Since First I Saw Your Face: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him
A short story by Emma Donoghue from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.‘Since First I Saw Your Face’ reimagines a relationship between two notable Victorian women.Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader, I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontë’s game-changing novel and its beloved narrator.
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Since First I Saw Your Face
Emma Donoghue
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
Since First I Saw Your Face © Emma Donoghue 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173388
Version: 2016-03-09
Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?
Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
Tracy Chevalier
MY FELLOW BOARDERS AT Benson’s are mostly cure-seekers, come to Wiesbaden in search of lost health. Two consumptives, an anaemic, half a dozen digestive cases. Mr Christopher Benson himself (withered legs, wheeled around by his valet) is the gentle lord of this house of invalids.
“No, I’m perfectly well, as it happens. It’s a natural pallor,” I tell his sister-in-law (nerves), who’s just arrived from Berkshire as September begins to cool.
“How convenient for you, Miss Hall,” says Mrs Mary Benson with a tiny smile. “You could claim to be on the verge of fainting at any moment. In the middle of a dinner party, say, or an interminable tour of a gallery.”
I shake my head. “The former, perhaps, but in matters of art I’m tireless. For some years now I’ve been working on a study of the Madonna and Child motif in German painting and sculpture.”
This sister-in-law has witty eyebrows, I notice now, as they soar.
By the second day we’re Ellen and Minnie, because, as she points out, watering places are known for their delightful suspension of the rules of etiquette. Thirty-one, and not pretty by any measure: dumpy, snub-nosed, straight dark hair. But a lively conversationalist, despite her shattered health. Her clergyman husband is director of a Berkshire public school, and something of a scholar, preparing a monograph on St Cyprian, a third-century Bishop of Carthage.
Minnie reports pressure on the sides and top of her head; trouble with appetite, sleep, memory; the ground seems to rise and fall beneath her. A devouring sort of lowness. A screwed-tightness, so that her shoulders ache as if she’s bearing an invisible yoke.
Having lodged so long at the Bensons’, I thought I’d no patience left for symptoms (the perennial topic in Wiesbaden). But somehow I keep listening to Minnie Benson.
Dr Malcolm has prescribed her a complete reprieve from the whirl and clamour of modern life. Prayers by her bed at a quarter past eight; bathe; dress; breakfast; read; walk; rest; luncheon; tonics (cod liver oil, iron, quinine); sew; walk; rest; dine; a little music; to bed by ten, with a dose of chloral hydrate for sleep.
