DEDICATION
For Charlotte, of course
CONTENTS
Dedication
Foreword by Tracy Chevalier
My Mother’s Wedding—Tessa Hadley
Luxury Hour—Sarah Hall
Grace Poole Her Testimony—Helen Dunmore
Dangerous Dog—Kirsty Gunn
To Hold—Joanna Briscoe
It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies—Jane Gardam
Since First I Saw Your Face—Emma Donoghue
Reader, I Married Him—Susan Hill
The Mirror—Francine Prose
A Migrating Bird—Elif Shafak
Behind the Mountain—Evie Wyld
The China from Buenos Aires—Patricia Park
Reader, She Married Me—Salley Vickers
Dorset Gap—Tracy Chevalier
Party Girl—Nadifa Mohamed
Transference—Esther Freud
The Mash-Up—Linda Grant
The Self-Seeding Sycamore—Lionel Shriver
The Orphan Exchange—Audrey Niffenegger
Double Men—Namwali Serpell
Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark—Elizabeth McCracken
Notes on the Contributors
A Note on Charlotte Brontë
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD BY TRACY CHEVALIER
Why is “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much? Why have twenty-one writers jumped at the opportunity to take that line and run with it, folding its powerful resonance and sheer chutzpah into their own stories? Is it because of who says it and how she says it, or who has written it, or how we read it—or all of those things?
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the story of a nineteenth-century orphan who becomes a governess and finds her place in the world, is most memorable for the character of Jane herself. “Poor, obscure, plain, and little,” with no family and no prospects, nothing to cushion her from a life of poverty and loneliness except her wits and her self-belief, Jane is the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And who doesn’t support the underdog? No matter what our circumstances, most of us see ourselves as underdogs; we can relate to her, and cheer her on.
Despite a childhood of physical abuse (near-starvation at her boarding school) and psychological torment (locked in the “red room” by her cruel aunt), Jane grows up with her self-esteem intact, and throughout the novel proves to be tough, resilient and morally grounded. She catches the eye of her employer, Mr. Rochester, a man assumed to be way out of her league. She is as witty and as clever as he, eventually winning his love when she isn’t even trying to. She stands up to him too, declaring, in probably the second most quoted line from the book: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” Who can resist a character like Jane Eyre?
“Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me”—as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. (Interestingly, Jane also inherits a fortune from an absent uncle, but no one ever remembers that detail; it is a deus ex machina out of her control and so it means less to us.) Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
It is also flattering—and memorable—to be addressed directly. How many novels acknowledge their readers? Jane addresses us the Reader throughout, and by doing so brings us on her side. Not only that: the line resonates because of the silent clauses that surround it. What it really says is: “You may be surprised to learn that, Reader, I married him” or, “Reader, I married him, though perhaps I shouldn’t have” or even, “Reader, I married him and then we went to bed.” We readers fill in those blanks, and doing so involves us in Jane’s decision as much as her speaking directly to us does. Her story becomes entwined with us, so that it feels as if we are telling it alongside Jane and her creator. No wonder we remember the line: we seem to have written it ourselves.
The woman who created that line is also a significant factor in its power. Though most readers may not know a lot about Charlotte Brontë, many will be struck by even the briefest outline of her remarkable life: remarkable not for being full of incident, but because it wasn’t. Or it was, but it was drama played out within an intimate domestic space rather than on a wider stage. Charlotte was one of a trio of sisters who grew up in a parsonage in a remote Yorkshire village on the edge of the moors, who all published novels around the same time, with strong characters and storylines, before dying young. If you visit the atmospheric Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, where I first had the idea to create this collection of stories, you will be struck by what a strange, intense family the Brontës were: a hothouse of creativity springing from unpromising surroundings. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë often sat together in the severe dining room, all writing and talking about what they wrote.
Women just didn’t do that back in the nineteenth century. Most writers then were men; middle-class women were expected to be decorative rather than active. They were not meant to write novels about obsessive love on the moors (Emily’s Wuthering Heights), or wives escaping their drunken, abusive husbands (Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), or a headstrong governess who declares that she will marry. That they published at all—at first under the peculiar male names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell—is miraculous. Jane Eyre went on to become a publishing sensation; it was well reviewed, sold well, and Charlotte was fêted by other writers such as William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell (one of the few other popular women writers at the time).
