“Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

It’s that time of the year.  The time when your impossibly put-together friends announce that they are going to accomplish a Huge Goal in 2011 and then proceed to do so with a minimum of stress, pain, or evident strife.  I usually fall on the other side of the spectrum, looking toward goals but nervous about announcing them, doing what I can and lamenting what I can’t and somehow accomplishing a bunch in the middle.

However.

It has come to my attention that I’m in need of some next steps in terms of my literary career.  (I just almost typed that phrase, moved away from the keyboard, did some busywork, returned, and typed it slowly.  Oh, dear.)  Nothing earth-shattering…it’s just time I looked at what I really want, what’s next, and how I can get from Point A to Point B.

I was talking to a friend about it last night and she said “2009 you would weep over the Facebook status updates of 2010 you.”

She’s right:  2010 was a hugely productive, accomplished, and important year, and though it whipped me down it also built me up in many unexpected ways.  The best part?  Discovering my literary tribe through the readers, bloggers, book-lovers, reviewers, and allies flung all over the world…the people to whom I owe my greatest debt.  Now I get to take all of you into consideration as I ponder my literary future, too, and that is a privilege.

Anyway, my conversation with my friend reminded me that I have other allies, too…the women who wrote my favorite books and whose lives I was privileged to study and write about in The Heroine’s Bookshelf. As I look forward, I can remember that Charlotte Brontë wrote her way through grief and took an active role in her publishing career; that Betty Smith used her writing to catapult her out of the slums of Brooklyn and as a window back in.  My literary heroines spent less time agonizing over the direction of their careers than finding work they couldn’t not do.  Armed with that work, you guys, and a whole history of female writers, I think I’m well-equipped for a new day.

Footnote:  If you haven’t seen it yet, check out The Heroine’s Bookshelf as reviewed on the front page of The Washington Post’s BookWorld.  And stay tuned…I’ve got something really fun up my sleeve for February!

To wit:

I am in Honolulu. it is a real pretty place. Mama is making a dress for me. papa is up north where it is cold. he will come back pretty soon. I have two kittens here and one aboard the ship. good by for today.

LOVE.

Anyway, it got me thinking…you don’t have to be a grown woman to be a heroine.  After all, our first encounter with Jane Eyre is when she is a small thing, curled up on the windowsill reading a book.  Francie Nolan transforms from skinny child to woman-too-soon in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  And Laura Ingalls is young indeed in most of the Little House books.

These young girls remind me of my friend’s daughter Addie, to whom I read approximately 13232532623234623456 books on a recent babysitting excursion, and my niece September, who is spunky and prideful enough for any storybook.

I get excited just thinking about it…what heroism is in their cards?  Did you show signs of heroism as a little girl?

In her poem “Evening Solace,” Charlotte Brontë wrote the following lines:

The human heart has hidden treasures

In secret kept, in silence sealed;

The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,

Whose charms were broken if revealed.

I’m not so much willfully silent these days as bogged down in preparations and anticipation.  In less than two months, The Heroine’s Bookshelf will hit the shelves.  In the meantime, prepare yourself for many exciting announcements…and more silence-breaking from my end.

For example, I could never stand my brothers’ little league games (for shame!) and so I’d sneak off with one of those long Jolly Ranchers and read with my back against a tree.  And I will never forget the cement blocks next to my house in Oak Park, San Diego.  In the morning they’d soak up the sun.  Then I’d lie on them, absorbing warmth, cramming as many books into my head as my head could reasonably tolerate (and often more).

Then there are the many German trains in which I was rocked almost to sleep by my reading and the movement of the locomotive.  And the deep cool rooms somewhere in Nielsen Library at Smith College.

Nowadays, I read a lot while dining alone in restaurants or snuggled up in my bed.  Sometimes the locale becomes a part of the book I’m enjoying…the loud waiters are the Confederate soldiers leaving Atlanta, the blanket I pull up around me is a quilt hand-patched by some long-gone pioneer.  And so I have to ask…what literary places are wrapped up with your reading habits?  Do you tune out your surroundings or let place in?

Illustration via Bethany Schlegel Art and Design

• Writing as fun:  Who can forget the image of Jo March scribbling in her attic, cap on head, pillow at the ready, rats scurrying all around?  Though I know that Louisa May Alcott’s experience of the writing “vortex” was a bit more painful, her character’s no-holds-barred approach to writing reminds me to have some fun with the process.  After all, what other profession includes dreaming, crying, even eavesdropping in its description?
• Writing as salvation:  The story of the Brontës is all I need to remember that I am lucky to have the outlet of writing.  I may not pace around a table at Haworth, but like Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, I try to pour my relief and anxiety into my work.  It helps.
• Writing as rebellion:  She may have written a century ago, but I still consider Colette to be the ultimate literary rebel (and writing about her literary declaration of independence was one of the highlights of The Heroine’s Bookshelf).  Sometimes I find myself continuing work just to prove to myself that I can…that I have something to say, after all.  And I usually do.
• Writing as legacy:  I recently treated myself both to Francine Prose’s excellent new Anne Frank book and the Revised Critical Edition of Anne’s timeless diary.  I didn’t get a chance to include Anne in my book, but I am touched by her awareness that her legacy in the world was a written one.  I won’t ever presume to be an Anne, but thoughts of a literary legacy of some kind are a nice reminder when the going gets tough (and a push to revise the hell out of my terrible first drafts so that nobody reads them when I’m gone!).
• Writing as reading:  As an unabashed bookworm, I can say that there’s nothing so tantalizing as the thought of showing my work to others, no matter how painful that process might be.  The wit, spunk, and sass of my favorite heroines reminds me that I can’t have readers unless I write.  Talk about motivation!

