Posts Tagged ‘jane eyre’

Little Laura Jernegan, a girl who traveled the world on a whale ship during the 1860s, made quite the splash on the Internet yesterday (thanks, Wendy McClure, for passing on the link).  Her journal, written when she was six years old, records her thoughts on various animals, the smells of whaling, her fearsome penmanship, and not knowing what’s for supper.  The overall impression is one of a feisty, feckless girl, a real-life heroine living out an adventure right out of a novel.

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?

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what a luxury it is to write a book (or, even better, to have written one). After all, the women who came before me were full-time moms, pioneers, dutiful daughters and poor ones, women with things to do. Still others had to fight to prove that their works were written by women at all.

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 reasons that will become apparent sooner rather than later, I’ve been thinking about literary places.  Not just real places like the Ingalls Homestead or the moors of England, but the places in which we discover the books that mean so much to us.

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

Ah, Jane Eyre. You have sucked up innumerable hours of my time and God knows what kind of space in my head and heart over the years.  And your covers always tend to feature bland, bleak, gray-clad governesses who don’t really point to an appealing book within.  In honor of Charlotte Brontë’s timeless classic (and as a way of announcing my intention to play along with the Brontëalong over at An Accomplished Young Lady), here are some Jane Eyre covers that won’t bore you to death (click to enlarge!):

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 is the story of a woman whose work was lambasted as unchristian, immoral, anything but the work of an upstanding lady.  She was nervous in temperament and given to moody depression and moments of utter despair, sadness that the unfettered moors of her childhood home heightened.  She wore spectacles and had ruddy cheeks and a few missing teeth.  And she gave us Jane Eyre, another plain, poor woman who changed the world.

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.

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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…