A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  I wouldn’t say I had Rosalie Murray’s cruelty in my dating life—I didn’t deliberately mislead my “suitors,” laugh at them behind their backs, or manipulate them into doing things for me. But I definitely had some of her single-minded focus. That’s how I found myself on dates with kind but boring guys from OkCupid like Gordon, with friendly but uncouth guys like Mike from choir, with wildly incompatible guys like Max the Republican from New Jersey. I went for coffee with Jess, who was immature but cute, and fun to make reading lists with, and Maria, who was as alpha as she was feminine. When I went out with Lauren, who was as awkward as I was, we both brought our dogs as buffers. I dated terrible kissers and compulsive phone checkers. Lesbians who sneered at my bisexuality and straight men who thought being queer was a party trick. I hid parts of myself altogether, feigning enthusiasm for whatever my date was into, no matter how esoteric. I was tailoring myself in hopes they would like me, and as a result I was neither genuinely happy nor genuinely appreciated. I wasn’t ready to allow myself to be known.

  The consequences of conformity would prove much worse for Rosalie Murray, whose husband was a wealthy but not particularly interesting man who, imagine the audacity, didn’t even want her to flirt with other men on their bridal tour. But here’s where Anne Brontë gets progressive (if a woman being libertine enough to flirt on her bridal tour isn’t progressive enough for you). After Agnes’s father dies, her mother suggests that the two of them open a day school together. Happy to leave everything at Horton behind, save Mr. Weston, Agnes agrees, and at first takes to the work with enthusiasm. Some time passes, and one day as Agnes enjoys a picturesque walk on the beach, who should she happen to see on the sand but Mr. Weston and a terrier named Snap. Mr. Weston has taken a living (that’s curate-speak for “gotten a job”) nearby and has “nothing but solitude to complain of, and nothing but a companion to wish for.” One does not have to be a lovesick teenager to pick up on that subtle hint. He and Agnes have a lovely walk, during the course of which she takes his arm, “though not with the intention of using it for support.”* The next day, and the next, he comes to call on her and her mother, and so on, and so forth. At last it comes to an end as tidily as even Miss Austen could have wished, with a proper seaside proposal and a marriage of equals.

  I can’t definitively assert that Patrick Brontë’s colleague Mr. William Weightman was the inspiration for the impeccable Mr. Weston, but Charlotte did allude to a quiet sort of affection between Weightman and Anne Brontë in a letter to Ellen Nussey in 1842, two years after Weightman came to work with their father.4 She teased Ellen about being in love with him too, though if the portrait Charlotte drew of Weightman is any indication, she may have actually liked him for herself. Patrick looked on Weightman as a son, and he spent a lot of time at the Parsonage. Unfortunately, he died of cholera in September of 1842. A marble plaque dedicated to his memory still hangs on the wall of Haworth Church. It would have been fitting for Anne to right her personal and professional disappointments by awarding both marriage and school to her first heroine.

  Agnes Grey closes her tale with “And now I think I have said sufficient.” The prose doesn’t crackle with passion or wit, and it’s too moderate to really sustain much tension. But even where it is fictional it is true, which I felt even before I knew Anne herself had insisted it was so. This story reflects such an alert mind, so observant of a society she was permitted to live in, but not belong to, that I cannot help but like her. Agnes Grey also contains gems that give us little hints about Anne Brontë herself. She liked Shakespeare, for a start. When she first meets the Murray children, Agnes breaks the fourth wall to say, “As I cannot, like Dogberry, find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness upon the reader…” to excuse moving forward more quickly.5 Though Agnes is soft-spoken, she’s not without humor: she “amuses [her]self with a hearty fit of crying” upon arrival at Horton Lodge, and later exclaims in exasperation, “Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!!” in the face of her charges’ impatience.6

  Some Brontë scholars take offense at the suggestion the sisters wrote even a little autobiographically—they think the inference denigrates the imaginative talents or literary craft of the Brontës. As a writer of nonfiction, I would never suggest it demeans fiction to draw from life. Truth in fiction never makes it weaker, but anchors it, unlike lying in nonfiction, which is like robbing a tree of its roots. When we know so little about Anne, in particular, it’s hard to resist connecting the dots between her home life and her literary one, no matter how light or faint the association may be. Plus, come on. In their juvenile adventures, when the Brontës went to school, their characters went to school. In their mature fiction, when the Brontës were teaching, their characters taught. The fact that these things happened in life and in literature is part of what gives them resonance. It’s what allows the Brontës to capture detail and write so realistically. It’s what makes them true.

  AS my year with the service program drew to a close, alongside Agnes Grey, I considered what Agnes had said about wanting to work on her own after feeling “despised and trampled upon by old and young.”7 Nonprofits were not for me—too much pleading for money and trying to work miracles with no resources. I’d also realized that while I might look for more jobs in publishing, I still wanted to write. I had a blog—but then, everybody had a blog. I wanted to be spending serious time writing essays or reviews or maybe something bigger, something I hadn’t even dreamt of yet. And I wanted to teach. With all the liberal arts options in the world open to me, funnily enough the ones I wanted to pursue the most were the same choices that had been open to the Brontës 160 years before.

