Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  “Are you all right?”

  The boy nodded the back of his head. You could hear the waves from the wave machine behind you before they lifted you up. That was good. They were just one turn from the beach. Now Bruno was holding Cody’s right wrist to the starboard handle of the inner tube. Every wave threatened to scupper them. What would happen then? Would it jolt a lifeguard into action? Would the boy be picked up by the passengers of another tube? Sucked into the filtration system? Bruno thought of Ernest drinking at the swim-up bar, Ernest who would never forgive himself, though he would forgive Bruno, and that would be the worst thing that could ever happen to either one of them. No, not the worst thing. Of course not.

  A bullying wave pushed the edge of their raft, tipped them, rushed overhead, and swept Cody away.

  Above the river the burghers of Schlitterbahn saw the flash of pale flesh, the hair that streamed behind as though a cephalopodic defence, Stay away. The last inhabitant of the lost city of Atlantis, washed into the waters of Torrent River—that was its name. A little boy, surrounded and then eclipsed by the bigger boys, the wild boys of the German-themed waterpark. “Look out!” shouted a blue-tongued woman from the bridge, but she was drunk, and already the other people doubted what they had seen, and besides, so what? Those feral boys would take him in. They never went home, those boys, they lived here, they circled and circled, howling and laughing and dreaming of home.

  “Cody!” Bruno shouted. “Cody!”

  The boys found the body, and lifted it up, and then there was his darling’s face, panicked, one hand out, and Bruno snagged it, and they were back in each other’s arms, bumping up on to the incline of the concrete beach. Cody coughed. He was alive. Not a lifeguard had shifted. They were surrounded by wild delight, shrieking, flesh, stove by a whale, but safe.

  Not till they had staggered out—not on to dry land, there was nothing, nothing, nothing dry in all Schlitterbahn—did Bruno realise that the water had stripped the swimming tights right off, that Cody now stood, naked, just as God had made him—though of course God hadn’t been anywhere near Cody’s conception, an event Ernest called a miracle. Surely the opposite, Bruno had thought. Ordinarily he hated God getting credit for Science’s good work. Yet here the boy was, the narrow naked awkward miracle.

  “Jesus,” said a voice. A man, this new model they now made, tremendously fat from the hips up, an epidermic barrel, skinny as a kid from the hips down, such a precarious construction it hurt Bruno to look at him. “Cover that kid up!”

  Their towels were back by the pirate ship. Bruno took off his shirt, and draped it over his son, to make him decent.

  At the Wasserfest Bar, Ernest stirred the slush at the bottom of his drink. O Schlitterbahn! The freckled, the fat, the hairy, the veiny, the chubby girls in bikinis, the umbilically pierced, the expertly tattooed, the amateurishly scrawled on, the beautiful, the grotesque, all the Boolean overlap: Ernest thought he’d never felt so tender towards the variety of human bodies. He loved them all. Every bathing suit was an act of bravery.

  “Yes,” he said to the bartender, whose name was Romeo, “I’d like another,” and then there was his family: Bruno with water dripping from his beard, Cody wrapped in some black cape which he now flung off, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! I capsized! I capsized! I was saved!”

  “You’re naked!”

  “Naked!” said Cody.

  “Marry me,” said Bruno, galumphing in.

  NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Joanna Briscoe is the author of five novels, including the bestselling Sleep with Me (Bloomsbury), published in eleven countries and adapted as an ITV drama by Andrew Davies. She has had several stories published in anthologies and broadcast on Radio 4, has written for all the national newspapers, and worked as a columnist and literary critic for the Guardian. Her sixth novel, When Nobody’s Looking, will be published by Bloomsbury UK and US in spring 2017. She lives in London with her family. Joanna Briscoe first read Jane Eyre while growing up on the moors in Devon, and her favourite section is when Jane is at Lowood.

  Tracy Chevalier is the author of eight novels, including At the Edge of the Orchard, The Last Runaway, Remarkable Creatures and the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring. She first read Jane Eyre when studying for her English Literature BA at Oberlin College. Her favourite part is when Jane has to sleep rough for a few days until she finds refuge with the Rivers family.

