The Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - 8 Books in One Edition E-Book
Charlotte Bronte
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - 8 Books in One Edition is a comprehensive anthology that showcases the literary brilliance and nuanced storytelling of the Brontë sisters. Encompassing a range of styles from gothic romance to social commentary, this collection provides a window into the 19th-century literary scene, capturing the varied expressions of its time. With standout novels like the haunting exploration of love and fate in uncivilized moors and the intense scrutiny of societal norms through poignant character studies, this edition underscores the diverse thematic richness of the Brontës' works. The Brontë sisters, hailing from the rural landscape of Yorkshire, England, left an indelible mark on literature by defying the constraints of their era. Their novels reflect the intersection of their introspective worldviews and the burgeoning Romantic and Victorian literary movements. Collectively, the Brontës' works offer an intricate tapestry that explores themes of feminism, trauma, isolation, and resilience. The cultural and historical contexts of their writings deepen the engagement with the universal human conditions their narratives facet, enriched by the forewords and annotations from eminent Brontë scholars who illuminate their individual and collective genius. This anthology is an essential acquisition for readers fascinated by literature's power to weave emotional and intellectual discourse. It invites exploration of transformative themes through the unique lenses of three masterful narrators, rewarding readers with the opportunity to experience the broad spectrum of styles and depth within this single volume. With its educational significance and stimulating dialogue across the sisters' works, this collection serves as both a scholarly resource and a captivating journey through the legacy of the Brontë sisters. 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 Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - 8 Books in One Edition
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë to showcase a shared preoccupation with conscience, desire, and social belonging. From Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma to Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the sequence traces how imaginative vision meets lived constraint. The curatorial aim is to present the breadth of their narrative experiments alongside recurrent moral questions about autonomy, responsibility, and love. It highlights the interplay between the solitary self and the pressures of community, inviting readers to experience the works as a conversation rather than isolated achievements.
Placed together, these novels illuminate an arc of development across different temperaments and strategies. Charlotte Brontë’s works often bring an intimate, confiding intelligence to the challenges of work, attachment, and self-definition. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights intensifies passion and memory into a stark meditation on kinship and endurance. Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ground ethical scrutiny in ordinary duty and personal resolve. The collection foregrounds these contrasts to reveal their common ground: a rigorous testing of conscience within fraught domestic and social spaces, where love, labor, and dignity are weighed against custom, fear, and the claims of others.
We emphasize a through-line of voice, authority, and the conditions under which a person may speak and be heard. Classroom, parlor, and threshold recur as charged settings for negotiation, instruction, and refusal. By arranging the novels side by side, the collection draws attention to how shifts in setting or perspective alter the scale of ethical choice, from private vows to communal responsibility. The aim is not to homogenize distinct sensibilities, but to allow their differences to clarify a shared commitment to serious inquiry into character, motive, and consequence, within narratives that combine emotional intensity with analytic steadiness.
Unlike encountering each title on its own, reading them together builds a continuous map of questions about power, sympathy, and endurance. The grouping encourages cross-reading of motifs—governessing, inheritance, secrecy, confession, flight—and of structural choices, such as framed narration, retrospective testimony, and patterns of return. It highlights how a seemingly solitary quest resonates differently when set against social panoramas or domestic chronicles. The collection thus becomes a single field of attention, where parallel paths converge and diverge, offering a depth of context and contrast that single-volume experiences cannot supply without the friction and illumination of proximate companions.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
In Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and The Professor, education and employment concentrate questions of dependence and dignity, while instruction becomes a test of patience, tact, and moral steadiness. Wuthering Heights recasts dwelling and boundary as elemental forces, turning home into a site of memory and contest. Shirley expands the social canvas, while Villette tightens the focus to interior watchfulness; Emma gestures toward fresh experiments. Across the eight, households, schools, and workplaces function as laboratories for character. Letters, confidences, and overheard speech move ethical debates from public rooms to private corners, revealing how feeling acquires language and how language reshapes feeling.
