The Brontës: Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - All 8 Books in One Edition E-Book
Charlotte Bronte
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Brontës: Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë encapsulates a transformative period in English literature, offering a profound glimpse into the rich tapestry of 19th-century narratives. This anthology unites the imaginative depths of gothic romance, societal critique, and poignant realism, showcasing the Brontës' ability to traverse a plethora of literary styles. From the haunting moors of 'Wuthering Heights' to the moral dilemmas in 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' this collection illuminates the diverse storytelling prowess of the Brontë sisters, whose works have been pivotal in shaping the literary canon. Bringing together these esteemed figures, the anthology highlights the revolutionary impact of the Brontës on feminist literature and their subtle challenge to Victorian norms. The sisters draw from their unique experiences and secluded upbringing in Haworth, England, crafting narratives that address themes of social class, gender inequality, and the struggles of the individual spirit. Aligning with the Romantic and early feminist literary movements, their collective works offer a critical exploration of the human condition, essential for understanding the evolution of modern literature. Readers are invited to immerse themselves in this comprehensive edition, providing a multifaceted perspective on the triumphs and tribulations of the human experience. This anthology not only serves as an educational cornerstone for students of literature but also as a catalyst for reflection on personal and societal values. Engaging with these narratives fosters a dialogue that transcends time, illustrating the enduring relevance and transformative power of the Brontës' literary masterpieces. 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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Brontës: Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - All 8 Books in One Edition
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection gathers the complete novels of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë, inviting a sustained encounter with three distinct imaginations. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma appear alongside Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Brought together, these narratives form a coherent exploration of conscience, love, endurance, and the making of a self within social entanglements. The aim is to present a panorama that honors difference while tracing affinities, allowing readers to perceive patterns that emerge only when these works are considered as a single arc of related inquiries.
United here, the novels illuminate a shared preoccupation with moral agency and the terms on which intimacy, work, and belonging can be sustained. The through-line reaches from the solitude of reflective protagonists to the friction of communities confronting loss, change, and obligation. Questions recur about how personal conviction negotiates constraint, how desire intersects with duty, and how hope endures when institutions prove brittle. By placing all eight titles together, the collection aims to foreground the conversation among them, drawing attention to recurring ethical tensions and contrasting responses that refract a common concern with integrity, independence, and the claims of others.
A further aim is to showcase the breadth of narrative approach across the set. Some works cultivate intimate interiority and measured observation; others drive toward elemental conflict and radical feeling; still others widen the social lens to probe cooperation, authority, and reform. In Charlotte Brontë’s sequence, experiment and range appear side by side, while Emily Brontë delivers a singularly concentrated vision, and Anne Brontë articulates clear, consequential ethics. Seen together, these strategies complement one another, offering multiple paths through related dilemmas of attachment, resilience, and choice, and inviting reflection on how form itself shapes moral attention.
This gathering also reframes familiar titles by situating them among companions that sharpen or complicate their concerns. Reading Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma alongside Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall reveals constellations that are harder to perceive when each book is approached alone. The result is a continuous field rather than isolated landmarks, emphasizing process over monument. The collection encourages comparative pacing, cross-references of mood and idea, and an appreciation of development across a body of work, without presuming hierarchy among authors or privileging any single novel as the definitive statement.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Placed in dialogue, the books illuminate a network of motifs: the testing of conscience under pressure, the negotiation of affection and authority, and the fragile architectures of home and community. Across Charlotte Brontë’s novels, recurring questions of recognition and voice take on varied shapes; alongside them, Emily Brontë examines passion’s tumultuous energies, while Anne Brontë pursues the ethics of responsibility and protection. The interplay is not homogenizing; rather, each work asserts its own texture, so that resonances appear as echoes across a valley, distinct yet answering. Together they frame a conversation about how character and circumstance co-constitute destiny.
