Becoming Jane Eyre Read Online Free PDF Page A

suggested than shown, by mysterious sounds, cries from afar, a laugh in the obscurity of the night. The imagination of the reader can do the work.” He was very strict about imitating the classics.
    She dared to argue with him. “But writing cannot be regulated. It is like the cry of the wind or—some sort of electricity.” He looked at her, smiled, and lifted his hand to her hair in a gesture of response, as though words were not enough. She took his hand and put it, in a gesture of admiration, to her lips.
    They talked freely about history—the French Revolution, the English queen—about their own histories: his first wife and baby dying suddenly, tragically. Charlotte spoke of her dead older sisters and her brother’s dissolution.
    “We have much that is similar in our past. For someone so young, you have suffered a lot. I have the impression we are going to be real friends, amis pour toujours ,” he said.
    She looked up at him and felt he knew her heart.
    How his moods altered like the spring weather: the showers following fast on a sunny day, greeting her with his generous smile, speaking love with his dark eyes, pressing her hand, lauding her facility with words, often leaving little gifts in her desk: a small, dew-damp bouquet of wildflowers, a book blooming magically between a dull dictionary and a worn-out grammar, or some little sweet pastry nestled unexpectedly in the lap of a dull assignment.
    She had never felt so well. She was full of energy, industry, and life. She enjoyed her French studies, her essays, and even her teaching, which she began to do for Madame H. with trepidation, taking over the role of the English teacher in the classroom with increasing authority, blossoming in the sun of Monsieur H.’s approbation. She realized she, too, could stand before students and hold their attention, share with them the things she knew. She, too, could teach.
    One evening, as they stood at twilight under the acacia tree, the sky an orange-pink, as she looked up at him adoringly, all her throbbing heart in her gaze, he had bent down close, pressing his heavy, hard body against her, brushing her cheek with his damp lips, stealing a brief kiss, whispering in her ear. “Who,” he said. “Who is my best girl?”
    “Your wife,” she had answered, but feebly, her voice shaking. How could he ask such a question? What did it mean?
    “If only, if only. . . .” And she felt his body swelling with a promise she could only guess at, as he pressed himself against her.
    Her existence was filling up in Belgium for a while, as it does now here in Manchester, sitting beside her father, writing this book, which comes to her so fast and clearly. Once again she feels that spring sultriness here, in the close rooms in Manchester, where she keeps the fire going for her father.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Writing
    W hat a luxury to be able to sit here hour after hour in the muffled light and the silence of the city! She writes all through the day with little interruption except for her father’s few murmured requests and the light food the nurse brings him. She helps herself from his tray. She shares the strained breakfast porridge, the tapioca, familiar food from her childhood. She eats all her meals close beside him. She feeds him. He opens his lips on the spoon like a baby bird. She wipes his lips and chin, and then her own. She hands the tray back to the nurse, a coarse-faced woman who disturbs her work. Then she takes up her pencil again.
    The writing is her way out of this room, this cell of solitude, darkness, and despair. Her mind is free to roam where it will. She dares to take up her humiliations and heartaches and to give them a structure. She thinks of the plot like Pilgrim’s voyage, a loosely linked chain of events, the battle with one danger leading to the next: causality.

    As the story takes shape, it lifts her out of the gloom of her failures at life and love. “What do you want?” the ten-year-old girl asks the