  The instability of the freelancer’s life had always seemed too scary—the constant hustle, the financial insecurity, the unpredictability—but I took heart from Agnes’s example that good things could come to those who took risks. When a friend passed along a job posting for writers on a pop-up-video-style sports clips television show, I dashed off a cover letter about my abiding love for sports and sarcasm, crossed my fingers, and submitted it. I hoped that being less comfortable on my own terms would pay off better in the long run than being in the employ of people who didn’t even see me as useful.

  I got an interview with the show’s creator and head writers in a second-floor production studio near the Flatiron Building. I tried not to notice the life-size nude portrait of the producer on the wall behind him, ignored his insensitive jokes about teen girls and cutting when he heard where I was currently working, and agreed to write a test script. This is the least my life has ever had in common with the Brontës, I thought as I searched for obscure sports trivia and biographical information on Patrick Ewing.

  After I got the job, I got to pitch jokes in the writers’ room, spit-balling like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer. I hunched over my laptop in coffee shops and bookstores. I stopped hesitantly introducing myself as unemployed and started calling myself a writer. I scrutinized grainy Madison Square Garden event clips until my eyes crossed, and was thrilled to see my jokes pop up, even in various degrees of rewrite, when the show aired on late-night cable. It wasn’t Emmy-winning work, and the promise that it might lead to a full-time assistant position never materialized, but I was a professional writer. For a little while.

  The show only ran for a single season, so I finished my final script just eight weeks after I began the first one. I channeled scrappy Matilda Murray and applied for any job I could find that would let me stay in New York. I ignored my mother’s repeated assurances that I could always move home and help around the house. I spent a few months working retail in a store that sold fun dishes and glassware, and held my head up. I started actually taking care of my own apartment instead of letting my room reflect my mental state, cluttered and full of dirty laundry. Agnes Grey had helped me realize I could take my future into my own hands, without waiting for anyone or anything.

  My newfound self-confidence was at last rewarded on a first date with a woman n
amed Preeti, who I met on OkCupid. I knew we were clicking as soon as I walked up to the meeting place I’d suggested, near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—it was close to the train station and technically en route to the restaurant, but it was also pretty desolate after dark. I walked over to the only person I’d seen in about three blocks and said, “Hi, are you Preeti?” “Depends,” she answered. “Are you here to murder me?” Dinner was a big success. No, seriously!

  Preeti had two cats, knew how to cook, volunteered on a community farming co-op, and worked in a molecular biology lab. We’d spent about the same amount of time in India, where her parents were from, and both wanted to go back someday. Way cooler than me, and sure of herself in a way I could only envy, Preeti was all the things I’d hoped for and never imagined I could find in one person. And she got me. I’ve never believed in love at first sight—largely because nobody has ever looked at me and fallen in love—but the spark I felt with Preeti was instantaneous. I fell so hard I got dizzy. I even called my parents and came out to them that same night. My mom said, “You know we love you no matter what. And I have to say, I’m not surprised. I mean… your hair.” (I had recently begun sporting an androgynous barbershop version of a pixie cut.) Her repeated emphasis on how not-shocked she was made me slightly skeptical, but when my dad paused for a long moment before saying, “OK, can I go to bed now?” I knew everything would be fine. I raised a toast to Matilda Murray and dug Shirley out of my bookcase.

  Shirley and Caroline

  The first chapter of Shirley is enough to deter many a reader from advancing a step further than the threshold. It required all the remembered fascinations of Jane Eyre to keep down the feelings of dissatisfaction.… Shirley is better written than Jane Eyre, but there is less power in it.

  —Unsigned review, Atlas, 18491

  Shirley, first and foremost, is a story of female friendship. It is also about class distinctions, the Napoleonic War, Yorkshire politics, gender roles, the behavior of the clergy, the power of a female heiress, and “the condition of women question,” i.e., should women earn a living and support themselves. It is some hybrid of Charles Dickens’s thoroughness, Jane Austen’s worldview, and Charlotte’s own unique blend of Romanticism and candor. Shirley is the first Brontë novel to have a narrator who is not part of the action; the first time we hear the voice of someone who is neither composing a letter or scribbling in a diary nor making a private confession, but instead observing the local goings-on alongside us. Charlotte also stops to pivot downstage and give us her thoughts on youth, working-class morals, feminism, and whatever else comes to mind. It is surprising and odd and I love it.

  Charlotte begins Shirley with four curates tediously bickering over theology at the dinner table. No joke, I tried to read Shirley four times before I got past the curates. One review compared the novel’s opening to the monsters people put at their gates, or “ugly dogs to deter idle folk from entering.”2 My latest theory is that the curates are Charlotte’s response to the male critics who seemed to want her books to be more like men’s books. So she begins a book entirely about the interior lives of women with a bunch of tedious local clergymen, as if to say Here, dudes, here are your men.