Certain images recur as organizing emblems: thresholds that mark entry and refusal; journeys that test resolve; enclosed rooms that focus thought; and open vistas that unsettle or enlarge aspiration. The novels return to the discipline of memory and the peril of forgetfulness, to the difference between confession and manipulation, and to the costs of silence. Bonds of friendship and mentorship often carry equal weight to romantic attachment, and work functions as both burden and liberation. These shared elements do not collapse difference; they generate a lattice through which contrasts of temperament, scale, and method become legible across the eight titles.
Contrast energizes the set. Some narratives cultivate an investigative calm that widens social perspective, while others are driven by stormier affect and compressed intensity. The oscillation between interior monologue and outward action, between private resolution and public conflict, creates a rhythm that sustains the collection. The novels encompass domestic spaces and civic scenes, gentle ironies and severe reckonings, restrained candor and heightened urgency. This variance in tone and scope fosters a productive conversation about how style influences moral perception, and how different narrative weights—measured, expansive, or fierce—shape our understanding of justice, loyalty, and the claims of love.
Within this constellation, several works appear to answer one another. Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey place professional vocation and personal dignity in close dialogue, testing how self-respect persists within unequal arrangements. Villette and Wuthering Heights, though divergent in atmosphere, share a fascination with the reverberations of guarded knowledge and the price of secrecy. Shirley’s attention to common purpose and shared risk converses with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s insistence on boundaries and protection. The Professor and Emma, compact and exploratory, bracket Charlotte Brontë’s range and quietly register experiments that illuminate choices developed with greater amplitude elsewhere in the set.
The arrangement also underscores how perspective governs empathy. When narrative distance narrows, moral complexity deepens; when it widens, systemic patterns emerge. Shifts in focal sympathy recalibrate our sense of blame and forgiveness, and recurring returns to decisive rooms, letters, and crossroads concentrate the stakes of choice. Placing Charlotte Brontë’s five novels in the same frame as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s two works highlights the dialectic between solitary trial and communal consequence. The result is a layered conversation in which style, structure, and emphasis become ethical arguments, each novel proposing its own calibration of freedom and care.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels continue to matter because they stage enduring questions with uncommon intensity and clarity. Identity, attachment, conscience, and the claims of justice are examined not as abstractions but as lived negotiations shaped by language, temperament, and choice. Across the eight books, readers encounter a sustained inquiry into how individuals imagine better lives while honoring obligations to others. The works reward attentive reading by offering multiple vantage points on courage and tenderness, ambition and restraint. Their resilience lies in the way they generate new conversations with changing times while maintaining the stubborn specificity of singular human voices.
Critical attention has long emphasized the scope and distinctiveness of each author’s contribution. Jane Eyre is frequently invoked as a touchstone for narrative intimacy and moral resolve; Wuthering Heights as a work of startling imaginative power; Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as clear, consequential engagements with ethical choice; and Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma as demonstrations of range and experiment. Across studies, classrooms, and public discussion, the novels have provoked debate over autonomy, authority, and the social meanings of love. Their capacity to sustain divergent interpretations testifies to their structural and emotional richness.
