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

her household: if she were rich, she oversaw a staff of servants and entertained for a living; if she were poor, she carried out endless labors punctuated by births and deaths. Jane Austen had to publish her books anonymously at a time when women were lucky to be taught to read. Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë both published under male pseudonyms, their writing the only vent for their active minds. Even Margaret Mitchell was the subject of scandal and derision in the twentieth century for her decision to pursue a newswoman’s career. Like their heroines, these women writers had much to endure. Some wrote against incredible odds or in secret; others faced down prejudice or poverty in their pursuit of a better life.

When I started looking into the stories of the authors who mean so much to me, I didn’t know I was in for a few shocks. I can’t be the only person who was initially disheartened to learn that Little Women was a labor of practicality, not love, for Louisa May Alcott. Written in mere weeks and considered lesser literature by Alcott herself, it was quickly finished and even more quickly turned into groceries and clothing for her struggling family. Frances Hodgson Burnett was just as famous for her inappropriate affairs as her timeless children’s books; Margaret Mitchell was almost barred from polite society for her wild behavior. How dare I enjoy, even learn from, the fruits of these female authors, especially the books I now know to be distractions from adult literary careers and happy lives, written under duress and in grave emotional pain?

But even if Alcott meant not a word of her most beloved book, its pages contain the truths I need to face the horrors of being a restless worker and a disappointing daughter. Sure, it’s moralizing and artificially cheerful, but the power of its message is underscored by its author’s story. Embedded inside the books I love, even those written by unwilling hands, are the stories of women’s struggles to survive, to define themselves as authors and as human beings whose worth went beyond a paycheck or a byline. These heroines’ messages couldn’t exist without the strife from which they were written, and the power of each story is magnified by the triumphs and failures that followed. Knowing the rest of the story deepens the act of reading itself.

Writing a book about reading at a time when the practical is the popular has been a rare challenge. Surely there’s always something better to do than revisit women who’ve been dead for centuries. As I wrote this book, I reread my childhood favorites and encountered new voices and stories, supplementing the books themselves with a rich selection of biographies and archival materials. In the course of its composition, I’ve moved from awe (total absorption in story and narrative) to obsession (the fun stage in which I read lengthy descriptions of a debutante year or make up my Little Women name) to guilt (who am I, a writer assisted by Diet Coke and Google and inexpensive transcontinental communications, to even pick up a book written with a quill pen before a wood fire?). After a while, even my breaks fed the book, every pause bringing a reminder of the enduring quality of “my” heroines and authors, from the distinctly Scarlett-like charm of a youth-obsessed Madonna to familiar notes of Frances Hodgson Burnett in the downfall and deaths of celebrities like Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Brittany Murphy.

As I befriended the women behind the books, I was reminded that they were as human as any modern woman. Louisa May Alcott? Testy morphine addict. Betty Smith? Chain-smoker with a terrible knack for picking the wrong men. Like their heroines, the women behind some of literature’s most important and enduring books weren’t perfect. Most of them didn’t even come close: their lives were pocked by acrimony and despair, family feuds and miserable, boring jobs. They showed up for them anyway. The heroism of these authors lies not in the perfection of their pursuits, but in the fact that they bequeathed us something in the process, something that came from the stumbling-through and survival that is our collective lot.

I may not write with a blotty fountain pen or a typewriter; I may never change the world. But I feel a wild closeness to the Lucy Maud Montgomeries and Zora Neale Hurstons who left us their life stories. These were women who could chop wood and tell off nasty critics, women with the guts and the tenacity to write when they lacked power, heat, and health. Over the past months they’ve become my fast friends, not just because they’ve given me a glimpse into the heroic life but because they’ve revealed a tiny bit of my own potential in the process.

In times of struggle, there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe. Accompanied by the heroines on my bookshelf, I choose to do both.

Chapter 1 Self

Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

JANE AUSTEN, PERSUASION

It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day. Jane broke the news over breakfast, then begged for a carriage to deliver her safely back to her family home in Bath. Her hostesses’ adieus were icy at best, in sad contrast to the pleasure with which their family had greeted her. It was a predicament, well, fit for a Jane Austen heroine, only this time the heroine was the author herself. She couldn’t afford not to marry. So why was she speeding away from Manydown Park as fast as her borrowed carriage could carry her, fleeing the only proposal she had ever received?

The author of Pride and Prejudice and Emma wasn’t exactly known for her romantic conquests, and the twenty-seven-year-old had already prepared herself for a spinster’s fate. It wasn’t that she was unattractive; indeed, her charms were fresh enough for any Regency drawing room. She had even managed to attract a romantic scandal years before. Still, things just hadn’t gelled, and it began to seem as if she’d be a dependent relative forever.

Back in her prime at age twenty-one, financial worries hadn’t seemed real to spirited Jane, who possessed an unusually broad education in addition to a lady’s expected accomplishments in drawing, dancing, and penmanship. Her penchant for conversation and her playful wit attracted the attention of Tom Lefroy, a young Irishman who went public with his admiration. Jane reveled in Tom’s conversation, tinged with an Irish accent. The couple conversed publicly, met in friends’ homes, and danced enough to incite juicy speculation. “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved,” she wrote to her sister in 1796. “Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”

Though her references to Tom were lighthearted, Jane couldn’t hide her attraction. Tom was everywhere: for months, he occupied her ballroom, her living room, and her blithe letters. By the time he returned to Ireland to study law, Jane considered herself engaged in heart, if not in fact.

Preoccupied, but energized, she threw herself into her work, completing her first two novels (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) before realizing that Tom wasn’t coming back. She never found out why her Irish love fell out of contact, but she suspected it had something to do with her poverty. Discouraged from his relationship with Jane by family members, he suddenly announced his engagement to a wealthy woman. Her marriage prospects dashed, Jane got down to the business of being a spinster. She took to wearing dowdy caps and retired from society, committed only to herself and her family, relegated to eternal dependence on her successful brothers, and caught somewhere between marriage market and matronhood.

So six years later, Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal seemed like her out. Jane was a welcome addition to the Bigg-Wither circle at Manydown Park. She accepted the invitation to visit gladly, all too eager to escape her family’s home in loathsome Bath and spend time with Alethea and Catherine, Harris’s sisters and her intimate friends, in Steventon. And her happy holiday hinted at a permanent vacation: just a week after her arrival, she impulsively accepted Harris’s proposal, celebrating her engagement along with her future in-laws. It was only later that night, alone in her bedchamber, that she began to have her doubts.

The decision should have been simple. Her fiancé was eligible, well connected; his hand would mean the difference between financial security and poor-relative status. Marrying Harris wouldn’t just make Jane a wife: it would make her a wealthy woman, free of uncomfortable family obligations and the specter of poverty that had haunted her entire adult life.