The fact that from such an unlikely background she became a famous, bestselling writer is heartening news for all would-be writers, for all women—and indeed, for all women writers. That is why I have asked women to contribute to this collection—we have even more reason to be grateful to Charlotte for her ambition and imagination, which paved the way for more women to write and be published. “Reader, I married him” reveals not just Jane Eyre’s determination, but Charlotte Brontë’s too, and it inspires our own.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up the line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken “Reader, I married him” to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Some of the writers have written close to where the stone has entered the water, taking the Jane Eyre story itself and writing it from a different angle: Helen Dunmore from Grace Poole’s point of view; Salley Vickers from Mr. Rochester’s eyes. Audrey Niffenegger places Jane in a contemporary war-torn country in “The Orphan Exchange.” Other stories are ripples a little further from the source, including elements from the novel such as the moors setting, or specific incidents, or imagery such as mirrors or animals, or even certain lines. (Look out for “small and plain,” Rochester’s famous description of Jane.) You do not need to know Jane Eyre to enjoy these stories, but if you do, those resonances will make you smile.
Other stories may move still further away from Jane, yet almost all of them address marriage (or today’s equivalent of it) in some way, exploring when marriage might happen, or should happen, or shouldn’t, or when it ends, or is with the wrong person, or seems to be with the right person but goes wrong. There are at least two proposals in the collection—though we will have to guess at the replies!
&nb
sp; For some weddings themselves provide the drama, courtesy of a painful shard of glass in Linda Grant’s “The Mash-Up,” or a sudden cast change in “My Mother’s Wedding” by Tessa Hadley, or a secret liaison during a Zambian bonding ceremony in Namwali Serpell’s “Double Men,” or a muddy Gothic encounter on the moors in “To Hold” by Joanna Briscoe.
For others, a wedding is only the start of a relationship, the stories moving beyond the traditional happy ending to find out what happens within marriage. Evie Wyld explores a woman’s feelings about her husband, set against an austere Canadian landscape peopled with bears, while Susan Hill dissects the fall-out from a famous Anglo-American marriage, and Francine Prose looks at what happens to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester after they wed. In “The Self-Seeding Sycamore” Lionel Shriver reminds us of what can grow after a marriage has ended.
Always, always in these stories there is love—whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers—in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
MY MOTHER’S WEDDING
TESSA HADLEY
IT WAS NEVER GOING to be an ordinary kind of wedding. My mother didn’t do anything ordinary. She would marry Patrick at the summer solstice; it would all take place on the smallholding where we lived, in Pembrokeshire. My parents had bought the place in the seventies from an old couple, Welsh-speaking and chapel-going. Family and friends were coming from all over; all our Pembrokeshire friends would be there, and those of our neighbours who were still our friends: some of them didn’t like the way we lived. My mother had dreamed up a wedding ceremony with plenty of drama. She and Patrick would drink Fen’s home-made mead from a special cup, then smash it; the clinching moment would come when they got to take off all their clothes at sunset and immerse themselves in the pond while everyone sang—Fen would wave myrtle branches over them and pronounce them man and wife. Mum had spent hours puzzling over her notebook, trying to devise the right form of words for her vow. She could whisper to horses (she really could, that wasn’t just hokum, I’ve seen her quieting a berserk half-broken young gelding when grown men wouldn’t go near it), but she struggled sometimes to find the right words for things.
Patrick wasn’t my father, needless to say. My father was long gone: from the smallholding and from west Wales and from the lifestyle. Dad had short hair now; he worked for an insurance company and voted for Mrs. Thatcher. From time to time I went to stay with him and my stepmother, and I thought of those weeks in High Barnet as a tranquil escape, the way other people enjoyed a holiday in the country: with their central heating, and their kitchen with its food processor and waste-disposal unit, and the long empty days while they were both out at work, when I tried on all her trim little dresses and her make-up. I never mentioned Mrs. Thatcher when I got back to Wales. I didn’t like her politics any more than the others did, but I loved my dad. I didn’t want to encourage the way everyone gloated, pretending to be shocked and disappointed by how he’d gone over to the dark side.
Patrick wasn’t the father of my two half-siblings, Eithne and Rowan, either. Their dad was Lawrence, and he was still very much in our lives, lived a mile down the road—only he’d left Mum around the time Rowan was starting school, went off with Nancy Withers. And on the rebound Mum had had a fling with Fen, who was her best friend’s husband. But that was all over now and Patrick was the love of her life and someone new from outside our set; all those people from her past—Lawrence and Nancy and Fen and Sue and all the others, though not my dad or my stepmother—would be at her wedding because that was the kind of party they all liked best, where everyone had a history with everyone else, and anything might happen, and there was opportunity for plenty of pouring out their hearts to one another and dancing and pairing up in the wrong pairs, while the dope and the drink and the mushroom-brew kept everything lubricated and crazy. Meanwhile, the ragged gang of their kids would be running wild around the place in the dark, wilder even than their parents dreamed, stealing Fen’s disgusting mead and spying on what they never should have seen—and one of them would almost inevitably break an arm, or set fire to a tent, or nearly drown. (Once, at a different party, one of the children really did drown, but that’s another story.)
And I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, because at seventeen I was too old to run with the kids, yet I was still holding back—too wary and angry and sceptical—from joining in with the adults. I was pretty much angry about everything, around that time. My mother came draping herself over my shoulders where I was trying to learn about photosynthesis out of the textbook for my Biology A level. “Janey, precious-heart, help me with this wretched vow thing, I can’t get it right. You’re the one who’s clever with words. What should I say? I’ve put ‘I promise to worship the loving man in you,’ but then I have this picture of Patrick flinging it back at me if ever anything went wrong. Because of course I know what can happen, I know about men, I’m not going into this with my eyes closed.”
“Mum, get off,” I said, trying to ease myself out from under her. “I can’t possibly make up your wedding vows. It’s inappropriate.”
“You’re such an old stick-in-the-mud,” she said fondly, squeezing my shoulders tightly and kissing the top of my head, her auburn hair flopping down on to the page. Her hair is like Elizabeth Siddal’s in Rossetti’s paintings and she wears it either loose or in a kind of rope wrapped around her head, and actually her looks are like Elizabeth Siddal’s too, and she wears the same drapey kind of clothes. But I was the one who knew who Elizabeth Siddal was, and that Rossetti buried her with a book of his poems and then dug her up again to get them back; I knew all about the Pre-Raphaelites and Rossetti and Burne-Jones and the rest, and I didn’t even like them all that much. That was the way life was divided up between me and my mother. I knew about things, and she was beautiful.
I couldn’t imagine Patrick flinging anything back at anyone. Patrick had the sweetest temperament. He was much younger than Mum, only twenty-six, closer to my age than hers, and he was loose-limbed with messy pale hair, and sleepy grey eyes as though everything in his life had been a dream until he woke up and saw my mother—in the wholefood cooperative in the village, as it happened, when they both reached out for a paper sack of muesli base at the same moment. He’d come out to west Wales to stay for free in a friend’s family’s holiday home for a couple of months, to finish his PhD thesis on the theology of Julian of Norwich (I knew who she was too). He’d run out of grant money and told us he’d been living for weeks on end on nothing much but apples and muesli base. “It’s very filling,” he said cheerfully. Mum thought he was otherworldly like the Celtic saints, but I knew he was just an intellectual. All his experience had been in books and he’d never properly come up against life in its full force before: he fell for the first real thing he laid his eyes on, like an innocent in a Shakespeare play. There was a girlfriend back in Oxford—another theologian—but she didn’t stand a chance against that rope of auburn hair. He’d abandoned the thesis, too.
We loved Patrick, Eithne and Rowan and me. Eithne and Rowan loved rambling with him around our land, finding out how he’d never done anything before: never swung out on a rope over the river or ridden a pony bareback (or ridden any way at all), never seen anything like the dead crows strung up along the fence wire of the neighbouring farmer who hated us. I loved talking with someone who knew things instead of being experienced. Experience was etched into the leathery, tanned faces of all the other adults in my life; experience was like a calculating light in their eyes when they looked at me. Patrick and I sank deep in the sagging old sofa which stank of the dogs, while my mother cooked vats of curry for the freezer, and he told me about Julian of Norwich, and I was happy. This doesn’t mean I was keen on his marrying my mother.
I
kept saying it would rain on the wedding party because it’s always raining in Wales (that’s another nice thing about High Barnet). We ought to make plans for the rain, I said, but my mother just smiled and said she knew it was going to be fine, and then it was: the day dawned cloudless and pure, yellow haze gleaming in the meadows, hills in the distance delicately drawn in blue. I had to hold on very firmly, sometimes, to my conviction that everything could be explained in the light of reason; it really did seem as though Mum had witch powers. She could smell if rain was coming, her dreams seemed to foretell the future, and her hands could find the place where a horse was hurt, or a child. People said her touch was healing—only I didn’t want her touching me, not any more.
She and I worked together all that morning, defrosting the curries and loaves of wholemeal bread and the dishes of crumble we’d cooked with our own apples and quinces, mixing jugs of home-made lemonade. Fen drove over with plastic buckets of mead and crates of bottles in the back of his flatbed, along with a suspect carrier bag: he was in charge of the stronger stuff. Sue had sent the wedding cake, soaked in brandy and decorated with hearts and flowers cut out in coloured marzipan. “You don’t think it’s poisoned?” I said. “After what you did to her?”
My mother only laughed. “We’ve forgiven each other everything. Anyway, Sue started it—when she slept with your dad, while I was still breastfeeding you.” I pretended I knew about this, just to prevent her telling me more.
Then I sorted out sleeping bags and blankets for all the guests who were going to stay over. Patrick helped me haul the old mattresses up into the hayloft in our barn, built of ancient grey stone, older and more spacious than the farmhouse. When we stood at the open loft window with the sweet air blowing around us—it was tall as the loft itself, gracious as a church window, only without any glass—we could see ten miles, all the way to the glinting fine line of the sea.