Their cultural afterlives stretch across theater, film, music, and visual art, as well as ongoing civic conversations about gender, consent, faith, duty, and the boundaries of care. Quotations and scenes from these titles circulate widely, shaping idiom and expectation, while adaptations keep returning to the pressure points that make the narratives inexhaustible. Scholars and artists treat the books as laboratories for thinking about narration, memory, and power. This collection invites renewed attention to that living legacy by restoring the context of mutual illumination, enabling sustained comparison without diminishing the singular force of each author’s chosen path.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
The Brontë novels emerged in the turbulent decades bridging late Georgian and early Victorian Britain, when industrial capitalism reordered northern communities. Yorkshire’s mills and expanding railways transformed moorland parishes into contested labor markets shaped by enclosure and fluctuating textile demand. The monarchy stabilized after earlier Napoleonic upheavals, yet legitimacy depended on managing poverty and dissent. Overseas, imperial consolidation linked provincial fortunes to colonial trade, while domestic governance tightened oversight through policing and poor-law regimes. Within this landscape, clergy families, small proprietors, and servants negotiated shifting hierarchies, providing social textures that underlie Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Social mobility remained sharply constrained. Landed gentry, manufacturers, and professional men controlled political influence, while servants, tenant farmers, and mill hands bore the brunt of economic volatility. Women of the middling ranks often depended on precarious teaching or governess work, constrained by coverture and limited property rights. The novels’ attention to employment, marriage markets, and kinship shows how dignity hinged on income and reputation. Charitable institutions and parish relief enforced moral scrutiny, and the new police expanded surveillance of vagrancy. In this structure, education promised uplift yet risked social ostracism, a tension especially acute for women who ventured beyond domestic boundaries to seek wages and self-definition.
Public life oscillated between reform and repression. The Reform Act enfranchised new urban voters but left working people largely excluded, fueling mass petitions and demonstrations associated with campaign movements for universal male suffrage. Mill districts carried memories of machine-breaking and strikes, and many households experienced the Corn Laws’ repeal as relief tempered by job insecurity. The Irish Famine drove migration into northern towns, altering labor markets and sectarian relations. Continental revolutions unsettled Britain’s ruling classes, while the Crimean War intensified patriotic rhetoric and news culture. Such pressures shaped everyday calculations about loyalty, livelihood, and risk that the novels register through workplaces, parishes, and households.
Imperial circuits threaded through provincial life. Capital from Caribbean plantations, Asian trade, and colonial administration financed estates, mills, and private fortunes; abolition in the 1830s altered legal structures without eliminating racial hierarchies or coercive labor systems elsewhere. Missionary and educational projects projected British authority as moral governance, while anxieties about contagion, rebellion, and cultural mixing circulated in newspapers and travel accounts. The novels’ references to overseas service, colonial careers, and transoceanic inheritances register how empire organized opportunities and prejudices. Encounters with difference—linguistic, religious, and racial—reveal metropolitan fantasies of superiority alongside dependence on distant territories, tensions that shadow family strategies, philanthropy, and respectability.
Religious life permeated governance and social custom. Parish structures linked spiritual authority to poor relief and schooling, while dissenting chapels cultivated alternative networks of credit, literacy, and sociability. Evangelical rigor shaped debates on temperance, sexuality, and household discipline, giving moral language to class conflict. Print culture expanded through cheap editions, yet propriety was policed by review periodicals and circulating libraries that discouraged topics deemed coarse, political, or irreligious. To navigate respectability and prejudice against women writers, the sisters adopted ambiguous initials in early publication. Their novels confront moral codes not as abstract doctrine but as daily negotiations within classrooms, kitchens, mills, and drawing rooms.
Book production followed the economics of the three-volume novel, sold to libraries that catered to middle-class subscribers. High prices limited outright purchase, yet postal reforms, railways, and urban booksellers broadened circulation. Periodical reviewing could make or break reputations, and accusations of impropriety threatened sales. Provincial authors faced distance from London’s gatekeepers, but the expanding literary marketplace created openings for bold voices. The Brontë signatures—initially opaque—enabled entry while sheltering private lives from scandal. As their titles gained readers, the sisters navigated contracts, reprints, and foreign editions, revealing how literary labor intersected with household budgets, inheritance anxieties, and the social prestige attached to authorship.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The collection stands at a hinge between Romantic inwardness and Victorian social analysis. These novels combine Gothic atmosphere with reportage-like attention to schools, parishes, and workshops, forging a hybrid of lyric intensity and institutional detail. First-person narration and tightly focalized third-person scenes advance psychological scrutiny, while moral testing grounds are rendered through weather, rooms, and landscapes that mirror states of feeling without dissolving into mysticism. The result is neither escapist fantasy nor sober ledger: it is an experimental realism, willing to admit dreams and visions, yet committed to material constraints such as wages, food, shelter, and the routine humiliations of dependence.
