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

I first encountered Jane Eyre when I was far too young to understand the sweep of its great love story and its great tale of cleaving to one’s self as steadfastly as to any other love. I loved it then for what it gave me, but I love it more now for what I bring to every reading. It’s a book I revisit again and again: when I seek to see myself amid the threat of depression and feeble people-pleasing, when I need to bolster myself for storms of my own making. Every time, it’s a bit different, some parts familiar and soothing, others jarring and rude. But every time I finish Jane Eyre, I marvel at how plain and poor Jane can adhere so unbreakably to her own truth. This steadfastness pushes her into heroic territory, even when it seems as if she will come out with nothing but her principles. It’s the thing that carries her through one of literature’s more turbulent love stories without separating her from herself or her ideals.

Like Jane, we are goaded by peril and stress, loss and unimaginable redefinition. First, we lose sight of ourselves. Then we hone in, regroup. Suddenly, clarity sets in: unimportant things are shelved until later; our selves are identified, then cared for. Slowly, painfully, we become even more loyal to that which we know to be right. We stand up. We ask for help, even when doing so seems “as unromantic as Monday morning.” We walk on toward ourselves. And we make our way forward, as long as we don’t cling too tightly to the principles that drive us onward. Like Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë, we find we “must struggle on, strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.”

READ THIS BOOK:

• In the midst of breakups and life passages

• With a box of tissues at hand

• When you’re not sure if you can deal with another personal bombshell

JANE’S LITERARY SISTERS:

• Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

• Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

• Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Jo March in Little Women,

by Louisa May Alcott

Any mention of her “works” always had a bad effect upon Jo, who either grew rigid and looked offended, or changed the subject with a brusque remark, as now. “Sorry you could find nothing better to read. I write that rubbish because it sells, and ordinary people like it.”

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa May Alcott had always imagined her return from her first trip to Europe as a kind of triumph, a graceful homecoming replete with happy memories and artistic and romantic accomplishments aplenty. The reality was somewhat different: fourteen nauseous, boring days aboard the Africa led not to fanfare and tearful reunions but to the damp, anticlimactic feeling that overcame her as she looked out over the Boston harbor that meant home. The Europe of her childhood fantasies had been something to energize, inspire, and satisfy; the one she had just seen had turned her into an invalid nearly as cranky as the one she had been sent to supervise.

As a companion to Anna Weld, the thirty-three-year-old had seen Switzerland, London, Paris. But her obligations to her nervous, frivolous charge had kept her from wandering or exploring on her own, a fact she resented more with every passing day. Miss Weld didn’t care about the scenery that surrounded her, and her neurotic chatter drove Louisa nearly mad with boredom and anger. Neither new friends nor unfamiliar sights could undo the fact that here, too, was unrelenting work, her constant companion since childhood. Even the sudden gift of money from her mother was just a stopgap measure. While it allowed her to spend a few brief weeks luxuriating in London, she knew she was operating on borrowed time. Characteristically, she was also doing so on borrowed money. When she came home, listless and sick, she realized that the gift had been lent by well-meaning friends. Guilty and angry, she went through the family finances, falling back into her old role of problem-solver and reluctant breadwinner.

It was in this fretful state of mind, compounded by the recent death of her beloved brother-in-law, that Louisa received her publisher’s commission—and it was an unusual one. She’d made her career first as an anonymous writer of lurid serials, then as author of a wildly popular book drawing on her experiences as a nurse in the Civil War. To her surprise, publisher Thomas Niles wanted neither—he wanted a book for girls. Louisa herself was an unmarried tomboy who knew little about children, let alone little women. She was also poor. “Niles asked me to write a girls book…. Fuller asked me to be the editor of [popular children’s magazine] Merry’s Museum . Said I’d try,” she wrote in her journal. “Began at once on both jobs, but didn’t like either.”

That statement about sums up Louisa’s complex relationship to the only constants in her life: work and ambition. What we today associate with clocking in, sitting in meetings, or standing behind a counter meant something very different in the 1840s, when Louisa was a girl. To the Alcott sisters, “work” was the backbreaking labor expected of a woman, shorthand for the hours of sewing, mending, fitting, and patterning a girl had to perform simply to have clothing to wear in a world that lacked washing machines, detergent, or ready-made anything. “Work” was scrubbing a blackened hearth, kneading bread, lugging heavy buckets of water into the house from an outdoor well. For Louisa, this drudgery distracted from her true ambitions, desires born as much from deprivation as dreams.

When the family moved to Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843, their workload only increased. The community was the brainchild of Louisa’s father, Bronson, and his deluded apostles, men with an insatiable, albeit impractical, need to put their lofty philosophies into action. When they moved to the rocky farm, the “consociate” family took a vow never to use any product of an animal’s life or toil, be it wool, silk, or fields plowed by horses. Louisa and her siblings starved together on sour apples (potatoes and other root vegetables were off-limits due to their “toxic” downward-pointing tendencies) and watched their parents’ marriage nearly fail, unable to withstand suggestions of celibacy or wife-sharing. Over the course of that dreary year, Louisa and her sisters watched their father reduced to a shell of his former self, a man even more unfit for honest labor than he had been in the early days when he wandered the country as a peddler of household goods, living on the kindness of strangers and the less-than-edible fruits of his complex philosophical tenets.

In those days, a father unable or unwilling to provide for his family exposed them to the very real prospect of illness, imprisonment, and starvation. Abba Alcott and her girls had long lived side by side with debt and dependence; they’d relied on family members and the charity of Bronson’s more stable Transcendentalist friends. Now they themselves had to go out to work, taking on positions as teachers, governesses, and social workers.

Herself the prisoner of complex ambitions and overwhelming insecurities, Louisa longed to prove herself. She had already tried and failed to sell her sewing and her stories; now, despite her mother’s misgivings, she agreed to work as a maid in the home of James Richardson, a family friend. Eager to see something, anything, of the world, she arrived at the Richardson house ready to earn a living.

The position was a bit more than she had bargained for; in addition to her stated work, she was apparently expected to act as a sort of paid girlfriend to Richardson, who regaled her with long philosophical ramblings and sexually harassed her. When she objected, her language tart and charged with anger, she paid the price. Her new tasks included shoveling snow and withstanding the abusive notes Richardson shoved under her door. She drew the line at blacking her inappropriate employer’s boots, fleeing at the first possible opportunity. In exchange for two months of boring, humiliating, and unsatisfying labor, she was paid just four dollars. She sent the money back, traumatized and embittered by her first real experience working outside the home.