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

thankful for, she gives thanks. And she keeps walking.

Does Jane’s strength come from her utter rootlessness, from the lessons of a life of hardship, toil, and emotional deprivation? Perhaps. But Jane is as human as her creator. As she wanders along in a crisis partly of her own making, strength and weakness seem interchangeable. Faced with a difficulty (and what a difficulty!), Jane has chosen loyalty to herself over loyalty to her love. The hardships of her life have not been enough to soften her. If she stays with Rochester, she will doubtless enjoy the rest of her life… and burn in hell for all eternity. So she goes, suffering as much from her self-imposed isolation as from the knowledge that she has wounded the one she holds most dear.

Principles got Jane into this mess, and eventually they get her back out again. Jane’s steadfastness endangers her one meager chance at happiness and sets her life on a course of survival and focus. But the act of clinging, the very practice of steadfastness, defines and hones the principles themselves.

Jane’s deluge takes away everything she has come to value, but it has something to give in return. That journey is the crucible in which her true character—that of a woman who combines principle with a loving heart, a woman who can’t bear mere duty and learns to temper her natural severity with love—is forged. And, tellingly, it is a journey Jane must make alone. All the brooding lovers and abusive teachers in England couldn’t teach Jane as much about herself or her core values as a few days wandering the moors, looking for salvation, and searching for the next right step. Though she would be content to fall into the moors and become a part of the outdoors, she does not die. She stands up, moves forward, asks for help. Ultimately, Jane makes her way back to Rochester and finds her happy ending. Steadfastness rewarded, she survives.

Charlotte, too, clung steadfastly to life over death. After a period of intense grief, she entered the world of English literary lights on her own terms, ventured out from Haworth and brushed shoulders with London high society. She even married, leaving behind the spinsterhood that defined and confined much of her adult life. Though fated to die young (she succumbed to dehydration in 1855 following a bout of uncontrollable morning sickness after only a few months of marriage), Charlotte had one thing in common with her plain Jane: she couldn’t be beaten by life.

Any heroine worth reading about will one day find herself on the moors of a devastating personal crisis. For the most part, we must traverse them alone. We would do well to remember Charlotte and Jane as we come face to face with our inadequacy and our inner strength.

The moment of crossing is one of isolation, humility, and despair. But as heroines, we are already equipped with everything we need. Inside every heroine is the lovelorn, lonely writer who kept on working; the plain governess who kept on walking toward her principles. Even when we’re too scared to function or too grief-stricken to care, we can be carried along by steadfast actions like Jane’s. Our steadfastness punctures the fear and isolation of the deluge, enabling us to address only that which deserves our attention and keep putting one foot in front of the other, bad reviews and broken hearts notwithstanding.

I first encountered Jane Eyre when I was far too young to understand the sweep of its great love story and its great tale of cleaving to one’s self as steadfastly as to any other love. I loved it then for what it gave me, but I love it more now for what I bring to every reading. It’s a book I revisit again and again: when I seek to see myself amid the threat of depression and feeble people-pleasing, when I need to bolster myself for storms of my own making. Every time, it’s a bit different, some parts familiar and soothing, others jarring and rude. But every time I finish Jane Eyre, I marvel at how plain and poor Jane can adhere so unbreakably to her own truth. This steadfastness pushes her into heroic territory, even when it seems as if she will come out with nothing but her principles. It’s the thing that carries her through one of literature’s more turbulent love stories without separating her from herself or her ideals.

Like Jane, we are goaded by peril and stress, loss and unimaginable redefinition. First, we lose sight of ourselves. Then we hone in, regroup. Suddenly, clarity sets in: unimportant things are shelved until later; our selves are identified, then cared for. Slowly, painfully, we become even more loyal to that which we know to be right. We stand up. We ask for help, even when doing so seems “as unromantic as Monday morning.” We walk on toward ourselves. And we make our way forward, as long as we don’t cling too tightly to the principles that drive us onward. Like Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë, we find we “must struggle on, strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.”

READ THIS BOOK:

• In the midst of breakups and life passages

• With a box of tissues at hand

• When you’re not sure if you can deal with another personal bombshell

JANE’S LITERARY SISTERS: 

• Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

• Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

• Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Chapter 11 Ambition

Jo March in Little Women,

by Louisa May Alcott

Any mention of her “works” always had a bad effect upon Jo, who either grew rigid and looked offended, or changed the subject with a brusque remark, as now. “Sorry you could find nothing better to read. I write that rubbish because it sells, and ordinary people like it.”

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa May Alcott had always imagined her return from her first trip to Europe as a kind of triumph, a graceful homecoming replete with happy memories and artistic and romantic accomplishments aplenty. The reality was somewhat different: fourteen nauseous, boring days aboard the Africa led not to fanfare and tearful reunions but to the damp, anticlimactic feeling that overcame her as she looked out over the Boston harbor that meant home. The Europe of her childhood fantasies had been something to energize, inspire, and satisfy; the one she had just seen had turned her into an invalid nearly as cranky as the one she had been sent to supervise.

As a companion to Anna Weld, the thirty-three-year-old had seen Switzerland, London, Paris. But her obligations to her nervous, frivolous charge had kept her from wandering or exploring on her own, a fact she resented more with every passing day. Miss Weld didn’t care about the scenery that surrounded her, and her neurotic chatter drove Louisa nearly mad with boredom and anger. Neither new friends nor unfamiliar sights could undo the fact that here, too, was unrelenting work, her constant companion since childhood. Even the sudden gift of money from her mother was just a stopgap measure. While it allowed her to spend a few brief weeks luxuriating in London, she knew she was operating on borrowed time. Characteristically, she was also doing so on borrowed money. When she came home, listless and sick, she realized that the gift had been lent by well-meaning friends. Guilty and angry, she went through the family finances, falling back into her old role of problem-solver and reluctant breadwinner.

It was in this fretful state of mind, compounded by the recent death of her beloved brother-in-law, that Louisa received her publisher’s commission—and it was an unusual one. She’d made her career first as an anonymous writer of lurid serials, then as author of a wildly popular book drawing on her experiences as a nurse in the Civil War. To her surprise, publisher Thomas Niles wanted neither—he wanted a book for girls. Louisa herself was an unmarried tomboy who knew little about children, let alone little women. She was also poor. “Niles asked me to write a girls book…. Fuller asked me to be the editor of [popular children’s magazine] Merry’s Museum. Said I’d try,” she wrote in her journal. “Began at once on both jobs, but didn’t like