The Journal of Dora Damage Read Online Free

the Falling Sickness one still had to be careful. We led a peaceful life, owing to the
     delicacy of her condition: she accompanied me each morning as I sewed and folded in the workshop; in the afternoons she helped
     me with the chores, and in the evenings we read books, made up fanciful stories, sang, or played the old cottage piano. In
     the winter, we nestled by the fire and sewed leaves of paper together to make simple, tiny books, bound with scraps of leather
     or cloth from the workshop; in the summer, we sat in our patch of a garden and sewed real leaves together, and then we placed
     our leaf-books under the spindly bushes for the fairies. I kept my anxieties away from Peter, as it was not right to trouble
     him with women’s worries; but I also kept them away from the medical profession. I have many regrets, but that is still not
     one of them.
    We liked being helpful to the bookbinders, Lucinda and I, for the sewing and folding was not hard. Occasionally I was privy
     to the books themselves, and had made several, not unheeded, suggestions for the casing design. I had enjoyed reading them:
     the legislative proposals, the academic theses, the histories, the memoirs of notables, and the primers for success in commerce
     (but Peter kept the medical anatomies away from me). I found them more edifying and provocative than the popular romances
     my sex was encouraged to read. Reading was my happiness: my father had described me to Peter’s father, William Damage, as
     ‘bookish’ when our engagement was made, and while I knew he had not meant it entirely as a compliment, it boded well for my
     match with my father’s apprentice bookbinder.
    Surely one could forgive the daughter of a bookbinder for her love of books? But my father took no responsibility for my passion;
     he blamed my mother, who had been a governess before their match. She had, in his opinion, made the grave error of rearing
     me in the fashion of her superior charges, thereby expanding my intellect beyond the material station of any husband his income
     was capable of attracting. I would, he was convinced, remain not only a spinster, but entirely friendless, as I would be the
     intellectual, if not economic, superior of women of my own society. So I learnt the expediency of placing bell-jars, as it
     were, over my love of books, philosophy, politics and art, unmoveable as they were from the mantelpiece of my life, and I
     allowed them to become soot-blackened with neglect.
    While Lucinda slept, I took the plants off the windowsills, shook out the muslin soot-stoppers, and washed the windows with
     cold tea – which would let in as much of the day’s meagre light as possible, save our candles, and bring more cheer to the
     dim, north-facing room – and then I cleaned the lamps. I scattered yesterday’s tea-leaves over the carpets, then swept them
     up again with the dust, and put them in the range to burn. My neighbours might have snubbed me for not washing the floor,
     but I was ever fearful of adding to the damp throughout the property and aggravating Peter’s condition, so on my knees I worked
     only on the worst areas, scrubbing, wiping and drying in one motion. I swept black beetles, spiders and silverfish out of
     the corners of the kitchen, then I went down to the room where Peter made up his paste, next to the coal-cellar, and pulled
     some more water from the tap. I scrubbed the pans with sand, and set about cleaning the range, as the laundry dangled on my
     head from the clothes-horse on the grimy ceiling. Each time I turned my head, a damp trouser leg or shirt sleeve would slap
     my cheeks, as if a ghost were demanding intimacy with me. A lethargy set in as I toiled, and with it the familiar quiet anger,
     that this was my life, these were the walls of my existence, and the confines of my hopes.
    It was not as if I were a particularly good house-keeper. For all my diligence, the house was never clean enough; I always
     fell short. My