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  Perhaps my favorite modern-day cover, Megan Wilson‘s silhouette for the Vintage edition;
2)  White’s Books’ gorgeous, somehow-still-moody floral take;
3)  Dame Darcy takes on an illustrated Jane Eyre for Penguin;
4)  The edition I first encountered in the library at Blessed Sacrament Parish in San Diego…Fritz Eichenberg’s incredibly illustrated box set from the 1940s;
5)  A pulp fiction fake take on J.E. that made me giggle;
6)  A gorgeous 1950 cover by Grau Sala via Jane Eyre Illustrated, your source for even more gorgeous Jane Eyre covers, dust jackets, and illustrations through the years.

This was Charlotte Brontë, and she’s been on my mind recently for many reasons.

To me, reading is as immersive and essential as breathing, and there are some authors who are more than my favorite writers…they feel like my intimate friends.  Charlotte Brontë is one of those women, and she’s the subject of my first Heroine Mini-Series featuring three pivotal moments in her life.

↔

That shuffling scamp! Charlotte read the letter swiftly, taking in the news once, twice, until she could scarcely see for anger.  He had done it again.  Thomas Newby, the man who had published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, was spreading a vicious rumor, this time in the United States.  Seeking to expand his fortune and capitalize off of the controversy surrounding Charlotte’s incendiary Jane Eyre, he had led the American publishing house Harpers to believe that the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell all belonged to one person and that Jane Eyre, the American rights to which they had just bought, was in fact the work of one author instead of three.

That shuffling scamp! The Brontë sisters had never been ones to make public spectacles of themselves, but after the months of terrible reviews and public scrutiny, this was the last straw.  Charlotte and her sister Anne tromped four miles across unforgiving moorland, enduring a thunderstorm before falling into a carriage that carried them to London.  Barely rested and painfully aware of their countrified appearance in the midst of a bustling city, they sought out the offices of Smith, Elder.  Charlotte herself had carried on a years-long correspondence with her publisher, George Smith…under the pseudonym of Currer Bell.  And now his name, the name of the man who had fought for her book and brought it into the world, was being smeared an ocean away.

That shuffling scamp! Charlotte insisted, gently at first, more passionately when denied, that she must see Mr. Smith at once.  And there he was, “young, tall, gentlemanly,” stepping forward courteous and confused at the sight of these two thin, timid-looking women.  Charlotte thrust a letter into his hand, one he had addressed with his own hand to “Currer Bell, Esq.”  He started, sputtering.

“Where did you get this?”

“At the post office.  It was addressed to me.”  She let the words sink in before she continued.  “We have both come that you might have ocular proof that there are at least two of us.”

To be continued…

]]> http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/03/03/charlotte-bronte-in-london-heroine-mini-series-part-1/feed/ 0 http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/02/09/why-so-serious-heroines/ http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/02/09/why-so-serious-heroines/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:46:09 +0000 Erin Blakemore http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/?p=90 One of the most gratifying parts of writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf was discovering the backstories behind the women who wrote some of my favorite books.  And it wasn’t all fun and friends.  During the course of the book, I got to look at the underbelly of some of these women’s lives:  depression, chronic illness, opium [...]]]> One of the most gratifying parts of writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf was discovering the backstories behind the women who wrote some of my favorite books.  And it wasn’t all fun and friends.  During the course of the book, I got to look at the underbelly of some of these women’s lives:  depression, chronic illness, opium addiction, adultery, even suicide.   And you know what?  I loved every minute.

Why embrace the serious sides of my literary heroines when many of them left such happy, pert, intelligent women as their legacy?  (Anne of Green Gables or Lizzie Bennet, anyone?)  Why not just focus on the picture they wanted to present to the world…the picture of the productive, happy writer who left her dirty laundry between two covers and moved on with life?

I was reminded of this question when reading this article about Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dirty little opium secrets (or not-so-secrets, as the case may be).  For me, the answer is all about context.  When we look at the real lives of these writers, their accomplishments in the face of great trials and hardships are even more impressive.  Louisa May Alcott wrote her books in a state of constant, crushing financial worry…and if she hadn’t known what it was like to be poor, she could never have given us the image of four sisters sewing their way through dire straits and attempting to burden the load they must shoulder.  Could Charlotte Brontë have made Jane Eyre‘s Lowood School so terrifying if she herself had not survived a similar experience?

Now that I know the backstory behind my favorite books, I feel even more grateful that these women took time out of their lives to give something to us, people they never met or even imagined.  Not that I subscribe to the thought that writers must be tortured (that’s probably material for a whole ‘nother post), but I think they’re at least allowed to be human.  When we deny a Jane Austen or a Frances Hodgson Burnett her humanity, we miss out on the rest of the story.

I remembered that the real world was wide…

Born in 1816, Charlotte Brontë shattered perceptions about female intellect and passion with Jane Eyre, which she published under a pseudonym. Charlotte died in 1855 after becoming one of the most celebrated and mysterious writers in England.

For Book Clubs:

1. Jane’s steadfastness leads her to what is right, but it also separates her from the man she loves. Is Jane’s steadfastness positive or destructive on the whole?.

2. Though she made her heroine rootless and lonely, Charlotte Brontë herself was fiercely attached to her family. Discuss family ties (and the lack thereof) in Jane Eyre.

3. At the time of its publication, Jane Eyre was subject to wild speculation as to the author’s gender. Is the book “women’s fiction” or not? Why?

4. How are Jane’s emotions reflected in the landscape around her?

5. Discuss Jane’s role as governess. How does it serve as a literary device? Is there power or only humiliation in her subservient role?