The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

dynamic and creating her own. When Francie fights with her mother about going back to school, you can feel her anxiety about breaking up her already endangered family crawl down your own neck, a spiderlike specter that is guilt, fear, and boldness all tied up in one:

“Our family used to be like a strong cup,” thought Francie. “It was whole and sound and held things well. When Papa died, the first crack came. And this fight tonight made another crack. Soon there will be so many cracks that the cup will break and we’ll all be pieces instead of a whole thing together. I don’t want this to happen, yet I’m deliberately making a deep crack.” Her sharp sigh was just like Katie’s.

As women charged with creating our own families even as we leave the ones into which we were born, it can feel so wrong to instigate those cracks in the foundation of what we’ve learned to love. But even as she acknowledges the destructive power of adolescence and adulthood, Betty looks on those rifts with the kindness her mother lacked. Her words are painful, but the underlying message of unity despite the imperfections can help a heroine move through her own disruptions to the family unit.

Betty Smith offers complex solace to heroines called upon to negotiate their own treacherous family roads. In Betty’s world, the very man who heals you can be the one who breaks you in two and who sets your life up for a world of pain. The woman who forces you into a life you’re not sure you really want is also the person who cares for you most in the world. It’s a painful symmetry, one in which the message isn’t in the hurting, but in the cleaving to one another.

Francie and Betty both stick to their quest for an intact family. Some abandon their families altogether in favor of an assembled group of friends and fosters. Others, like me, take a clumsy stab at negotiating that gray area that falls between family and self, a mother’s love and disapproval, and a daughter’s struggle to define her own way. It took much more than my year abroad to teach me that I can allow myself to be part of my family on my own terms, terms we come to in a constant truce of sorts. Decades later, it’s slowly sinking in that nobody but me can define what I can contribute to my family, and that my challenge to reconcile myself to my people will be the work of a lifetime, not a day.

As modern heroines, we’re faced with an ever-changing definition of family. As things like same-sex marriage and changing female roles redefine the family unit, we are called upon to redefine ourselves as heroines and as humans, reassessing and rediscovering our place in relation to others. Whether we’re ready to take on the family roles that have been handed us is beside the point. A heroine can create her own familial destiny. Like Francie, we’re surrounded by a sloppy, vital, flawed, and abundant family of choice wherever we go. The shining world of childhood might look a bit dingier in the light of day, the librarian may never look up from her desk, even our mothers might falter and fail us on occasion. But as heroines, we can become our own mothers even as we become others'. We can, like Betty Smith, press our backs up against the chimney in our freezing apartment, smuggling the heat of a neighbor’s stove as we work on connecting our pasts with our presents.

READ THIS BOOK: 

• When you have to make do with $5 until your next paycheck

• After unsettling phone calls with mothers or wild siblings

• On long solo vacations taken to figure out where things stand

FRANCIE’S LITERARY SISTERS: 

• Esperanza Cordero in The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

• Sarah Smolinsky in The Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska

• Astrid Magnusson in White Oleander, by Janet Fitch

Chapter 6 Indulgence

Claudine in Colette’s Claudine novels

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

COLETTE

Paris in the 1890s was a hub of excess, a steaming hothouse where anything could happen. It was a society that fed on scandal, cultivated ugliness, stringing together love affairs and louche acts like so many pearls. It was the last place you’d expect to find Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, but there she was, a child among adults, bored and petulant, barely older than a schoolgirl and still sporting a schoolgirl’s knee-length braids. Not exactly a heroine you’d pay any attention to once you met her husband, Willy, a man who defined charisma in a charismatic time.

Gabri, as the young wife was known, had a frank provincial accent that stuck in the ears of her new Parisian consorts like burrs in silk. She seemed—and felt—more suited for climbing trees or hiking through the woods than lounging in the stultified, corseted atmosphere of the sitting rooms Willy loved to take her to. A rake, a lecher, a womanizer, and a windbag, Henry “Willy” Gauthier-Villars had an appeal that far outweighed his many weaknesses: Willy was famous, and rabidly so. He had established his reputation as a writer skewering the music of the day and was known for his excessive appetites for food, money, and women. This was a man whose last mistress had committed suicide after bearing his bastard child, a child Willy’s parents were eager to dispose of and whom they encouraged Willy to send to sleepy Burgundy to nurse. It’s there that he met the Colettes and their seventeen- year-old daughter; before he knew it, he was held captive by her youthful sexuality and her stunning beauty. He would gain nothing by marrying an obscure, dowryless country girl fourteen years his junior, but once he realized that marriage meant he could have her whenever he wanted, he married her all the same.

Gabri herself was more than charmed. She became obsessed with Willy’s cravings and the licentious, over- the-top personality that challenged everything her sheltered childhood had taught her. She got to know him a little better during their two-year engagement, but nothing could prepare her for the day in May 1893 when the new wife finally made fin de siècle Paris, in all its tawdry, overdressed glory, her home. Only then did she realize that Willy “specialized” in tomboyish women much younger than himself, women he courted extravagantly and jilted viciously. He enjoyed putting Gabri on display in polite society while he indulged himself in other women’s bedrooms. She learned about these affairs first through rumor and anonymous letters, then from chance meetings with her rivals. To a more seasoned woman, one versed in the languid sexuality of bohemian-meets-bourgeois Paris, Willy’s flirtations would have seemed harmless. But to Gabri, they were a betrayal.

Caught between a sort of languid love prison and her own growing restlessness, Gabri began to experiment. She didn’t dare to take her own lovers (yet), but she could push the envelope in other ways, playing her trophy role to the hilt, daring to wear a boy’s sailor suit to social events and reveling in the raised eyebrows and shocked praise of her hosts. She began to collect a shamelessly bohemian group of friends, dramatic and theatrical individuals who challenged social mores. She embraced gay men and demimondaines alike, gathering them around her with her increasingly famous stories of racy schoolgirl life. But even as she tested the boundaries of a stifling social order, her ties to her increasingly money-hungry husband grew stronger. Now she fulfilled the dual role of wife and secretary, handling his correspondence and eventually helping pen his essays.

History does not record whether Gabri (who had begun to tinker with the simple moniker Colette) or Willy first came up with the idea of writing down her schoolgirl stories, but soon enough she was embroiled in a full-scale literary project. It was understood from the start that the work was Willy’s. After all, his was the famous name, and he regularly indulged in the very du jour practice of employing a stable of ghostwriters whose toil was rewarded by a cut of the royalties—once they agreed to let Willy claim their work as his own. The deal was simple—the writers did the dirty work, Willy took the credit. Why on earth should his arrangement with his wife be any different?