  Eventually, if we are stalwart and true, we meet the heroine, Caroline Helstone, a typical lighthearted romantic heroine. It’s possible that Caroline is loosely, loosely based on Charlotte’s best friend Ellen Nussey. She’s a mild, well-behaved curate’s niece, politely in love with her neighbor and distant cousin Robert Gerard Moore. She studies French and sewing with his sister, Hortense, and lives for the evenings when Robert joins them in the parlor to read aloud or chat. This mellow domestic sphere is disrupted when textile embargoes from Parliament force Robert to lay off his workers; Caroline’s uncle forbids her to see Robert on the grounds that he’s a presumed Flemish sympathizer. It’s historically interesting (… ish) and lays the foundation for a conventional marriage plot with various temporary obstacles that will resolve as expected after the right people make the correct courtly gestures of affection and contrition at the appropriate times.

  Caroline Helstone certainly thinks that’s the kind of novel she’s in—after an evening with Robert Moore during which he demonstrates basic human courtesy, she is luminous with hope and expectation. “When people love, the next step is they marry,” she sighs, dopily.3 I’m not saying Caroline was desperate, but she certainly went quickly from having no indication that Robert loved her to being sure they were about to become engaged. This is where my suspicions that Charlotte was mocking me began to develop. The next morning, all of Robert’s lover-like manners from the night before are totally gone; Caroline is distraught. Charlotte The Narrator addresses the lovelorn flatly:

  Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions, utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.4

  Yikes. I’m of several minds about the sudden onset of metaphoric martyrdom. Part of me thinks Charlotte is making fun of me for picking out nursery supplies before a second date and whining when it doesn’t pan out. The other part of me is convinced that Charlotte crafts this restrictive, patriarchal world with all its ladylike confines and socially appropriate withholding of feelings so that Shirley Keeldar can kick the door open and let the sunshine in. A few pages later, Caroline’s literally in the middle of conducting Old Maid research (Is it better to be the cheerful, saintly, helpful old maid everyone asks for favors, or the cranky, acerbic old maid people are afraid of?*) when her uncle drags her up to the local squire’s estate, Fieldhead, to meet the new tenant. This is when we get to stop caring about all that thorough historical back-storying. In fact, the novel’s entire historical foundation is about to stop being remotely compelling (even to Charlotte, who abandons the Luddite Rebellion plotline for chapters at a time—leaving me gasping, What about the weaving machines?!?!?).

  The arrival of Shirley signals the end of this novel’s resemblance to anything traditional. Twenty-one years old and the only child of parents who gave her the traditionally masculine name they would have given their male heir, this reincarnation of Rosalind, fresh from the Forest of Arden, strides in to flip on all the lights and crank up the volume. It’s like we’ve been slogging through a despondent swamp and are yanked out by a claw machine.

  Shirley has style, intelligence, an estate, a title, and oh best beloved Shirley, the panache to thoroughly enjoy all of it. Caroline is all naïveté and quiet resignation and faith in romance. Shirley is boisterous, funny, and confident, though not quite as self-assured as she initially seems. Charlotte wrote Shirley, she confessed to Elizabeth Gaskell later, as an homage to her sister Emily, had she been born “into health and prosperity.”5 Though there are other spitfires, other opinionated damsels, other protagonists with swagger, Shirley is unique among her contemporaries by also being thoroughly lovable, in ways your Becky Sharps or Emma Woodhouses are just not.

  I was bowled over by Shirley’s wit and charm; in Caroline and Shirley, I saw myself and Preeti. We were a matched set. The two of them, and the two of us, never ran out of things to say, and weren’t afraid to tackle the big questions, like whether men and women are actually different or just socialized differently, or what exactly the producers hoped to improve on by remaking The Parent Trap. Our version of Shirley and Caroline’s picnics was a constant Gchat conversation in which we debated the work of L. M. Montgomery, the upcoming season of Mad Men, the merits of various animals, kids, and vegetables. We could talk about the Bechdel test for hours, all day, every day, for weeks. After a million “oh my God you have to read _____” conversations, we formed a book club where we’d each read a new book and trade a YA book fro
m our childhoods, which is how I discovered Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman Cycle novels and how Preeti met Margaret Thursday. I’d never cast myself as the quieter, inexperienced one before, but then I’d never been out with someone as warm and funny as Preeti, either.

  Suddenly every bad date I’d ever suffered through with a bore or a jerk seemed like the price of admission I’d had to pay to have this, a girl I wanted to be my girlfriend, who was beautiful and funny and didn’t want me to change or be less vocal, who liked lots of things I liked and knew many things I didn’t know. I gazed into the future and wondered which of us would get pregnant when it was time to start a family, or if we both would. We each had a brother, so the genetics wouldn’t be a problem; I guessed it would depend on how our careers were going. This was after knowing her for eight days.

  For our second date, I took Preeti to dinner at my favorite crepe place, and afterward we wandered the East Village; it was just as much fun as the first outing had been, though we again only parted with a friendly hug. I was confused, but figured I just needed to be more overt about the fact that I was attracted to her. On our third date, I upped my casual-arm-around-the-shoulders quota of the evening to four, and made sure we brushed hands every hour or so. Poor Preeti—she had to resort to dramatic gestures to let me know it wasn’t going to happen. When we picked our seats in the empty movie theater, she sat down a seat away from me, plunked her bag down beside her, and took out her knitting.