Intellectual debates about sensation, will, and moral agency inform the fiction’s texture. Empirical habits of observation—note-taking, classification, self-examination—mix with belief in Providence and the formation of conscience through trial. The novels continually test whether character is shaped by inheritance, environment, or choice, staging conflicts between paternal authority and individual autonomy. Skepticism toward easy optimism coexists with assertions of duty and forgiveness. Educational theories, from rote discipline to child-centered cultivation, appear in classrooms and private lessons. The result is a pragmatic ethic: progress is possible, but only within the pressure of institutions, bodies, and money, a stance that complicates sentimental consolations.
Scientific and technological change supplied metaphors and settings. Steam engines, factory looms, and railway timetables structured daily rhythms and social contact, while the penny post accelerated correspondence that drives courtship, schooling, and business. Popular science—geology’s deep time, astronomy’s vastness, physiology’s nerves, and faddish phrenology or mesmerism—circulated through magazines and lectures, offering models for temperament and development. Medical reform reframed madness, grief, and addiction as illnesses addressed by discipline and care. Innovations in printing lowered costs and spread illustrations, shaping readers’ expectations of vivid scene-making. Even the telegraph’s promise of instant news altered ideas about distance, secrecy, and the velocity of rumor.
Parallel arts shaped sensibility. Church music, parlor song, and the pianoforte cultivated disciplined feeling and social poise; the novels’ attention to performance reflects a world where taste functioned as moral proof. Painting favored intense nature studies and medievalist detail, encouraging close observation of light, texture, and ruins that echo the books’ fascination with rooms and weather. Theatre offered melodrama and comic relief, yet was policed for indecency, pushing psychological extremes into prose. Architecture’s Gothic and neoclassical languages provided a vocabulary for grandeur, austerity, and decay. Such crosscurrents honed an aesthetic that could be intimate, fierce, and formally daring without rejecting decorum.
Literary factions debated purpose and method. Did fiction instruct through domestic realism, expose industrial disorder, or dramatize transgressive passion? Critics accused novelists of pandering to sensation or, conversely, of dull propriety; periodical skirmishes enforced canons of taste. The sisters’ books enter this arena with distinctive strategies: confessional address, sharp social description, and an insistence that intense feeling belongs in serious art. Their provincial settings, use of dialect, and refusal to flatter elite idleness challenged metropolitan norms. The recurring controversy over “separate spheres” meets the pragmatic claim that women’s labor and thought structure public life, an argument embedded in classrooms, courts, and counting rooms.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception was polarized. Some reviewers praised moral fervor and forceful character drawing; others condemned perceived coarseness, unseemly passion, or social critique. Circulating libraries weighed denunciations against demand, illustrating how propriety and profit coexisted uneasily. The ambiguity of the Bell signatures initially shielded the authors from gendered dismissal, yet speculation about identity colored every notice. As editions multiplied, preconceptions hardened: one camp celebrated instructive uplift; another feared harm to impressionable readers. These controversies reveal an audience negotiating modernity—yearning for candor yet invested in decorum—and they established the novels as touchstones in debates about women’s authority, working-class representation, and moral pedagogy.
Later Victorian tastes reframed the books as morally safe or domestically improving, even when their energies resisted such packaging. Anecdotes about secluded moors and disciplined parsonage life encouraged an image of native genius purified by isolation. Early biographical narratives emphasized suffering, duty, and piety, aligning the sisters with national virtue while softening social bite. As school editions appeared, passages seen as indelicate were sometimes trimmed, and introductions steered interpretations toward exemplary patience. This canonizing impulse secured wide readership but risked minimizing experimental form, ironic wit, and the novels’ relentless attention to labor, money, and legal constraint as engines of character.
