “true” history. I wouldn’t normally conflate Agnes’s words with Anne’s, but this was one of the most poorly masked autobiographies I had ever read. Agnes’s “true” history is, in many ways, Anne’s. The author is hiding behind her protagonist, desperate to blurt out something important, but unable to expose her true self. The only thing she can do is ask her readers to read her novel carefully, so we gain the “instruction” that will help us discover the “hard to find” treasure. What has Anne hidden inside the text? Did my father know, or was that what he was trying to decipher, alone in his study? Anne, like all good teachers, must have known that a discovery was valuable only if you figured it out on your own.

  Her novel ended with the cruelest joke: And now I think I have said sufficient.

  Hah.

  James Orville wrote me an e-mail the following week. It always surprised me to think of him using technology. It was the same surprise I would have felt upon seeing Odysseus whip out Google Maps.

  To: “Samantha J. Whipple” swhipple@old.ox.ac.uk

  From: “James Timothy Orville” jorville@old.ox.ac.uk

  Subject: Necessary Improvements

  Dear Samantha,

  I did not enjoy your essay on Paradise Lost. My recurring concern is the way in which you craft your sentences. Have you ever taken a course in creative writing? I think it might help ease the banality of your prose.

  All best,

  O.

  From: “Samantha J. Whipple” swhipple@old.ox.ac.uk

  To: “James Timothy Orville” jorville@old.ox.ac.uk

  Subject: RE: Necessary Improvements

  Dear O,

  I’m sorry you dislike the way I write sentences. Have you considered that it might be because you’re not reading them aloud, in a Russian accent? Usually I find that helps.

  I have done creative writing before. I greatly dislike it.

  Best,

  Samantha

  To: “Samantha J. Whipple” swhipple@old.ox.ac.uk

  From: “James Timothy Orville” jorville@old.ox.ac.uk

  Subject: RE: RE: Necessary Improvements

  It surprises me that you dislike writing, given your family history. In addition to next week’s assignment, I would like you to read the writing the Brontës penned as small children—you will locate it in the library under “Brontë Juvenilia.” Have you read The Chronicles of Angria? Or The Tales of Gondal? I think you will discover that reading stream of consciousness will help ease your inner critic.

  I couldn’t think of a nonhostile response, so I chose not to respond at all. There was only one reason my “inner critic” was so well nourished: James Orville. Nothing squashes creativity quite like a frowning British man. And yes, I had read the Brontës’ juvenilia, thank you. All of it. The Brontë siblings began writing as very small children, before they even developed the full vocabulary to express their thoughts. As a child, I had read those stories cover to cover, over and over again. I did not have any brothers or sisters, and as a result, I would dream myself into the Brontës’ darkened living room and pretend that I was there, too, on those stormy evenings, in the middle of all the chaos and all the tantrums as the Brontë siblings wrote their very first stories.

  In my mind, I would always be sitting next to Anne on the east side of the dining room table. Emily would be to my right. There would be blank parchment in front of us, because whenever you walked into the Brontë home, there was always blank parchment in front of you. Occasionally, Branwell or Charlotte would stand up by the fireplace to recite their latest masterpieces. I had never liked Branwell. He was confident, swaggering, bigmouthed, and incurably in love with himself—the kind of person who would never have been nice in high school. He was a young man in a world that existed to benefit young men. Twelve-year-old Charlotte would be small, compact, and quarrelsome, like a Viking child. The two of them would often act out the latest adventures from Angria, the imaginary world they had created together, one inhabited by swashbuckling adventurers and plagued by the political intrigue of the rakish Lord Northangerland. Emily, Anne, and I—seated at the table, glassy-eyed—would watch patiently as the latest drama unfolded.