Recurring symbols knit the works together: thresholds that mark entry and exile; windows that stage observation and longing; storms and calms that register inner weather. Names matter, carrying history and hope, while inheritance becomes a moral rather than merely material question. Charlotte Brontë’s narrators often weigh candor against prudence; Emily Brontë’s design exposes the cost of obsession and the echoing force of remembered injury; Anne Brontë’s clarity tests virtue in ordinary practice. The contrasts create a dialogue in which fervor meets accountability, and attachment is refined by trial, not unmade by it, even when forms of relation remain unsettled.
The books converse through structural choices as much as through theme. Framed narratives present testimony and counter-testimony; retrospective narration explores the ethics of telling after the fact. Soliloquy and surveillance interact, as characters scrutinize themselves and others with equal intensity. In this exchange, Wuthering Heights throws a shadow that clarifies the resolve of Agnes Grey, while the large-scale social portraiture of Shirley refracts the vigilant solitude cultivated in Villette. Jane Eyre’s insistence on interior wholeness finds a stringent complement in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where persistence acquires the profile of principle tested in daily endurance.
Genre energies blend and diverge across the sequence. Elements of romance intensify psychological inquiry; comedy of manners sharpens social critique; domestic chronicle becomes a forum for law, conscience, and care. The Professor and Agnes Grey lean toward apprenticeship narratives of work and growth; Villette and Jane Eyre foreground perception and self-command; Shirley assembles community-wide tensions; Wuthering Heights presents a stark, echoing design; Emma, though different in scale, points toward renewed experimentation. The resulting interplay reorients expectations: rather than choosing between sentiment and intellect, these novels repeatedly bind passion to judgment, asking what survival requires and what integrity permits.
Subtle resonances cross the boundaries of authorship. A figure standing at a doorway or a letter withheld acquires different weights from book to book, yet the gesture remains legible as a trial of trust. Imagery of night travel, locked rooms, and returning footsteps recurs with altered emphasis, suggesting a dispersed conversation about secrecy and disclosure. When Jane Eyre asserts an indivisible self, its courage throws the bleak music of Wuthering Heights into relief; when The Tenant of Wildfell Hall insists on moral limits, it illuminates how Shirley stages communal negotiation. The conversation is plural, insistent, and mutually clarifying.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels continue to matter because they join urgent questions of autonomy, attachment, and responsibility with forms capable of bearing that weight. Their protagonists insist that feeling must be answerable to principle without being extinguished, and that work, care, and imagination belong together. The collection demonstrates how intimate narratives can press upon public concerns, while broad canvases can preserve the precision of individual conscience. Taken together, the eight books model ways of reading that honor ambiguity without surrendering judgment, and they restore to familiar motifs a seriousness that remains recognizable wherever desire and duty must learn to coexist.
Their presence in classrooms, public conversation, and artistic adaptations is continuous at a general level, and the novels have helped sustain debates about gender, power, and the ethics of narration. Readers and artists have returned to these titles to test their own moment’s assumptions about love, freedom, and social responsibility. The works’ argumentative energy—not merely their atmosphere—has been widely acknowledged, and their characters’ decisiveness has encouraged discussion about consent, accountability, and the meaning of endurance. That afterlife confirms not a single message but a resilient capacity to provoke and organize reflection across shifting cultural horizons.