Twentieth-century copyright expirations expanded access, enabling inexpensive reprints and translations that circulated far beyond Britain. Universities established critical editions that compared variants and clarified publishing histories for Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Archival research stabilized texts and foregrounded manuscript evidence, encouraging attention to revision, pacing, and diction. As syllabi embraced the novels, scholarly footnotes amplified references to law, education, and empire, helping general readers enter dense social contexts. The shift from collectible relics to widely taught works reshaped authority, inviting fresh arguments about voice, structure, and ethical stakes.
Adaptation in theatre, radio, cinema, and television continually reinterpreted the books for new publics. Directors favored condensed plots and heightened visual motifs—storm-swept moors, stark interiors, schoolrooms—while composers and designers added soundscapes and costumes that materialized mood. Each medium emphasizes different values: stage versions prize immediacy; film courts spectacle; television expands psychological continuity through serial form. Translations and co-productions globalized settings and accents, reframing class codes and colonial reference points. Such adaptations create feedback loops: they popularize themes, invite parody or homage, and send readers back to the novels, where narrative voice and moral ambiguity exceed any single performance.
Late twentieth-century scholarship unsettled earlier certainties. Feminist critics analyzed marriage law, coverture, and the economics of domestic service to show how love plots entwine with labor markets. Post-colonial readings examined racialization, missionary rhetoric, and metropolitan dependence on colonial wealth, complicating notions of moral progress. Queer interpretations traced nonconforming attachments and the policing of desire, while disability studies reconsidered illness, impairment, and care as structural conditions rather than isolated misfortunes. Ecocriticism highlighted moorland, weather, and animal life as more than backdrops, reading environment as active agent. Together, these approaches reframed the novels as laboratories of power, feeling, and social imagination.
In the digital age, open-access archives, high-resolution scans, and searchable databases transformed how readers encounter the books. Crowdsourced transcription and new editions of unfinished or variant material sharpen attention to process, not just product, making composition, revision, and publishing negotiations newly visible. Heritage tourism and exhibitions connect sites, objects, and manuscripts to narrative settings, while classroom platforms link global cohorts who annotate together. Anniversary projects spur fresh introductions and translations that address current debates about race, gender, and the environment. These networks affirm enduring appeal while emphasizing that the novels remain live documents, continually recontextualized by changing publics and tools.
Synopsis (Selection)
JANE EYRE
An orphaned governess forges an independent moral identity amid hardship and a complex attachment to her employer at Thornfield Hall, where a hidden secret tests her principles.
SHIRLEY
Set amid Luddite unrest in Yorkshire, it follows Caroline Helstone and heiress Shirley Keeldar as industrial conflict, class tensions, and intertwined affections complicate a mill owner’s ambitions and their own prospects.
VILLETTE
Lucy Snowe takes a post at a Belgian girls’ school and navigates isolation, surveillance, and crosscurrents of faith and feeling, as enigmatic relationships and misrecognitions shape her search for stability.
THE PROFESSOR
Narrated by William Crimsworth, a clerk-turned-teacher in Brussels, the novel traces his bid for self-reliance in work and love while confronting prejudice, temptation, and the quiet rewards of merit.
EMMA
An unfinished fragment introducing a supposed young heiress left at a London school under dubious circumstances, sketching themes of identity, class pretense, and moral testing before the narrative breaks off.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
A stark tale of obsessive attachment and revenge between Heathcliff and Catherine and its corrosive effects on two Yorkshire families across generations, told through layered narrators against the moors.
AGNES GREY
A clergyman’s daughter becomes a governess to support her family, observing the vanity and cruelty of the wealthy and asserting quiet integrity as she measures duty against emerging affection.
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
A reclusive young mother seeks refuge under an assumed name, and the unfolding account of her marriage exposes the legal and social constraints on women as a local farmer is drawn into her story.
The Brontës: Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - All 8 Books in One Edition
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.