  I knew why Orville wanted me to read The Chronicles of Angria. Charlotte and Branwell’s prose was wild, passionate, and unencumbered. This was imagination in its purest form, perfectly transcribed from two young, uncorrupted brains. Historians later discovered The Chronicles of Angria and concluded that Charlotte and Branwell’s imaginary world was a sweet, playful, grammatically terrifying yet overall beautiful expression of childhood. Orville, I’m sure, would agree. I saw it quite a different way. Anyone who had spent time in that darkened living room with the girls and me would have seen how earnestly Anne and Emily would have loathed the writing of their two self-righteous siblings. Anyone who paid attention would know that Anne and Emily disappeared every night after midnight to develop their own imaginary land. Under the covers of Emily’s bed, they would exchange the daily news from Gondal, a glorious world of dueling dragons, ruined castles, haunted buildings, fainting heroines, underground passageways, crypts, catacombs, labyrinths, omens, villains, curses, and magic. The imaginary kingdom of Gondal became Emily’s pride and joy, more so than any of her future poetry—more so even than Wuthering Heights. It took months before Branwell and Charlotte found out about it. When they did, that’s when all the problems began.

  Despite what historians (or Orville) might say on the subject, I knew that Angria and Gondal were not innocent fantasies. Each was an empire wrought of competition, whose outlandishness existed solely to vanquish the other. It was Charlotte and Branwell versus Emily and Anne. Whose fantasy world was better? Who had the best-developed characters, the most vivacious and fantastical plots? It was a war between imaginations, and it lasted far longer than any of the siblings could have anticipated. Angria and Gondal set the foundation for the central, unspoken conflict of the Brontë lives: which Brontë was the best?

  At first glance, the answer was Branwell—that is, until he reached his twenties and drowned his talent in alcohol. The next-best bet was Emily, but she soon detached herself from real life, preferring her imaginary worlds to this one. That left just Charlotte and Anne. The Viking versus the Nobody. Who would be the greater success? Which one—Anne or Charlotte—would write their family into immortality? Could a small, timid child ever go up against the Great Charlotte? The competition between Anne and Charlotte was the silent struggle of their lives, and their best-kept secret.

  I explained all of this to my mother once, but I stopped when I realized how deeply my intimate friendship with my father’s dead family frightened her. She had come to live with me soon after the funeral, in the non-charred half of the house, and assumed I was going mad, just like my father. She said, “Imaginary friends are not good, Samantha, not good at all.” I was beginning to sound too much like my dad, I suppose, and Mom hated every part of him sh
e found in me. She viewed Dad as something radioactive that had exploded and left little pieces of himself lodged in the people around him. As the body closest to him, I had borne the brunt of the toxic aftermath. To be fair, her worries weren’t entirely unfounded. I used to pace around my father’s destroyed library in small circles for hours, like one of those crazed tigers at the zoo that only knows one path. The only thing that had survived the fire was the handwritten sign over the library door, which now read: If you’re careful enough, nothing good or bad will ever. Apparently, the fire had singed off the “happen to you.”

  During those few months, I began writing. “Creative writing,” as Orville might call it. Every night, I wrote a new story and recited it to my mother. The plot would always involve me in the Brontë living room, talking to Emily about plants, dogs, or the rakish Lord Northangerland. Mom would clap after I read her my stories, then ask me if I was sure I didn’t want to be a doctor. I understood her concern. My stories were not very good. They didn’t have much of a story line, and, in the way of all serious fiction, they ended with the untimely deaths of everyone.

  Mom grew worried. The more I wrote, the more I imagined she thought I’d go on to drink myself to death and set the house on fire. I resented her lack of trust. Occasionally I would walk around with deliberate facial tics, just to keep her on her toes. In retrospect, I should have been more sympathetic. Mom was, after all, only thirty-seven at the time. There were days when I’d find her sitting at the edge of the paddling pool, jeans rolled up, filling the air with old songs by The Carpenters. I didn’t realize how terribly sad she was, because at the time Terribly Sad was something only I had ownership over.

  One evening, I was sitting in her bathtub, and she was brushing her teeth in an ankle-length cotton nightgown and gray socks. “We’ve Only Just Begun” was playing in the background. It was the most morbid love song I knew, the kind that played at funerals during slideshows and made you thankful to be alive but deeply conscious that Karen Carpenter was anorexic and had died of a heart attack at thirty-two. I was in the middle of reading her my latest story, “Life Is Pain, Mother.” She interrupted me before I even hit the climax: