The Brontë Sisters - The Complete Novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Unabridged): The Beloved Classics of English Victorian Literature E-Book
Charlotte Bronte
1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Bront√´ Sisters - The Complete Novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Unabridged) invites readers into the tumultuous and vibrant world of Victorian England through the passionate, and often haunting, narratives crafted by the Bront√´ sisters. This anthology encapsulates the collective genius of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bront√´, presenting a tapestry of themes such as the struggle for individual agency, the constraints of societal expectations, and the raw, gothic exploration of the human condition. Each story within this canon not only showcases strikingly diverse literary techniques'—from intricate character development to expansive, moody landscapes'—but also highlights the timeless relevance of their thematic explorations. The Bront√´ sisters reshaped the literary landscape of their era, drawing from personal experiences and widespread societal shifts of the 19th century. With Charlotte's critical eye for societal norms, Emily's deep dive into the human psyche, and Anne's stark confrontation of social issues, their novels collectively paint a profound portrait of their time. Their works resonate with elements from the Romantic and Gothic traditions, yet they distinctly transcend into a pioneering realm of proto-feminist thought, marking them as pivotal figures in both literary history and the ongoing dialogue on gender and identity. This anthology offers not merely a reading experience but an exploration into the dynamic evolution of narrative form and thematic depth. For both scholarly exploration and personal edification, The Bront√´ Sisters - The Complete Novels provides a substantial, unified volume through which readers will encounter the multifaceted genius of these literary icons. Encouraging reflection and discussion, this collection underscores the enduring impact the Bront√´s wield over literary and cultural discourse, rendering it an invaluable addition to both academic and personal libraries. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
The Brontë Sisters - The Complete Novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Unabridged): The Beloved Classics of English Victorian Literature
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection gathers Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Brought together, these novels present a coherent portrait of artistic kinship and difference, tracing intertwined inquiries into selfhood, conscience, love, work, and social relation. The aim is to situate each novel within a shared horizon of questions while preserving the singular timbre of its voice. Unlike encountering one title in isolation, the collection frames a conversation across authors and modes, allowing readers to perceive patterns of thought and feeling that emerge only through proximity.
The through-line uniting these works is a steadfast pursuit of interior freedom amid external constraint. Across Charlotte’s array, Emily’s singular vision, and Anne’s measured candor, the novels test how integrity sustains itself within fraught attachments and shifting hierarchies. The grouping highlights a spectrum of imaginative strategies for articulating desire, duty, and endurance. It seeks to map a field of shared preoccupations—identity, moral choice, belonging—while attending to the different energies each author brings. By gathering the sisters’ novels side by side, the volume underscores continuity and divergence without flattening them into sameness, illuminating a family resemblance that never dissolves individual character.
Another aim is to foreground form as a mode of thought. The novels explore how narrative vantage, pacing, and focus shape ethical perception and emotional acuity. Read together, they stage variations on confession and reticence, steadfastness and change, solitude and companionship. The set traces how artistic choices generate moral consequences, inviting comparison without prescribing hierarchy. It encourages attention to recurring tensions between aspiration and limit, and to the ways language seeks adequacy to inward experience. The collection thus presents a sustained meditation on how a novel imagines a life, and how imagination renders character both vulnerable and resilient.
This gathering also emphasizes breadth within unity. Charlotte Brontë’s five titles offer diverse approaches to character, vocation, and feeling; Emily Brontë’s contribution supplies a distilled counterpoint; Anne Brontë’s pair brings lucid scrutiny to conduct and consequence. Together they map a terrain where passion, principle, and social negotiation intersect. Presented as a single constellation rather than as separate encounters, the novels permit a cumulative experience of return and variation, intensifying recognition across works while enriching each on its own terms. The result is not a summary but a chorus, in which distinct voices persist even as shared concerns resound.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Placed in dialogue, the texts reveal complementary temperaments. Charlotte Brontë’s novels cultivate sustained interior scrutiny shaped by tensions between personal conviction and social expectation. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights offers a fierce, elemental counterpoint, insisting on the magnitude of feeling and consequence. Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall emphasize responsibility, independence, and ethical steadiness with measured clarity. The interplay among them is not simple agreement but mutual testing, in which proposals about love, dignity, and endurance are advanced, unsettled, and reconsidered as each work articulates the competing claims of conscience, community, and the solitary will.
Recurring motifs surface across these novels: the search for a livable home; encounters with authority that demand inward accounting; the formation of vocation; the moral complexity of attachment; the price and promise of candor. Scenes of leaving and returning, of watching and being watched, of teaching and learning, recur as patterns rather than formulae. Figures who test boundaries meet counter-figures who defend norms, and the resulting negotiations generate the books’ distinctive ethical textures. Through repetition with difference, the collection reveals not a single thesis but a dynamic field in which desire presses against duty, and imagination answers constraint.
Contrasts in tone intensify the dialogue. Charlotte Brontë’s range moves from austere concentration to expansive social canvases, while Emily Brontë sustains an uncompromising pitch that throws other modes into relief. Anne Brontë’s clarity of address and practical intelligence recalibrate grand declarations into lived consequence. Shifts in perspective and structure disperse or condense attention, producing varied rhythms of revelation and reserve. Across the ensemble, irony alternates with sincerity, candor with secrecy, intimacy with estrangement. These oscillations do not cancel one another; they create a braided fabric in which competing affects heighten both the power of assertion and the necessity of doubt.
Sentences, images, and situations echo across the corpus in ways that feel both familial and freshly individualized. A phrase of defiance in one book finds a measured rejoinder in another; an appeal to duty is reframed as an appeal to dignity elsewhere. While each author advances distinct priorities, the works continually answer one another, refining propositions through contrast. The presence of five novels by Charlotte beside Emily’s and Anne’s contributions highlights both shared lexicons and divergent commitments. This proximity invites readers to trace subtle inflections that suggest influence without imitation, kinship without convergence, and dialogue maintained through principled difference.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels continue to matter because they think rigorously about how a person becomes answerable for a life. Their pages examine the demands of integrity under pressure, the formation of work and relation, and the costs of love when measured against self-respect. They dramatize the learning of sympathy without relinquishing judgment, and the attainment of freedom without disavowing obligation. In bringing them together, the collection foregrounds these concerns as a composite inquiry. The result is a resource for reflecting on agency, resilience, and responsibility, themes whose urgency persists across changing circumstances and invites renewed acts of attention.
Their critical reception has long recognized their stature within the tradition of the novel, yet better than rankings is the vitality of their afterlives. The books have inspired countless reinterpretations in performance, visual art, and narrative media, and they continue to spark debate about gender, power, education, and ethical choice. Classrooms return to them for their layered voices and thorny dilemmas; artists draw on their atmospheres and urgencies to craft new work. Such persistence suggests durable questions rather than fixed answers, and a capacity to renew themselves with each generation’s shifting sensibilities and intellectual commitments.
Conversation about these novels often turns to their treatment of autonomy and consent, to their scrutiny of authority, and to their insistence that private feeling bears public significance. They invite legal, philosophical, and spiritual vocabularies without collapsing into any single framework. Scholars read them for innovations of voice and structure; writers read them for craft; general audiences read them for intensity and clarity of purpose. The dialogue among the works intensifies these encounters by offering multiple angles on comparable problems, permitting comparative insight while avoiding coercive synthesis. The result is a living archive of inquiry and form.
As a unified set, the novels sharpen one another’s edges and deepen their resonances. Encountering Charlotte Brontë’s five alongside Emily Brontë’s single novel and Anne Brontë’s pair enables a fuller grasp of range and concentration, experiment and resolve. Patterns emerge not as tidy formulas but as provocations to think again about voice, choice, and relation. The collection’s value lies in what it makes newly perceivable: continuities that run beneath difference, and differences that keep continuity from hardening into orthodoxy. It offers an invitation to sustained attention, rewarding lingering comparison with intellectual pressure and renewed aesthetic pleasure.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Composed amid the transition from late Georgian to high Victorian Britain, the Brontë novels emerged within a constitutional monarchy consolidating imperial reach while negotiating reform. The 1832 Reform Act, 1834 Poor Law, and 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws reconfigured representation, relief, and trade, even as industrial capitalism accelerated enclosure and migration. Across the Channel, the revolutions of 1848 unsettled elites; within the Isles, famine-driven Irish displacement altered labor markets and social sensibilities. Overseas conflicts in Asia signaled imperial assertiveness. Such forces framed everyday routines—post, rail, schooling, hiring—and fostered anxiety about authority, mobility, and moral order that the fiction probes with regional specificity.
In Yorkshire’s West Riding, where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë lived, textiles and engineering transformed parishes into contested workplaces. Memories of the Luddite risings of 1811–12 lingered in oral history, while 1830s–1840s Chartist petitions and strikes dramatized claims to political voice. Mill owners, investors, and agents confronted weaving families and frame-tenters; wage cuts, machine guards, and military escorts became part of civic life. Shirley retrospectively stages these tensions during wartime dislocation, but all the novels register the clang of machinery, the discipline of the clock, and the social realignments of new money versus old land, refracting class negotiation through courtship, schooling, and parish oversight.
Gender hierarchy underlay these transformations. Coverture fused a wife’s legal identity to her husband’s, limiting property, earnings, and custody. Respectable employment for middle-class women narrowed to teaching, governessing, and literary work, typically precarious and surveilled by employers, clergy, and kin. Domestic ideology proclaimed separate spheres yet relied on women’s paid and unpaid labor to stabilize households stratified by rank and income. Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in distinct keys, interrogate the bargain between virtue and dependency, the price of female respectability, and the thin protections available to those resisting mistreatment within marriage, guardianship, or service.
Empire threaded through provincial life. The 1833 abolition statute ended slavery within most British jurisdictions but preserved plantation-linked capital and colonial administration that continued to shape fortunes and marriages at home. Merchants, soldiers, and civil servants circulated between Britain and far-flung territories; missionary societies and language schools mediated such exchanges. Continental proximity offered another horizon: education and employment drew English teachers to Belgium, a setting explored in The Professor and Villette. The novels register colonial and cosmopolitan entanglements—financial remittances, racialized descriptors, and migration stories—while depicting how imperial wealth, prejudice, and aspiration informed domestic authority, neighborhood gossip, and the moral lexicon of respectability.
Religious institutions structured community life and social mobility. The established church shared parishes with dissenting chapels, producing competition for congregants, schools, and charitable funds. Curates, often poorly paid and precariously placed, mediated between landowners, tenants, and the poor, while patronage determined livings and pulpits. Evangelical reform emphasized temperance, reading, and self-scrutiny, shaping courtship rituals and Sunday routines. Sermons, parish visits, and tract societies furnished moral vocabularies that the novels interrogate without simple satire or assent. Clerical households—central in Agnes Grey and recurrent elsewhere—expose how doctrine, status, and economics intertwined, affecting reputations, hiring, and the daily negotiation of sin, sympathy, and social ambition.
Publication operated within a commercial ecosystem policed less by state censors than by market intermediaries. Triple-decker pricing suited circulating libraries, whose subscription model rewarded “proper” tone and deterred formal risk. Reviewing journals disciplined reputation, and cautious firms demanded cuts or explanations, especially from women. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë adopted initials and the shared surnom “Bell” to deflect gendered bias, navigating competing publishers and contractual traps. Postal reforms, cheaper print, and expanding rail networks widened readerships beyond London. Yet moral guardianship—editors, librarians, and family advisers—could stall reprints or reframe publicity, conditioning how these novels entered drawing rooms, schools, and lending shelves.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The novels synthesize Enlightenment habits of observation with Romantic commitments to feeling, imagination, and the sublime. Gothic architecture, ruins, storms, and nocturnal spaces furnish atmospheres where conscience debates passion, and where the unknown tests social scripts. Yet the writing also insists on verifiable detail: wages, leases, schedules, recipes, timetables. This blend—meticulous realism infused with visionary intensity—gives Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights its austere grandeur and Charlotte Brontë’s fiction its psychological intimacy, while Anne Brontë’s work presses ethical clarity against sentimental evasions. The moor, the parlor, and the classroom become laboratories for measuring inward experience against communal law.
An emergent Bildungsroman tradition intersects with women’s life-writing practices—journals, letters, lesson plans—to foreground interior growth as a public concern. In Jane Eyre and Villette, self-scrutiny negotiates with vocation and friendship; Agnes Grey recasts professional competence as moral witness; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tests the limits of testimony and artistic labor. The Professor and Charlotte Brontë’s fragment Emma treat pedagogy as both livelihood and philosophy. Across these works, the page doubles as mirror and stage: memory composes identity while narrators examine motive, habit, and bias, anticipating later psychological fiction without relinquishing social analysis or the tactile textures of place.
Scientific and technological shifts inflect the books’ horizons. Steam power, factory discipline, and the expanding rail network recalibrate distance and danger; letters speed under new postal tariffs, and timetables crop up in courtship, commerce, and school terms. Popular sciences—physiology, phrenology, mesmerism—furnished metaphors for character and volition, even when treated skeptically. Gaslight and early photography altered how faces and rooms were seen, encouraging descriptive precision and experiments with perspective. These currents sharpen narrative pacing and broaden plausibility: a rendezvous depends on a coach connection, a rumor rides the post, and a pupil’s nervous symptoms invite medical and moral interpretation side by side.
Parallel arts supplied idioms and frames. Amateur theatricals, sketching, and domestic music-making punctuate social calendars and courtship, while public concerts and galleries model spaces where strangers read one another. The Gothic revival in architecture and interiors lent symbolic weight to thresholds, corridors, and attics, yet everyday objects—samplers, account books, slates—anchor scenes in habitual labor. Continental schooling, especially in Brussels, foregrounds language drills, dictation, and performance, converting classrooms into theatres of authority. Musical forms—arias, duets, folk airs—echo in narrative counterpoint, where themes return transformed, silences carry meaning, and the conduct of listening defines ethical relations as surely as the conduct of speech.
Formally, the novels test the limits of reliable witness. Framed tales, editorial prefaces, interpolated documents, and secondhand reports generate layered perspectives that invite readers to weigh motive and memory. Regional idioms, especially Yorkshire dialect, confer texture and contest metropolitan norms without romanticizing hardship. Shifts in tense and address—confidences to an imagined listener, appeals to fairness, gestures of reticence—stage the ethics of storytelling itself. Such devices defend privacy while demanding accountability, balancing confession against reserve. The result is a narrative poetics that marries immediacy to reflectiveness, turning plot into an inquiry about how truth is known, told, and believed.
Competing doctrines animate debate. Utilitarian calculations of happiness and cost meet deontological scruples about duty and conscience; evangelical reform contests complacent privilege; laissez-faire commerce clashes with communal obligation. National character is both celebrated and unsettled by travel and settlement abroad, while foreign language instruction and cross-Channel workplaces complicate assumptions about class and gender. Shirley converses with the industrial “social problem” novel without relinquishing lyric description; Villette refines introspective analysis within a Francophone milieu; Wuthering Heights stretches romance toward mythic austerity. Together, the books absorb and refashion contemporary arguments about progress, sympathy, and self-command into distinctive, often dissonant, aesthetic resolutions.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial reception mixed admiration with alarm. Reviewers praised energy, novelty, and uncompromising voice yet worried about “impropriety,” violence, and skeptical treatments of authority. Circulating libraries and family gatekeepers sometimes discouraged or abridged the books; controversy swirled particularly around representations of marital cruelty and women’s autonomy. Publishing under the Bell pseudonyms complicated attribution until clarifying visits to London and subsequent prefaces. Emily Brontë’s singular manner perplexed contemporaries; Anne Brontë’s candor provoked rebuttal; Charlotte Brontë’s boldness earned both accolades and censure. These tensions, far from marginal, shaped the early canonization and the pedagogical uses of the novels.
By the late nineteenth century, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights had achieved emblematic status, though often mediated by pious or picturesque framing that softened their provocations. Biographical mythologies clustered around Haworth Parsonage, domesticating radical craft into tales of stoic genius. Early twentieth-century readers, facing mechanized war and social reorganization, rediscovered the books’ intensity as psychological documents and as reflections on authority under stress. Agnes Grey, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Charlotte Brontë’s fragment Emma gained intermittent attention, yet largely under the shadow of the two most famous titles. Library editions normalized spelling, pruned passages, and steered classroom interpretation.
Mid-century criticism, followed by feminist scholarship, transformed the map. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall emerged as a landmark analysis of legal and emotional coercion within marriage; Agnes Grey’s account of paid care work reoriented debates about class and gender labor. Scholars restored neglected prefaces, collated variants, and resituated Shirley’s industrial history and Villette’s introspection within broader discourses of work, surveillance, and desire. Questions about privacy, consent, and professional identity replaced earlier moralism. Manuscript study and editorial rigor refined texts and timelines, encouraging readings that respect both linguistic nuance and the novels’ uneasily shared ground with conduct literature, evangelical witness, and social protest.
Later twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics extended reassessment through postcolonial, environmental, and disability studies. Imperial entanglements—trade, migration, and racialized language—attracted sustained scrutiny, prompting debate about complicity and critique. Ecocritical work treated the moors and industrial districts as dynamic ecologies rather than mere backdrops, while attention to trauma, neurodiversity, and caregiving reframed depictions of distress and mentorship. Translation histories and global classrooms diversified reception, testing how local idioms travel and how colonial legacies inflect sympathy. Such approaches neither flatten the books into allegory nor exempt them from reckoning, but rather trace how ethics, space, and embodiment shape their continuing urgency.
Adaptations in stage, radio, cinema, and television multiplied audiences, foregrounding visual atmospheres and musical motifs that the prose first imagined. Public-domain status encouraged new editions, annotations, and school texts, while archives and a dedicated museum secured manuscripts and correspondence. The Professor’s posthumous publication and the survival of Charlotte Brontë’s fragment Emma invite curiosity about process and abandonment; editorial projects contextualize both without presuming completion. Digital repositories permit comparative reading across states and centuries, and anniversaries draw visitors to landscapes that shaped composition. Contemporary classrooms debate ethics, style, and history in tandem, confirming the works’ capacity to renew conversation.
Synopsis (Selection)
JANE EYRE
An orphaned governess at Thornfield Hall, Jane navigates a deepening attachment to the enigmatic Mr. Rochester while confronting secrets and tests of conscience. A coming-of-age Gothic narrative about autonomy, integrity, and love.
SHIRLEY
Set during the Luddite unrest in industrial Yorkshire, the story interweaves social conflict and personal ties as heiress Shirley Keeldar, Caroline Helstone, and mill owner Robert Moore face economic pressures, class tensions, and gender constraints.
VILLETTE
Lucy Snowe relocates to the city of Villette to teach at a girls' school, contending with isolation, cultural and religious divides, and uncertain affections. A psychologically focused tale of reserve, resilience, and self-possession.
THE PROFESSOR
Narrated by William Crimsworth, the novel follows his refusal of patronage, move to Belgium, and pursuit of work and principled love on his own terms. A compact realist study of education, labor, and earned companionship.
EMMA
An unfinished fragment that opens in a girls' school with the arrival of a poised new pupil whose identity and past are suspect, drawing the schoolmistress into a puzzle of class and deception. It sets up a social mystery that breaks off early.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Across two generations on the Yorkshire moors, the fierce bond between Heathcliff and Catherine fuels a cycle of obsession and retribution that ensnares the Earnshaw and Linton families. A stark, multi-voiced tale of passion and haunting landscapes.
AGNES GREY
A plainspoken governess recounts posts with difficult families, depicting the trials of underpaid work and the moral patience required to retain dignity. A quiet, realistic narrative of endurance and ethical choice.
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
The reclusive Helen Graham arrives under a cloud of rumor, and through letters and a diary her flight from a destructive marriage and fight to protect her child come to light. A forthright examination of addiction, reputation, and women's legal and moral autonomy.
The Brontë Sisters - The Complete Novels: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Unabridged)
Charlotte Brontë’s Novels
JANE EYRE
TO
W. M. THACKERAY, Esq.,
This Work
is respectfully inscribed
by
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
A preface to the first edition of “Jane Eyre” being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant.
To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author.
The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as “Jane Eyre:” in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry — that parent of crime — an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is — I repeat it — a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth — to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose — to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it — to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him.
Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital — a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time — they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead.
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day — as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him — if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger — I have dedicated this second edition of “Jane Eyre.”
CURRER BELL.
December21st, 1847.
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of “Jane Eyre” affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have been made, and to prevent future errors.
CURRER BELL.
April13th, 1848.
CHAPTER I
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner — something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were — she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.”
“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returned to my book — Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape —
“Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space, — that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room door opened.
“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
“Where the dickens is she!” he continued. “Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain — bad animal!”
“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once —
“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”
And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.
“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward diffidence.
“Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’” was the answer. “I want you to come here;” and seating himself in an armchair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, “on account of his delicate health.” Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.
“That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since,” said he, “and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!”
Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult.
“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.
“I was reading.”
“Show the book.”
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
“You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.”
I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first — ”
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words —
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!”
“Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined —
“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
CHAPTER II
I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.”
“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s-maid. “What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son! Your young master.”
“Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?”
“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.”
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two pair of hands arrested me instantly.
“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said Bessie. “Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly.”
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature. This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of me.
“Don’t take them off,” I cried; “I will not stir.”
In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.
“Mind you don’t,” said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity.
“She never did so before,” at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail.
“But it was always in her,” was the reply. “I’ve told Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me. She’s an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover.”
Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said — “You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse.”
I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in —
“And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them.”
“What we tell you is for your good,” added Bessie, in no harsh voice, “you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you away, I am sure.”
“Besides,” said Miss Abbot, “God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.”
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The housemaid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room — the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur.
Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.
My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I returned to my stool.
Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present.
All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged. Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks, set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off the choicest plants in the conservatory: he called his mother “old girl,” too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own; bluntly disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk attire; and he was still “her own darling.” I dared commit no fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon to night.
My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium.
“Unjust! — unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression — as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question — why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of — I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child — though equally dependent and friendless — Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery.
Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o’clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my own uncle — my mother’s brother — that he had taken me when a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her; but how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not — never doubted — that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls — occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaning mirror — I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode — whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed — and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it — I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot entered.
“Miss Eyre, are you ill?” said Bessie.
“What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!” exclaimed Abbot.
“Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!” was my cry.
“What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?” again demanded Bessie.
“Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come.” I had now got hold of Bessie’s hand, and she did not snatch it from me.
“She has screamed out on purpose,” declared Abbot, in some disgust. “And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks.”
“What is all this?” demanded another voice peremptorily; and Mrs. Reed came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling stormily. “Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left in the red-room till I came to her myself.”
“Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma’am,” pleaded Bessie.
“Let her go,” was the only answer. “Loose Bessie’s hand, child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then.”
“O aunt! have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it — let me be punished some other way! I shall be killed if — ”
“Silence! This violence is all most repulsive:” and so, no doubt, she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without farther parley. I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone, I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.
CHAPTER III
The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind or water: agitation, uncertainty, and an all-predominating sense of terror confused my faculties. Ere long, I became aware that some one was handling me; lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture, and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.
In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved: I knew quite well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery fire. It was night: a candle burnt on the table; Bessie stood at the bed-foot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me.
I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room, an individual not belonging to Gateshead, and not related to Mrs. Reed. Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinised the face of the gentleman: I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing: for herself and the children she employed a physician.
“Well, who am I?” he asked.
I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand: he took it, smiling and saying, “We shall do very well by-and-by.” Then he laid me down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was not disturbed during the night. Having given some further directions, and intimates that he should call again the next day, he departed; to my grief: I felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow; and as he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart again sank: inexpressible sadness weighed it down.
“Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?” asked Bessie, rather softly.
Scarcely dared I answer her; for I feared the next sentence might be rough. “I will try.”
“Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?”
“No, thank you, Bessie.”
“Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o’clock; but you may call me if you want anything in the night.”
Wonderful civility this! It emboldened me to ask a question.
“Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?”
“You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room with crying; you’ll be better soon, no doubt.”
Bessie went into the housemaid’s apartment, which was near. I heard her say —
“Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren’t for my life be alone with that poor child tonight: she might die; it’s such a strange thing she should have that fit: I wonder if she saw anything. Missis was rather too hard.”
Sarah came back with her; they both went to bed; they were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.
“Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished” — “A great black dog behind him” — “Three loud raps on the chamber door” — “A light in the churchyard just over his grave,” &c. &c.
At last both slept: the fire and the candle went out. For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel.
No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room; it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering, but I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities.
Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down: but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone out in the carriage with their mama. Abbot, too, was sewing in another room, and Bessie, as she moved hither and thither, putting away toys and arranging drawers, addressed to me every now and then a word of unwonted kindness. This state of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging; but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably.