Gathered here, the eight novels offer a concentrated encounter with narrative intelligence under pressure. The arrangement invites relational reading: patterns become visible across authors and titles, and each work’s distinctiveness sharpens against its neighbors. This sustained proximity encourages fresh attention to how voice is earned, how compassion negotiates with truth-telling, and how the claims of the heart answer to the claims of justice. The result is an experience of breadth and focus at once, presenting a coherent field of themes without dulling individual edges. It is a durable invitation to reconsider what a novel can think and do.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
The Brontë novels emerged in Britain’s transition from late Georgian to high Victorian rule, under a constitutional monarchy asserting imperial reach while navigating reform. Industrial capitalism remade Yorkshire towns through mills, wage labor, and enclosure, sharpening divisions between owners and workers. Debates over the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts, Chartist petitions, and poor relief shaped public life and private anxiety. Shirley explicitly situates its world amid machine-breaking fears and commercial risk, while the other novels register factory smoke, new money, and rural displacement. Everyday experience unfolded under parish oversight, debt law, and magistrates, with newspapers amplifying agitation and moral panic.
Gendered power defined opportunity and danger. Coverture bound married women’s property and legal identity to their husbands, while limited divorce and custody provisions made separation perilous. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall confronts this legal terrain directly, insisting on female autonomy against law and custom. Governess work, central to Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey, exemplified precarious respectability: educated, isolated, and easily dismissed. Print culture enforced decorum through circulating libraries and reviews; publishers courted profit yet policed impropriety. To enter the marketplace, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted ambiguous initials and masculine pen names, negotiating patronage, contracts, and anonymity to shield reputation and secure access.
Religious authority framed education, charity, and morality. The established Church shaped parish life, schools, and employment pathways, while Evangelical revivalism and Nonconformist chapels spread rigorous self-scrutiny. Doctrinal disputes inflected debates on novels as moral instruments, with reviewers weighing spiritual edification against dangerous passion. Clerical households, such as those that inform Charlotte’s perspective, observed parish responsibility alongside economic precarity. Governesses and teachers navigated denominational expectations and devotional reading lists, their livelihoods subject to piety tests by employers. The novels’ attention to conscience draws from this culture of sermon, catechism, and hymn, where public reputation and private faith contested moral authority.
Britain’s expanding empire shaped language, commerce, and social aspiration. Colonial wealth funded country houses and urban speculation, while imperial trade tied Yorkshire manufacture to distant plantations and ports. Questions of race and foreignness surfaced in public discourse through missionary reports and parliamentary inquiries. Although primarily provincial, the novels register empire’s presence in education, fashion, and prospects for migration. Villette and The Professor engage continental schooling, translation, and cross-Channel mobility, scrutinizing cultural authority beyond Britain. Wuthering Heights locates otherness at the social margins, interrogating belonging and exclusion within a hierarchized society attuned to accent, lineage, and perceived origin.
European upheaval haunted the period. Memory of the Napoleonic Wars lingered in veterans, taxation, and international rivalries, while the 1848 revolutions electrified newspapers and cafés from London to Brussels. Britain avoided full-scale revolt yet absorbed refugee intellectuals and tightened policing of assemblies. These pressures color the atmosphere of Villette’s continental city and inform schoolroom vigilance. Irish Famine migrations altered labor markets and public charity, stoking nativist hostility. The Professor reflects the lure of foreign teaching posts amid constrained prospects at home. Across the novels, distant gunfire registers as censorship, surveillance, and anxious respectability rather than battlefield spectacle.
Rigid class hierarchies organized mobility and space. Landed gentry, professional middle ranks, manufacturers, tenant farmers, and servants inhabited distinct codes of address and obligation. Inheritance law protected estates yet destabilized cousins and wards; dowries and settlements managed desire through property. The governess, positioned between nursery and drawing room, dramatized class liminality central to Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey. Wuthering Heights questions lineage as credential, while Shirley surveys the industrial plutocracy’s authority. Urban boarding schools in Villette and The Professor impose meritocratic rhetoric but reproduce patronage. Across these works, household management, credit, and kinship enforce power where Parliament rarely appears.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
These novels arise at a hinge between Romantic inwardness and Victorian social scrutiny. They yoke lyrical intensity to disciplined observation: storms and moors coexist with account books, school timetables, and ledgers. Jane Eyre transforms confession into a moral instrument, while Wuthering Heights tests the Gothic’s boundaries through layered testimony and stark materiality. Agnes Grey adopts plain style to expose labor’s texture; Shirley and Villette intensify psychological weather alongside civic commentary. The Professor and Emma sketch professional ambition within disciplined form. Across the corpus, passionate feeling is not an escape from reality but a method for anatomizing it.
