I like to imagine Charlotte was rewriting the story of losing her own mother with this plot twist. How wonderful would it have been for a caretaker to suddenly materialize from the next manor house over, someone who could have nursed Branwell, Emily, and Anne back to health, or helped Charlotte and Patrick bear the sadness of suddenly finding themselves alone in the Parsonage. Of course Charlotte wrote a mater ex machina—she was sorely in need of one herself. The least she could do was give one to Caroline. There are very few mothers and daughters in the Brontës’ books—besides Agnes and her mother, Caroline is the only female character who even gets a mother she can talk to; Cathy Earnshaw and Isabella Linton don’t live long enough to get to know their own children.
The dose of happiness Caroline receives after being reunited with her mother is the beginning of her recovery. Soon she is well enough to resume her visits to Fieldhead, cheering up Shirley, who has become rather tired of the uncle, aunt, and cousins who have been visiting her (along with Robert Moore’s brother, Louis, tutor to Shirley’s cousin Henry). Next Shirley’s focus shifts from Shirley to Louis, the tutor. This annoys me, because there are no more picnics, no more feminist debates, and very little actually happens. He mostly skulks around the schoolroom waiting for Shirley to come back from parties. But maybe it was unthinkable for Charlotte to keep writing a character in her sister’s strong, opinionated voice once that voice had been silenced.
I never thought anything would make me miss Heathcliff, but aloof, forbearing, never-laughing, seldom-smiling Louis makes me a little nostalgic for a man who at least knows how to plan a party. Why is Louis in this book, you may find yourself asking, since he is pretty clearly terrible? One afternoon, Shirley’s cousin Henry, a conveniently placed Tiny-Tim-alike, is going through Louis’s desk and finds a parcel of copybooks. Caroline opens one and discovers not only was Louis originally Shirley’s teacher, too, but they’d been secretly in love for years. Gasp!
After letting Louis blather on in his diary far too long, Charlotte disposes of the curates and marries off Caroline and Robert. Shirley refuses to do any of her own wedding planning in order to force Louis to take up the reins of familial leadership (which frees her up to run her actual estate), and the book ends right as the power dynamics get interesting again. You’ll be relieved, I’m sure, to learn that the Orders of Council are repealed, and the end of the Napoleonic War restores the wool market’s stability within the community. Charlotte leaves Shirley by flashing forward to the narrator sitting at a kitchen table listening to her housekeeper retell the story of two local married couples, who married for love and companionship, and lived happily ever after. Conspiracy theorists may well wonder if this housekeeper is not also Nelly Dean, compelled to serve as perpetual neighborhood historian through some Faustian bargain.
The messages of Shirley are so much more complicated than what I get from most of the other Brontë novels. They reflect Charlotte’s own evolving attitude toward marriage and attachment, no doubt; otherwise the characters would either marry or refuse to marry, and move on. Instead she expostulates at length about men and women and who must be dominant and why and whether they are truly equal and whether that’s how it should be or merely how it is. In Shirley we are presented with nearly every option open to village-born women. We meet wives, old maids, chatty girls, withdrawn girls, girls who married well, girls who married poorly, servants, governesses, women who keep house for their bachelor relatives, a beautiful girl with a substantial dowry, and Caroline, a pretty girl just well-born enough to have few respectable employment options. The richest protagonist in the entire Brontë canon gets to manage her estate’s affairs, not just passively wait to be married off while a male heir profits from the entailment. We get snapshots of unhappy families and happy families, marriages with children and marriages with no children, and are mostly left to sift through the data to draw our own conclusions.
In Shirley, Charlotte also contemplates whether women should work, disappointing Mary Taylor (who was rather radical on the subject for the time). Of course women must work, Mary thought. The real controversy was how difficult it was to find any means of self-sufficiency at all. As she grumbled to Ellen Nussey in 1849, “there are no means for a woman to live in England but by teaching, sewing or washing. The last is the best. The best paid is the least unhealthy & the most free. But it is not paid well enough to live by. Moreover it is impossible for any one not born to this position to take it up afterward. I don’t know why but it is.”17 Later Mary would vent her frustrations in published work of her own, advocating financial responsibility and independence for women of every station and circumstance.
Unsurprisingly, Shirley’s emphasis on women’s options confirmed the suspicions of contemporary critics who already thought Currer Bell was a woman. Charlotte was chagrined—“I was sadly put out by the Daily News.… Why can they not be content to take Currer Bell for a man? I imagined, mistakenly, it now appears, that Shirley bore fewer traces of a female hand than Jane Eyre; that I have misjudged disappoints me a little, though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.”18 Oh Charlotte. Maybe it was something about the way the heroine goes around her village calling all the men stupid that gave you away.
The Mary Taylor philosophy, that women must be equipped to earn their own living, dovetails neatly with the values my mother instilled in me growing up. She comes from a line of women who had to shift for themselves after husbands and fathers died or left. She often reminded me, with some bitterness, that it would be up to me to provide for myself and my future children. My father, who recently retired from the US Securities and Exchange Commission after twenty-five years, usually finds it advisable to sit quietly when Mom’s conversation takes on this theme. He had stuck around, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been prepared.
