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with spirit and justice. “What does Bessie say I have done?” she has the child retort to the aunt. Let the editor, the reader, put this down!
    She contrasts the plain, ten-year-old girl with her richer, better-looking cousins. She invents a bully, a fourteen-year-old boy, John Reed—drawn from her days as governess—a fat child who gorges himself on cakes and sweetmeats. He has sallow skin and two spoiled sisters. How she has suffered at the expense of spoiled children whose doting parents could find no fault in them! She makes her heroine small for her age, delicate, and, like herself, plain. She conjures up a disapproving aunt, a mercurial servant girl.
    Charlotte knows about the structure of stories and novels: her beloved Bunyan, Scott, Byron, the German Romantics, the French novels, the great Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle. She has listened to her teacher’s admonitions to imitate classic works. She remembers the fairy tale, where there is an abandoned child, a Cinderella, the parents absent or dead, the aggressor brought swiftly onto the scene. She knows readers will recognize themselves here, all those who had too many brothers and sisters, who were lost in the midst of the solitude of a large family, as she was—or those who had no family at all. An orphan is not so far from a middle child, a third child, soon to be one of six motherless children, with their remote father shut away in his study, muffled in grief. She will avoid mawkishness by creating the complexity of a real child’s mind: this child will be no angel.
    She remembers her aunt’s preference for the other children. She makes up a child who dares to ask what most would want to ask of the uncomprehending adults around her, had they the courage—a bright, brave, imaginative child, the child she would have liked to be. Like Charlotte now in the somber room, turning the pages of a familiar book, this child is glad of a quiet moment to study the pictures, the words that both echo the loneliness in her heart and carry her away from her solitary place in this family. She dreams of shadowy realms, frozen wastes, uncharted territories. The child is almost happy.
    The desolate day outside, the loneliness of the child within the heart of the family, leads to the reading of the book, the escape into pictures, into a dream world. She creates a moment of hope, a slight pause before violence. Perhaps things will be better for her heroine in her hideout, in her world of dreams. Perhaps things will be better for Charlotte, too, starting this new book, alone with her father at her side. Her spirit lifts.

    The name of her character and of her book comes to her casually, as she is busy with other things. She thinks of it as she adjusts her father’s blanket and lifts a cup to his lips, as he stirs, mutters something, stretches out a hand.
    “Are you really there, my dear?” he asks.
    “Of course, Papa,” she says, but she is not really there. She plunges on and on into the silvery depths. She floats through the autumn night and leaves this place behind.
    It comes to her out of thin air. She is not sure if she has heard such a name. Was there someone she knew with that name? Does it come from the family arms she once saw in a church, or the river she knows well, the beautiful valley of the Ayre? Or is it a name that comes from air, perhaps, or fire? Fire and ire will be in the book: rage at the world as it is. Unfair! Unfair! Ire and eyer: she is the one who now sees in her father’s place. She has become the voyeur, the observer. Plain Jane, Emily Jane, her beloved sister’s second name, Jane, so close to Joan, brave Joan of Arc, Jane so close to Janet, Jeanette, little Jane. A name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth amid hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Love
    S itting at her father’s