To Hold: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him
A short story by Joanna Briscoe from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.In ‘To Hold’, a woman looks back on her life, which has been defined by three marriages.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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To Hold
Joanna Briscoe
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
To Hold © Joanna Briscoe 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: 9780008173364
Version: 2016-03-09
Contents
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
READER, I MARRIED HIM because I had to.
You see, we did in those days. There was no glimmer of a choice.
My hand in marriage was requested by the boy with the triangular Adam’s apple and a shuffling thirst for a girl. He was the lad who worked for his parents’ motor garage on a yard beyond the village, and I hadn’t expected his offer after a lifetime of nods, three conversations, one dance and no kiss with him. But he knocked on our door and asked my father, who postponed his answer, crimson-necked. Using half an excuse, he told Dougie Spreckley to wait.
As my parents’ only child – no further births; no boy to help with the rough work; no man’s wages to soften old age; only one womb available for the grandchildren they already treasured – I was aware that all hope lay with me, though they never said it, and the knowledge made me swallow a rise of nausea. They were good parents.
It was Mr Tay-Mosby with his Mosby Hall who was the bright dream on the other side of Gibbeswick.
The Hall lay along the Oxenhope road, behind park walls, vegetable garden abutting the moors. He had shown the Hall and gardens to me when I was a girl, just as he had taken me once to the fells and Tarey Carr beyond, where the bogs slumped and beige fogs sickened when the winds weren’t screaming.
The espaliered walls, the choke of cabbages, ended in a gate that led straight through to where the gorse was webbed with nests and the merlins soared to Gibbeswick Fell. Tay-Mosby hiked daily through the tussocks accompanied by his dog, Ranger Boy, surmounted the head of the waterfall as he chopped at thorns with his stick, walked by the beck to where the quarry was, the Pennine Way, the views further west to witch country.
He contemplated me as I grew. I was only aware of his appraisal as a blush inside me, because he wouldn’t look at me with his eyes. He turned away with a statue’s indifference if he ever spoke to me, yet he watched me too; my skin knew it.
My mother was flustered by him, and mentioned him repeatedly; my father merely nodded his approval. I was fifteen when I understood their hope that I might one day have a chance with John Tay-Mosby, though he was as old as a father, and the shock of the realisation was so much worse than the terror of the blood when it first came out of me, worse than the killing of baby birds by Dougie and his friends, worse than seeing my father bang his head against the door because the beet crop’s roots grew cysts.