And as for Shirley, for all she talks of wanting to submit to a masterful man, what she really likes is Louis undertaking to make her submit; whether she ever actually surrenders is debatable. It’s all very Taming of the Shrew. She doesn’t even let Louis have the last word when he asks her to marry him. After Louis proposes (or at least lectures himself to a standstill), Shirley counters with,
Mr. Moore… I do not ask you to take off my shoulders all the cares and duties of property, but I ask you to share the burden, and to show me how to sustain my part well. Your judgment is well balanced, your heart is kind, your principles are sound. I know you are wise; I feel you are benevolent; I believe you are conscientious. Be my companion through life; be my guide where I am ignorant; be my master where I am faulty; be my friend always!19
I like the collaborative but pragmatic note that Shirley strikes here—she’s not making a whimsical leap; she’s weighed the pros and cons and made her choice accordingly. If she would just leave out the “be my master” part, I could imagine using this in a proposal myself. The romantic teenage Charlotte who once wrote to Ellen Nussey that only love could induce her to marry, and who gave Jane and Rochester the impetuous love of a lifetime, had by now acquired much more grown-up ideas about why two people might decide to enter into matrimony.
CHARLOTTE finished Shirley by September, and it was published in October. The critics didn’t know what to make of it, really; it had elements of literature they recognized, but it was neither romance nor history, neither social critique nor a morality tale. It has Charlotte’s signature dry humor, her luscious Romantic description, her keen observation of human foibles and pomposity, and, best of all, women searching for their places in the world. But all that most critics could see were the signs of Currer Bell’s presumed femininity “clouding up his judgment.” Their loss.
I read Shirley at a time when I needed the galvanizing energy of platonic female friendship in my life; I needed confidence in my own purpose, and an appreciation for non-romantic companionship. It might be a mess tonally, but Shirley has some of the funniest scenes Charlotte ever wrote, like when an idiotic curate comes to tea at Shirley’s home and gets chased upstairs by
the dog and locks himself into a guest room while another idiotic curate pounds on the door; it’s practically a Victorian Bugs Bunny cartoon. Then there’s the delightful hidden treasure of Mary Taylor’s family as the Yorkes—the resemblance was so true to life that Mary observed dryly in a letter that Charlotte had put Robert Moore in the wrong back bedroom after he was wounded.
In many ways, Shirley has a lot more to say than Jane Eyre, though it does lack the power and electricity of its predecessor. Caroline has to confront her romantic notions and reconcile them with the real world while still protecting her poetry-loving heart. Mrs. Pryor sets an example of hard-won independence. Shirley gets to be confrontational and flamboyant and whistle and manage her estate and pick out a husband and go to the village fair. Role models all around.
Preeti and I maintained our high-intensity friendship for a few months, but then one afternoon, she told me she’d never thought we were “dating.” Ever. I knew she’d decided she wasn’t interested in a relationship after our first few dates, but I thought we had at least been on the same page up until then. I thought those had at least been dates. Puzzlingly platonic dates, yet still dates. But no. It had all been in my head. I was hurt more deeply by the idea that she’d never considered dating me than I had been by the fact that she didn’t want to continue dating me. I signed off abruptly and later sent her a terse email: “I’m sorry, I just can’t do the Preeti and Miranda show right now.”
We would briefly reconnect a few months later, when it would turn out she almost was ready to date, but by then I’d moved on. Mostly. I think Shirley helped—Caroline’s pathetic moping, Shirley’s assertiveness, even Louis’s manipulation all contributed to a list of dos and don’ts I could work with. Don’t be so waifish they can’t tell you’re interested. Don’t go out of your way to pursue someone who’s clearly pursuing someone else. Don’t put up with aloofness. Don’t put up with mercenaries. Don’t conceal your identity from your long-lost daughter. Be the kind of irascible old maid people are afraid to bother. Be generous. Be bold. Find someone who wants to be your partner in life. Let them in.
Taking Charlotte’s “labour is the cure” maxim to heart, I threw myself into my professional life instead of lingering over my romantic misfortunes. I didn’t want to work retail forever, and I couldn’t expect another professional writing opportunity out of the blue, so I had to start thinking long term. What would allow me to write, edit, and teach? Like the voice from beyond that told Jane Eyre to advertise, I heard a whisper from somewhere, graduate school.* Where would I find my living while I made that happen? I hadn’t lost touch with my old colleagues from my very first job in educational publishing. In fact, after the layoffs I’d moved to Brooklyn and into a three-bedroom apartment with Kate, the editor who’d hired me, and a rotating series of third roommates that included a drama queen, a food writer, an aspiring singer who’d recently joined one of those “maximize your life-meaning” cults, and a night owl obsessed with Sleep No More, an immersive performance piece based on Macbeth that had just begun its long run in an old hotel in Chelsea. We’d recently adopted a dog named Gracie, a comforting presence who was supposed to sleep on the couch but snuck into my room every night to keep my feet warm.
