Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

sympathy.
    Her sisters, too, are writing their second novels, though the first ones have still not been accepted. All three volumes have been sent out and rejected again. They continue to send out the same brown paper parcel, after crossing out the name of the previous publisher. Their poems have not sold, though they have been favorably reviewed. Yet all three of them have gone on writing and discussing their work among themselves, despite the lack of success. They have even paid to advertise the poems, using the words of one of the favorable reviews.
    What determination, sturdiness, and self-reliance—or is it folly? Charlotte wonders, as she looks at her sisters at work, the youngest with her desk on her knees. She is as convinced of the merit of their work as of their diligence. Pale, grave, thoughtful, almost severe in their dark dresses, Emily and Anne look distinguished and intelligent. She can see that they have passed through something that has formed and linked them indissolubly. It is in the gravity of the way they sit and talk and in their laughter. It is in them even when they are not looking at each other.
    Their father’s eyesight has continued to improve, and he has been able to take back some of his duties from his kind Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who has relieved him during his blindness. Still, the problem of money remains, as their brother spends anything he can come by on drink or opiates, and none of the girls has any employment. They no longer speak of the school they had once dreamed of establishing in the parsonage. With the brother at home, a shiftless, dissipated wreck, an albatross around their necks, such a project is unthinkable. They dare not even invite their friends to visit.
    Charlotte sips from her cup of tea, now cold. She sighs and says, “My life is passing me by. Here I am thirty, and yet I have achieved nothing, nothing! Am I being punished for going back to Brussels so recklessly after Aunt’s death?”
    “Nonsense,” Emily says in her abrupt and practical way. Their gazes meet, and Charlotte feels suddenly younger, more hopeful, looking into her sister’s beautiful, tired eyes. “We have our work—no one can take that away from us. No matter how exhausted or sad I feel, we have our writing, and that changes everything. And we have one another, after all.”

    The servant nods and smiles approvingly at these three young women she thinks of as her own bairns. “Indeed, you do,” she says. Since her arrival in the family, these girls have been close. They have kept one another alive with their affection for one another and for their brother. She can still see them as young things, holding hands and running out together along the broad, sunny walk. They would scamper across the moors, the brother, small as he was, running on ahead, the red head catching the sunlight. He would shout, “Catch me if you can!” and the girls would go after him, picking up the younger ones when they tripped, thrust out of the house in flannel dresses even in bad weather. “Exercise is good for them,” the grim parson would say if she protested, pleading to keep them indoors on bitterly cold days.
    She remembers them sitting huddled close by the fireside in the evening and listening to some old tale she would tell of the fairies and wee folk, tiny phantoms who frequented the leaves of foxgloves in the hollow, emerging out of ferny dells in the moors and frolicking in the beck on moonlit nights. How they would beg her for one story after another—the more violent, the more mysterious and magical, the better. She told them of the days before the mills had come in, when all the wool spinning was done by hand in the houses. She repeated all the folklore her grandmother had told her: stories of the Gytrash, the malevolent spirit who takes the form of a large dog or horse and leads people astray. She has gossiped freely about the notables of the area: the Heatons ousted from Ponden Hall for a