  Born in Dublin in 1969, now based in Canada, Emma Donoghue is an award-winning writer of novels both contemporary and historical, short stories, literary history, and drama for radio, stage and screen. She is best known for Room (2010) and her film adaptation of the novel (2015). Revisiting one of the favourites of her adolescence, Jane Eyre, she wrote the introduction to the Folio Society’s new edition, describing it as a book that “made the world take a nobody seriously”—a goal that animates all Donoghue’s own work. Her next novel, The Wonder, about an Irish girl in the 1850s who seems to live without eating, comes out in September 2016. www.emmadonoghue.com

  Helen Dunmore was the first winner of the Orange Prize and is also an acclaimed children’s author and poet. Her novel, The Lie, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize. Helen Dunmore’s fiction and poetry is translated into more than thirty languages and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel is Exposure, published by Random House UK and Grove. She loves the many layers of Jane Eyre’s character: her fiery intelligence, her battling spirit as she takes on a world which tries to crush her, her wit and her audacity. But Jane Eyre can be stealthy too, and that is what drives Helen’s story.

  Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her other books include The Sea House and Lucky Break, and her most recent, Mr. Mac and Me, was shortlisted for the New Angle Prize and was the winner of the East Anglian Book Awards best novel. She contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines, and teaches creative writing for the Faber Academy. She first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, and although it remains one of her favourite novels, she accepts its influence over her early life wasn’t always healthy, especially when, as a lovelorn fourteen year old, she hung out of her window, convinced that someone, somewhere was calling to her.

  Jane Gardam is an acclaimed novelist who excels in the short story form. She has twice been awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year and she also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She was awarded an OBE in 2009. Her most recent novel, Last Friends, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and Jane is a recent recipient of the Charleston-Chichester Award, the only award to recognise longstanding creativity and achievement in the short story genre.

  Linda Grant is the author of six novels and four works of non-fiction. Her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her family memoir, Remind Me Who I Am, Again, won the Mind Book of the Year and the Age Concern Book of the Year. She lives in London. Linda Grant’s copy of Jane Eyre is a navy blue hardback with the Latin motto of her school embossed in gold on the cover. It was awarded for winning the Rosa B Chambers prize for Reading Aloud, an accomplishment which finally found an application at literary festivals.

  Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction as well as three short story collections, and, most recently, a long essay about her interest in and connection to Katherine Mansfield. Her most recent collection of short stories, Infidelities, published in 2014, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award and won the Edge Hill Prize. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee and lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters. She has known Jane E
yre since she was nine and continues to think about her. In that way—as is the case with all truly realised fictional characters—Jane is a contemporary.

  Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past. She is also the author of two collections of stories, Sunstroke and Married Love. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and other magazines. She cannot remember the first time she read Jane Eyre, but it must have gone in deep, and it’s never stopped working. And whenever she’s cleaning she remembers Jane and Hannah getting Moor House ready for Christmas.

  Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels—Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border—as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories which won the Portico and Edge Hill prizes. The first story in the collection, “Butchers Perfume,” was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 with “Mrs. Fox.”

  Susan Hill is the author of sixty books. Titles include I’m the King of the Castle, The Woman in Black, Strange Meeting, The Beacon as well as the Simon Serrailler detective series. The Woman in Black is the basis for the UK’s second-longest-running stage play ever, and a major film starring Daniel Radcliffe. She has never read Jane Eyre.

  Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), the novels The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and the most recent collection Thunderstruck & Other Stories, which won the 2015 Story Prize. A former public librarian, she is now a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin. She didn’t read Jane Eyre until she was in her mid-thirties. Her absent-mindedness about reading it meant the amazing gift of a great book that she had nearly no misconceptions about: she sat on a rented sofa in rural Denmark, and fell in love with it.

  Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa in 1981. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. In 2013 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in 2013 and won a Somerset Maugham Prize; it was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

  Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a guide at Highgate Cemetery. In addition to the bestselling novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, she is the author of four illustrated novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters, The Adventuress, The Night Bookmobile, and Raven Girl, which was also adapted into a ballet by the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden. She lives in Chicago and London.

  Patricia Park is the author of the debut novel Re Jane (Viking/Penguin Random House), a modern-day interpretation of Jane Eyre set in New York and Seoul. She was a Fulbright scholar and has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Salon, Daily Beast and others. A self-proclaimed “Eyre-head,” Park first read Brontë’s classic as a twelve-year-old in Queens, NY, and has since wondered what if, Reader, she hadn’t married him. Park is at work on her second novel, set in Buenos Aires.

  Francine Prose is a novelist and critic whose most recent book, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, was published by Yale University Press. Her previous books include the novels Lovers at the Chameleon Club: Paris, 1932, My New American Life, Goldengrove, A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and the non-fiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. She writes frequently for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. She lives in New York City.

  Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia in 1980 and is associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Tin House, n + 1, McSweeney’s, The Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Guardian. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; was selected as one of the Africa 39, a Hay Festival Project to identify the 39 best African writers under 40; appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2009; was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2010, and won the Caine Prize in 2015. On reading Jane Eyre, she says: “I first read it in one long, fevered sitting that took me through the night to a grey, rainy morning. It was 1995 and I was back in Zambia for a year of secondary school. Perhaps that’s why my story commingles these two versions of home: my country and the wild landscape of letters into which I so often escape. Jane has always seemed my spiritual double.”

  Elif Shafak is Turkey’s most-read woman writer and an award-winning novelist. She writes both in English and in Turkish, and has published fourteen books, nine of which are novels, including The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, Honour, The Architect’s Apprentice and her genre-crossing memoir Black Milk. Shafak blends Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling, bringing out the voices of women, minorities, subcultures, immigrants and global souls. Defying clichés and transcending boundaries, her work draws on different cultures and cities, and reflects a strong interest in history, philosophy, culture, mysticism, Sufism and gender equality. www.elifshafak.com

  Lionel Shriver’s novels include the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin and the Sunday Times bestseller Big Brother. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York. Her twelfth book The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 is forthcoming in 2016. Shriver has not read Jane Eyre since her teens, and admits sheepishly to dependency on multiple mini-series to refresh her memory—having avidly watched more than one.

  Salley Vickers is the author of eight novels, including Miss Garnet’s Angel and The Cleaner of Chartres, and two collections of stories, most recently The Boy Who Could See Death. Her books explore themes of art, psychology and other dimensions and she allies herself with an old tradition of storytelling. Salley Vickers won her first ever school prize when she was thirteen for an essay on Emily Brontë, and has remained a devotee of the Brontës ever since. They feature in Cousins, her latest novel published by Viking in summer 2016.

  Evie Wyld is a prize-winning author living in south London. Included in Granta’s 2013 list of Best of Young British Novelists as well as the Daily Telegraph’s Best Writers Under 40, Evie was the winner of the 2014 EU Prize for Literature. Her first novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. Her second, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award, Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award and Miles Franklin Award. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize. Evie’s graphic memoir about her childhood obsession with sharks, Everything Is Teeth, was published in August 2015 and illustrated by London artist Joe Sumner.

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  A NOTE ON CHARLOTTE BRONTË

  Charlotte Brontë was born in Yorkshire on 21 April 1816, the third of six children of Patrick and Maria Brontë. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, a small village on the moors where Patrick became curate to the church. Charlotte lived most of her life in Haworth, apart from short stints at boarding school and as a governess working for other families, as well as two years studying and teaching in Brussels.

  Her mother died in 1821, and her two elder sisters in 1824, leaving her the oldest of four. She, her sisters Emily and Anne, and her brother Branwell were very close, and primarily self-taught. As adolesce
nts they began to write, making up stories about fantasy lands. In particular, Charlotte and Branwell invented and wrote about the kingdom of Angria.

  None of the siblings married, but went out to teach or tutor or work as governesses, inevitably returning home. An idea to open a school at Haworth was the impetus for Charlotte and Emily to go to Brussels to improve their French. There Charlotte fell in love with her married teacher, Constantin Heger, and subsequently wrote about this experience in the posthumously published The Professor, and in her last novel, Villette. The Haworth school plan never attracted enough students and the plan was abandoned.

  In 1845 Charlotte discovered a cache of poems Emily had written, and determined that they should be published, along with poems by herself and Anne. They managed to find a small publisher to bring out Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell—the curious androgynous names the sisters took to disguise themselves—but the volume only sold two copies. The sisters were reinfected with the writing bug from their youth, however, and all three began to work on novels, often sitting together in the dining room to write, and reading out their words to one another at night.

  Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were published with little fanfare in 1847. Charlotte’s first—The Professor—was rejected by publishers, but when she sent in Jane Eyre, based in part on her time at boarding school and as a governess, a publisher knew it had a winner, and on publication late that year it became a bestseller.

  The public tried to guess who “Currer Bell” was. When a theory began to circulate that one person had written all of the novels, Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to reveal themselves to Charlotte’s publisher to prove that “Currer” and “Acton” were two different people. (Emily was too retiring to go with them.) The publisher, George Smith, was astonished to discover that the author of Jane Eyre was a small, shy woman, but he and his mother took her in and encouraged her to meet members of the literary world, including William Thackeray, one of Charlotte’s favourite writers. He famously held a dinner party that she attended, where she sat mute, refusing to blossom into a witty guest, and Thackeray left the party for his club, not to return! Charlotte also met and became friends with other writers, including Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell; the latter published a biography of Charlotte after her death.