Becoming Jane Eyre Read Online Free

resonant voice. He rendered Hippolyte’s lines with such feeling and so much expression that, despite her limited French, she forgot where she was, swept away. When he came to a breathless halt and looked around the classroom and the silent, awestruck pupils, she thought, I am falling in love, falling in love with language, with these sensuous words .
    She listened to him as he analyzed what he had read, probing and darting with daring and eloquence. Despite her limited understanding of the language, she was immediately aware of this man’s original mind, his deep comprehension of the many layers of the difficult text. She watched him use all his enthusiasm, his strength of mind and body, to claim the attention, and the hearts and minds, of these young women. Suddenly, she became aware, her mouth was open and her breathing shallow.
    Then he handed back the girls’ homework, his pupils coming up to claim their work. She saw his expression change again and again, withering one pupil with the movement of lip or nostril and elevating the next with the upturn of an eyebrow. Some wept; others beamed, their faces lit with delight. Sometimes he would produce a little gift for a favorite student who had pleased him particularly, bringing forth something, a bonbon or gourmandise from one of his numerous pockets, like a conjuror from a hat.
    She knew she wanted to please this man, to see his expression alter, to delight his eyes. She wanted one of his sweet gifts.

CHAPTER THREE
    Glimmerings
    H er father stirs beside her. He gropes in his darkness, and she arrests his wandering hand and imprisons it in both of hers.
    “Read me something, dear child, will you? You are my vision. God bless you, child, and reward you,” he says. Gone is the old autocratic tone, the aggravation barely concealed beneath the pious Christian pronouncements, the threats of punishment for sins.
    Sitting by her blinded, silenced father, she dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice. She writes from experience, using what she knows of life, of literature, of love, plunging into the midst of her tale, not wasting the reader’s time or trying her patience with lengthy preliminaries.
    This time, she will not hide behind the persona of a man, as she did in her novel The Professor , with its two brothers in conflict, or as her younger sister has at the start of her book: no Crimsworth, no Lockwood. Nor will she use the Byronic heroes from her early works: no Wellesley, no Townshend, and above all, no Chief Genius Branii, to tell his tale of war, blood, mire, death, and disaster.
    She remembers the direct, engaging voice of Robinson Crusoe—indeed, she feels like Robinson Crusoe, abandoned on her desert island—and she writes as though recounting her own adventures. “An autobiography,” she writes at the top of the page. She will make them think this is the truth, and it will be.
    In their rejection letter, the editors have asked for an exceptional incident. She will give them one—no: many of them. She will give them mystery. She will use compression and little explanation, plunging into action. Above all, no grumbling. She will write out of rage at injustice and arrogance, the religious humbugs, the exploiters.
    She works on the first scene, writing rapidly, seeing it all vividly, the shadowy picture emerging fast from the darkness of her mind, this shadowy room: the rainy, gray November day, the aunt’s bitter words to the child. “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance,” the aunt tells the child, her darlings clustered around her before the fire.
    This new story of an orphan develops with a kind of urgency she has never known before. She has read and written so much, from such a young age. She knows the child’s position in this alien family will yield a steady stream of pathos. She knows how to create suspense by putting a fragile creature in immediate jeopardy and by making her fight back