Philosophically, the works negotiate Enlightenment rationalism’s claims with Romantic idealism’s assertion of imaginative truth. They consider self-improvement through education—a female Bildung—without surrendering conscience to utilitarian calculus. Evangelical introspection furnishes vocabulary for temptation, repentance, and vocation, while common-sense reason tests visions and dreams against habit and evidence. Skepticism toward cant accompanies respect for conviction. Perception, memory, and narrative reliability become ethical questions: how to know, and who may judge. In this arena, Charlotte’s narrators cultivate disciplined self-audit; Emily’s design dramatizes competing voices; Anne’s ethics elevate practical compassion over display, insisting that feeling must answer to lived consequences.
Technological modernity reshaped imagination. Steam mills, canals, and expanding railways reorganized time, making punctuality and schedules part of character. The penny press accelerated controversy, while stereotyping and better presses widened circulation, enabling swift reputational swings. Telegraphy condensed distance, echoing the novels’ fascination with sudden news and rumor. Popular science—geology, meteorology, and early physiological psychology—offered metaphors for depth and change, even as natural theology sought harmony between scripture and observation. Electricity’s spectacle, demonstrated in lectures and fairs, supplied images of shock, attraction, and invisible force. These currents animate depictions of industry, weather, feeling, and the hidden infrastructures of influence.
Parallel arts supplied technique and atmosphere. Stage melodrama modeled sharp moral contrasts, disguises, and sudden reversals, while the domestic theatre and recitation trained voices for confession and testimony. Drawing and watercolor, taught in schools, honed attention to line and tone that surfaces in scenic composition. Hymnody and parlor music established rhythms of devotion and sociability, echoing in narrative crescendos and refrains. Continental pedagogy emphasized composition, dictation, and performance, informing classroom scenes in Villette and The Professor. The novels adapt painterly chiaroscuro and theatrical framing to explore surveillance, spectatorship, and self-presentation under the gaze of households and crowds.
Within literary debates, the novels traverse realism’s pledge to ordinary life and the Gothic’s repertoire of menace, refusing a single camp’s manifesto. They prefigure sensation fiction’s focus on secrecy, documents, and domestic law, but insist on ethical inquiry over shock. Frame narratives and embedded testimony, notably in Wuthering Heights, stage rival interpretations; first-person development in Jane Eyre retools the Bildungsroman for a woman’s claim to vocation. Charlotte’s later works extend social realism toward industrial and urban scenes; Anne’s economy of style champions clarity. The result contests critical binaries—useful versus beautiful, moral instruction versus imaginative liberty—by intertwining them.
Attention to language and locale grounds the books’ aesthetic. Yorkshire speech, schoolroom French, and legal jargon appear as social instruments—opening doors or marking outsiders. Weather, light, and topography move beyond backdrop to act upon perception, memory, and choice, particularly across moorland and industrial valleys. The novels choreograph interior monologue with public dialogue, producing rhythms of reserve, eruption, and afterthought. In Villette and The Professor, bilingual exchanges test authority and misreading; in Wuthering Heights, place-names and thresholds map conflict. Throughout, stylistic economy alternates with figurative swell, creating a prose capable of portrait, satire, and sudden visionary lift.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception was immediate and contentious. Jane Eyre became a sensation, praised for vitality yet faulted for coarseness and rebellion; Wuthering Heights baffled some readers with its stark energies; Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were measured against propriety and reform. Circulating libraries promoted access while pressuring publishers to soften offense, encouraging abridgments and prefaces that framed reading as moral exercise. Anonymity and gendered suspicion shaped early reviews, which often misattributed authorship among the sisters. As reputations solidified, Victorian taste domesticated the works, emphasizing uplift while marginalizing their ferocity, labor critique, and legal audacity.