I emailed around to see if anyone was hiring. Luckily, two of my former coworkers, Eric and Sheryl, had landed together at another educational publisher, and they had an opening for a production assistant. Without saying much about it to anyone, I also applied to a graduate program that would let me write and prepare me to teach. Since I was clearly en route to becoming an old maid, at least I would be employed and in pursuit of higher education at the ripe age of twenty-six. Sometimes in life, as in literature, the best route to the thing you’re searching for is relatively uncharted.
Meeting Mr. Rochester
Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
—Jane Eyre, Chapter XII
As in every major life transition since middle school, starting a new job meant it was time to reread Jane Eyre. I paid special attention to the part where she pragmatically reassures herself that if she dislikes life at Thornfield, she can simply advertise again. I wasn’t entirely sure I really wanted to be working back in publishing, especially another test-prep company with no trade books to play with, but when the worst-case scenario is “I’ll do something else afterward,” trying uncertain things becomes much less daunting. Plus, I like office work: maintaining files and answering phones, sticking to schedules and proofreading and proofreading and proofreading—being a competent person in a low-stakes job isn’t a bad way to spend a year or two.
My new boss, Eric, had been an assistant editor at my last publishing company, and now he essentially ran the production department at LightBulb Publishing. In our first stint as coworkers, Eric was jovial and effortlessly social, one of the office’s popular people. He’d also still been in a hard-partying phase of life and I was already on the verge of becoming Marian the Librarian. I had been eager to please at our old company, and stubbornly independent when it came to my work. His casual demeanor masked a detail-oriented mind with exacting standards. He was a tad micro-managey, and I was overconfident to the point of defiance. He found me annoying and bossy. I found his pug obsession weird and his management style aggravating. I once beat him in an office Scrabble tournament with the word “ratlines,” and it took him two years to deliver the Chipotle burrito that he owed me. We were mismatched from the start.
But three jobs, two Brontë novels, and a few years later, I was more comfortable in my skin (and grateful to have a job) and he was more willing to trust my judgment, so we got along much better. He was funny, and exasperatingly precise. The longer we worked together, the more I found myself craving his approval, and even occasionally receiving it.
We worked side by side with a cubicle wall separating us, communicating mostly by Gchat since the office had an open floor plan. Sometimes we all had to listen while he argued over the phone with his live-in girlfriend. Our friendly professional relationship started to blur after about eight months. Gchat conversations that began with work-related questions devolved into terrible pun competitions and long, winding conversations punctuated by wisecracks and inside jokes. I would stifle laughter and listen for the sound of Eric’s chuckle emanating from the other side of the flimsy wall. Every day around two o’clock, he and Sheryl and I would go down to the bodega in the lobby for soda and candy bars. We took long walks on our lunch hour, exploring Lower Manhattan in the September sunshine. Trinity Church, Battery Park, the East River Esplanade, where we debated whether the South Street Seaport’s resurgence was the future or the demise of the city we both loved. He would ask me what I thought of a new “invention” of his—cupcakes, but bigger; or coffee but like, frozen; or a pie, but with chicken in it; or a feedbag for humans, and act astonished and confused when I laughed. Eric was prone to inventing the already extant, including cake, the Frappuccino, and chicken pot pie. Jury’s still out on the feedbag.
Eric and I got into the habit of leaving notes and drawings for one another when we dropped off projects or paperwork at one another’s desks. He made me a “gold star” out of a post-it to show my mom. I fashioned a medic alert bracelet out of paperclips and a file label (because of his advanced age, thirty-five) and left pretend messages from his mom when he was out of the office. “Eric, it’s your mother, please call so we can discuss your inheritance. It’s canceled.” “Eric, this is mom, we just found out that either you or you
r twin brother was born evil. The test results are coming back today. Call me.” “Eric, we’ve just realized we live in Staten Island, send help.”
I still thought my enthusiasm for seeing him at work every day was purely friendly until my annual reread of Jane Eyre over the holidays. As always, I was struck by Jane and Rochester’s banter, but now I noticed something new.
I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp lookout. It had formerly been my endeavor to study all sides of character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid.1
I was leaning against the headboard of the bed in my parents’ guest room, and suddenly I found myself thinking of Eric. But why? I saw plenty of bad in Eric. He was the world’s most annoying writing partner; it took us four hours to write a page of website copy because we fought over every word. Nobody was more critical of my writing than he was. We never agreed. He blamed the Internet for the world’s ills, while I agreed with introverts everywhere that it is a lifesaver. And he was a boy. Since falling for Preeti, the only dates I’d gone on, even halfheartedly, had been with women, and I had begun to wonder if I was even into men anymore. I did have to admit he was generous, prone to nice gestures like buying me a soda on our walks or remembering to ask how my latest non-date with Preeti had gone. And he might be disturbingly fixated on his pug, but at least he lavished love and affection on her. But these questions were all academic—he was spoken for. And so I shrugged the thought of him away. I couldn’t imagine what had even made me think about him in the first place. Then Charlotte Brontë tapped me on the shoulder.
A Girl Walks Into a Book Page 11