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

Depressed and listless, maddened by Heger’s nonre-sponse, Charlotte kept turning to her pen. Her struggles slowly unraveled themselves on paper, culminating in a love letter that bleeds with unrequited passion and stifled agony. “I strove to restrain my tears, to utter no complaint,” she wrote. “But when one does not complain, when one seeks to dominate oneself with a tyrant’s grip, the faculties start into rebellion and one pays for external calm with an internal struggle that is almost unbearable. Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you…. Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them… nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love…. But you showed me of yore a little interest… and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold on to it as I would hold on to life.”

He never responded. The letter was later found, torn in pieces and meticulously pieced back together by Heger’s wife.

And this is where Charlotte’s steadfastness came in. Behind her lay what might have been her only chance at love. In front of her was a future full of bad weather and boredom. Deprived of her beloved professor and doomed to menial chores back at the parsonage, she began to write in earnest.

She wrote about love and deprivation. She wrote poems that blister with isolation and despair. She wrote her first novel. She even wrote one last letter to Heger. She wrote in the living room where she had spun fantastical tales as a child, surrounded by her sisters, who were avid readers and writers. Together, they shivered, worked, and read through the long, dark English winters, taking breaks to pace around the living room. Still, she kept her words to herself.

The orgy of writing that followed was no idyll. The family curse raised its head again as Branwell, once talented and precocious, slid further into the grips of laudanum addiction and alcoholism, humiliating the family with his repeated lapses into debt and his ranting, incoherent behavior. Meanwhile, Emily and Anne were placid and distracted, wrapped up in their own affairs.

Charlotte’s jump from literary secrecy to outright ambition was a happy accident. Sometime in late 1845, she picked up one of Emily’s notebooks. Idly, she began to read, forgetting that she had not asked permission to do so. What she saw electrified her. “Something more than surprise seized me,” she recalled later. “These were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write.” Forced to confess her perfidy to her sisters, she found herself launching into a heartfelt argument for publication.

It took a while to convince Emily and Anne that publication was desirable or even possible, much less to overcome their scruples over Charlotte’s betrayal of Emily’s A. Anyone else would have given up. But Charlotte knew her sisters, and was convinced that the genius they could demonstrate in words should not lie in state at the parsonage forever. Slowly, she cracked through their reserve, tantalizing them—and herself—with visions of access to a world they could never conquer alone.

Armed with a small legacy from their deceased aunt and uncharacteristically optimistic about their prospects, the trio paid to publish their poems under a set of ambiguous pseudonyms. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell appeared in May 1846. Encouraged by two positive reviews, the sisters hastened to mail off their first novels to their publisher. But their optimism was premature; despite early signs of promise, the book of poetry sold a grand total of two copies. Still, Charlotte didn’t give up.

The year that finally brought Charlotte into literary triumph and scandal would ultimately be overshadowed by a landscape of total personal devastation. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, but Charlotte could barely devote any time to its growing popularity, the public’s obsession with its author’s secret identity, and the scathing assessments of its “unchristian” subject matter. As her book took on a life of its own, Charlotte’s own life was unraveling. Branwell drank himself to death in 1848. Her eccentric sisters followed soon after, succumbing to tuberculosis within three months of one another. Charlotte and her father were all alone.

Charlotte shielded herself from her pain with the thing that had always gotten her through: writing. “If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” she wrote in the preface to her novel Shirley in 1849. “Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.” Though she steadfastly turned herself to the duties that lay ahead, the years that followed her losses were the loneliest and most uncertain she had ever faced. Was this the end of life?

Charlotte’s alter ego asks herself the same question in the darkest chapters of Jane Eyre, a book that has much to teach us about loyalty and steadfastness. The abandonment, hopelessness, and devastation of Charlotte’s personal life pales in comparison with the trials she gave Jane, an impoverished orphan who must make her way through a hostile and immoral world. Just when Jane thinks she has found true love and a peaceful existence, Charlotte snatches the rug from under her feet. Edward Rochester, the moody man Jane loves with her entire life, reveals a disastrous secret at the altar: he is already married. Even worse, his wife is a madwoman who lives in the attic of the house where the now hopelessly star-crossed couple fell in love.

Here’s where it gets good. Anyone who has cracked open Jane Eyre is not likely to soon forget the emotional ordeal that follows as Jane faces the love of her life and refuses his request to be her lover, if not her husband.

I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty—“Depart!”

“Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise—'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.’”

“Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours.”

Lashed by the whip of principle, Jane flees across the moors, ending up exhausted, starving, and entirely debased as she starts a new life of voluntary separation from the only person she has ever loved. Jane is clearly poised for a comeback, but first she must undergo some of the most harrowing chapters in English literature. Charlotte almost revels in Jane’s devastation, but she won’t let her wallow for long. Slowly, she builds Jane back up, first through blind hope, then through abstract faith, and finally through the deeds and the love of other people.

A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.

What possible redeeming value can there be in this ultimate of darkest hours before dawn? Fortunately for Jane, and for us, Charlotte has buried a kernel of hope in the storm, and within her heroine. Jane’s rebirth is not one of brute persistence or of bravery, though she persists and is brave. It is of internal steadfastness, a dogged adherence to personal principles and values even when she is literally floored by grief and fear.

In the chapters that follow Jane’s flight, Charlotte and Jane get down to the nitty-gritty of what can sustain a person through a personal crisis of epic proportions. Jane the person is stripped down piece by piece, voluntarily turning her back on her relationships, her past associations, and even her name (she goes by a pseudonym in order to escape search and rescue by Rochester). Faced with the crisis of a relationship gone horribly wrong, one that threatens both her place in society and in the eyes of God, Jane refuses to take the easy way out. Instead, she chooses certain misery, shedding that which does not serve her principles. “Life, however,” she reflects, “was yet in my possession; with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.”

At first, it seems like there won’t be much left to set out toward. Jane has consciously dumped the trappings of the beautiful bride and is left only with her plain garb and meager possessions. Jane the social construct—the governess, the unlikely bride, the future Mrs. Rochester—is meaningless out on the moors. All that’s left is Jane as she truly is—a lost soul.

Jane’s journey through terror, abandonment, and conflicted emotions takes on a nightmarish quality for a while. Her lament echoed by the wild landscape she encounters, she does not stop. Though she has little to be