Across the twentieth century, reassessment widened. Early decades prized psychological depth and structural boldness, reading Wuthering Heights and Villette as radical experiments in point of view. After two world wars, critics returned to questions of survival, trauma, and ethical autonomy, finding new urgency in Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey’s labor economies. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, once dismissed as didactic, gained stature for its legal precision and courage. Academic editions clarified textual histories and restored passages, while copyright expirations encouraged inexpensive reprints and global classrooms. The unfinished Emma attracted curiosity as a workshop of evolving technique and social observation.
Adaptations multiplied the texts’ meanings. Stage versions condensed scenes into moral tableaux; radio and later television foregrounded voice and atmosphere; cinema emphasized landscape, costume, and gesture. Each medium’s constraints reshaped emphasis—governance of pacing, censorship codes, casting norms—producing new public arguments about passion, law, and education. Soundtracks and visual design naturalized interior conflict as storm, fire, and silence, translating prose metaphors into sensory motifs. These versions circulated globally, inviting readers to return to the originals with altered expectations, and prompting scholarly efforts to document variants, compare scripts with editions, and defend the novels’ complexity against reductive iconography.
Late-century scholarship diversified interpretive frames. Feminist criticism reconceived vocation, consent, and professional identity across Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, restoring Anne’s authority as a legal and ethical thinker. Post-colonial readings interrogated empire’s traces in language, inheritance, and foreign travel, especially in Villette and Wuthering Heights, while challenging earlier nationalist appropriations. Disability and mental-health studies revisited representations of confinement, care, and community responsibility. Environmental humanities reconsidered weather and moorland as agents rather than scenery. These debates do not cancel earlier appreciations; they complicate them, revealing how social difference, landscape, and law shape feeling and form.
Preservation has underwritten continuing reinterpretation. Authorial revisions, publisher proofs, and early impressions reveal negotiations over diction, chapter divisions, and prefaces. Scholarly editions established reliable copy-texts, annotated legal references, school practices, and industrial terminology, enabling comparison across Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor alongside Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, and Emma. Copyright lapses expanded access for students and theatre companies, while digitization opened collation of variants and reception documents. The result is a living archive: texts stabilized for citation yet open to fresh arrangement, adaptation, and pedagogy as new historical questions recalibrate what counts as central.
Synopsis (Selection)
JANE EYRE
An orphaned governess forges a life of self-respect and independence after a harsh childhood and employment at Thornfield Hall, where her employer’s hidden past tests her convictions.
SHIRLEY
Set amid industrial unrest in 1811–12 Yorkshire, the novel follows Caroline Helstone and the independent heiress Shirley Keeldar as their community grapples with mill strikes, class tensions, and constrained roles for women.
VILLETTE
Narrated by Lucy Snowe, who relocates to the city of Villette to teach at a girls’ school, the story explores loneliness, secrecy, and conflicted attachments in an unfamiliar culture with hints of the uncanny.
THE PROFESSOR
William Crimsworth recounts his struggle to find work and self-respect, becoming a teacher in Brussels and negotiating professional ambition, cultural displacement, and a measured, earnest courtship.
EMMA
An unfinished fragment about a mysterious girl admitted to a fashionable school under dubious sponsorship, raising questions of identity, class, and origin that remain unresolved.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
A brooding tale of obsessive love and vengeance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, narrated through layered accounts as their passions reverberate across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
AGNES GREY
Through the clear-eyed perspective of a young governess, the novel depicts the trials of service with affluent families, exposing everyday cruelties and the quiet pursuit of moral dignity.
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
A reclusive young widow and her child take refuge at Wildfell Hall, and through letters and a confessional diary the narrative reveals a marriage corroded by vice and a woman’s fight to protect her independence.
The Complete Novels of Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë - 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.
Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word
