Becoming Jane Eyre Read Online Free PDF

bully who finds her in her hideout and disturbs the reading of her favorite book.
    Sitting beside her helpless father, she completes the scene. When the boy insults her and throws the precious book at her, she has Jane strike back. “Wicked and cruel boy!” she says. “You are like a murderer.” Blood seeping from her head wound, she compares him to the Roman emperors, to Caligula and Nero. She makes active what has been passive in life. Her Jane retaliates with violence, like a bad animal who claws and must be punished; she is carried off to the Red Room. There, despite her protests, she is cruelly abandoned. Her aunt shuts her up entirely alone in the room with its large bedstead, damask curtains, shrouded windows, and looking glass, where her husband, Jane’s uncle, breathed his last.
    Like her Jane, who sits in the dark on her stool in the locked room, Charlotte has no need for bonds. She feels that if she left her father now he might disappear, as though it is her dim sight that holds him hovering in half life, as though she has invented him and not he her.
    Charlotte rises and walks across the darkened room. A pale face she hardly recognizes glimmers back at her from the looking glass, like an illustration in a child’s book, a goblin half-emerging from behind a curtain. She sees a small, childlike, neckless, insignificant person with irregular features. Who is here? What stranger is this? Why is this person not more like the models she studied as a girl in the annuals? Where is the perfectly oval face, the long, aristocratic neck, the alabaster shoulders, and the swanlike carriage? Above all, she thinks, drawing back her upper lip, where are the even teeth?
    So often she slips into a room in the shadows. She hugs the wall. She has the sort of face and figure people compliment, saying she has such expressive eyes, such lovely, light-brown hair, such dainty hands and feet. Or, she has been told, she has a smile that speaks of forbearance, courage, and loyalty.

    A paralyzing fear only small children feel, a fear of ghosts and spirits, comes to her again. She thinks of her Methodist aunt’s terrible tales of sin and eternal damnation: “Say your prayers, child, for if you don’t repent, something bad might come and fetch you away.” She longs for her mother’s protection. At the same time she remembers her mother’s last words, which were for her children, and what she feared most was that her dead mother might come back to them in the night to make sure her last wishes were being carried out and her poor children in good hands.
    Now the ghosts of all the departed are gathered here at her father’s bedside: her mother, her two older sisters, her dear friend, Martha, who died young and far from home. She hears a gust of dry air beating on the windows and a cry in the quiet street below. Candlelight flickers on the ceiling. How far into this underworld does she dare to go? Will she find her way back?
    The ghost of the mother’s brother comes to the child, Jane, in the Red Room. The ghost terrifies both her and her creator. Jane cries out in desperation for help.
    Charlotte leans over her exercise book now for solace and lifts it to her eyes, which, like her father’s, have never been good. She is accustomed to writing this way, but through the haze of tears she cannot read what she has written. She brushes her hand over the page and goes on. The early light, almost as blue as moonlight, filters through the curtains.

CHAPTER SIX
    Reality
    I n the half dark her father imagines he is back in the parlor where he first saw his future wife. He hears the rustling of her skirts and her lively, booted steps as she trips into the room. She stands before him, the light behind her. Plain, erect, correct, in a pale dress, she hovers shyly at her aunt’s side. “How do you do?” she says demurely to him. She bobs a curtsy, and he takes her small, cool hand in his large, hot one. She moves from him, going over to the