Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Charlotte shielded herself from her pain with the thing that had always gotten her through: writing. “If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” she wrote in the preface to her novel Shirley in 1849. “Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.” Though she steadfastly turned herself to the duties that lay ahead, the years that followed her losses were the loneliest and most uncertain she had ever faced. Was this the end of life?

Charlotte’s alter ego asks herself the same question in the darkest chapters of Jane Eyre, a book that has much to teach us about loyalty and steadfastness. The abandonment, hopelessness, and devastation of Charlotte’s personal life pales in comparison with the trials she gave Jane, an impoverished orphan who must make her way through a hostile and immoral world. Just when Jane thinks she has found true love and a peaceful existence, Charlotte snatches the rug from under her feet. Edward Rochester, the moody man Jane loves with her entire life, reveals a disastrous secret at the altar: he is already married. Even worse, his wife is a madwoman who lives in the attic of the house where the now hopelessly star-crossed couple fell in love.

Here’s where it gets good. Anyone who has cracked open Jane Eyre is not likely to soon forget the emotional ordeal that follows as Jane faces the love of her life and refuses his request to be her lover, if not her husband.

I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty—“Depart!”

“Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise—'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.’”

“Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours.”

Lashed by the whip of principle, Jane flees across the moors, ending up exhausted, starving, and entirely debased as she starts a new life of voluntary separation from the only person she has ever loved. Jane is clearly poised for a comeback, but first she must undergo some of the most harrowing chapters in English literature. Charlotte almost revels in Jane’s devastation, but she won’t let her wallow for long. Slowly, she builds Jane back up, first through blind hope, then through abstract faith, and finally through the deeds and the love of other people.

A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.

What possible redeeming value can there be in this ultimate of darkest hours before dawn? Fortunately for Jane, and for us, Charlotte has buried a kernel of hope in the storm, and within her heroine. Jane’s rebirth is not one of brute persistence or of bravery, though she persists and is brave. It is of internal steadfastness, a dogged adherence to personal principles and values even when she is literally floored by grief and fear.

In the chapters that follow Jane’s flight, Charlotte and Jane get down to the nitty-gritty of what can sustain a person through a personal crisis of epic proportions. Jane the person is stripped down piece by piece, voluntarily turning her back on her relationships, her past associations, and even her name (she goes by a pseudonym in order to escape search and rescue by Rochester). Faced with the crisis of a relationship gone horribly wrong, one that threatens both her place in society and in the eyes of God, Jane refuses to take the easy way out. Instead, she chooses certain misery, shedding that which does not serve her principles. “Life, however,” she reflects, “was yet in my possession; with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.”

At first, it seems like there won’t be much left to set out toward. Jane has consciously dumped the trappings of the beautiful bride and is left only with her plain garb and meager possessions. Jane the social construct—the governess, the unlikely bride, the future Mrs. Rochester—is meaningless out on the moors. All that’s left is Jane as she truly is—a lost soul.

Jane’s journey through terror, abandonment, and conflicted emotions takes on a nightmarish quality for a while. Her lament echoed by the wild landscape she encounters, she does not stop. Though she has little to be thankful for, she gives thanks. And she keeps walking.

Does Jane’s strength come from her utter rootlessness, from the lessons of a life of hardship, toil, and emotional deprivation? Perhaps. But Jane is as human as her creator. As she wanders along in a crisis partly of her own making, strength and weakness seem interchangeable. Faced with a difficulty (and what a difficulty!), Jane has chosen loyalty to herself over loyalty to her love. The hardships of her life have not been enough to soften her. If she stays with Rochester, she will doubtless enjoy the rest of her life… and burn in hell for all eternity. So she goes, suffering as much from her self-imposed isolation as from the knowledge that she has wounded the one she holds most dear.

Principles got Jane into this mess, and eventually they get her back out again. Jane’s steadfastness endangers her one meager chance at happiness and sets her life on a course of survival and focus. But the act of clinging, the very practice of steadfastness, defines and hones the principles themselves.

Jane’s deluge takes away everything she has come to value, but it has something to give in return. That journey is the crucible in which her true character—that of a woman who combines principle with a loving heart, a woman who can’t bear mere duty and learns to temper her natural severity with love—is forged. And, tellingly, it is a journey Jane must make alone. All the brooding lovers and abusive teachers in England couldn’t teach Jane as much about herself or her core values as a few days wandering the moors, looking for salvation, and searching for the next right step. Though she would be content to fall into the moors and become a part of the outdoors, she does not die. She stands up, moves forward, asks for help. Ultimately, Jane makes her way back to Rochester and finds her happy ending. Steadfastness rewarded, she survives.

Charlotte, too, clung steadfastly to life over death. After a period of intense grief, she entered the world of English literary lights on her own terms, ventured out from Haworth and brushed shoulders with London high society. She even married, leaving behind the spinsterhood that defined and confined much of her adult life. Though fated to die young (she succumbed to dehydration in 1855 following a bout of uncontrollable morning sickness after only a few months of marriage), Charlotte had one thing in common with her plain Jane: she couldn’t be beaten by life.

Any heroine worth reading about will one day find herself on the moors of a devastating personal crisis. For the most part, we must traverse them alone. We would do well to remember Charlotte and Jane as we come face to face with our inadequacy and our inner strength.

The moment of crossing is one of isolation, humility, and despair. But as heroines, we are already equipped with everything we need. Inside every heroine is the lovelorn, lonely writer who kept on working; the plain governess who kept on walking toward her principles. Even when we’re too scared to function or too grief-stricken to care, we can be carried along by steadfast actions like Jane’s. Our steadfastness punctures the fear and isolation of the deluge, enabling us to address only that which deserves our attention and keep putting one foot in front of the other, bad reviews and broken hearts notwithstanding.