The 6th book in Susan Wise Bauer's Well Educated Mind great fiction reads is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The book was originally released under the name of Currer Bell in order to protect her and her sisters identities and because women authors weren't looked upon kindly at that particular period of time.
"Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a
sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively
masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because —
without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking
was not what is called 'feminine' — we had a vague impression that
authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice . . . [quoted from
the Norton edition of Wuthering Heights, p. 4]
Chapter One
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We
had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in
the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no
company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it
clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further
out-door exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on
chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw
twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by
the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the
consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and
Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round
their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the
fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither
quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had
dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to
be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that
until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own
observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a
more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and
sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural,
as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges
intended only for contented, happy, little children.”
“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners;
besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up
her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until
you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in
there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of
a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with
pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my
feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red
moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double
retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to
the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not
separating me from the drear November day. At intervals,
while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of
that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of
mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub,
with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British
Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally
speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that,
child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They
were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the
solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of
the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern
extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—
“Where the Northern Ocean, in vast
whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores
of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland,
Greenland, with “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and
those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of
frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of
centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights,
surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of
extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed
an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended
notions that float dim through children’s brains, but
strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages
connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave
significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and
spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the
cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck
just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary
churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two
trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its
newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be
marine phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I
passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock,
surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped
understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly
interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes
narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good
humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery
hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs.
Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed
our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken
from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period
I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of
Moreland.
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my
way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too
soon. The breakfast-room door opened.
“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of John
Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
“Where the dickens is she!” he continued.
“Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not
here: tell mama she is run out into the rain—bad
animal!”
“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I
wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would
John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of
vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door,
and said at once—
“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”
And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of
being dragged forth by the said Jack.
“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward
diffidence.
“Say, ‘What do you want, Master
Reed?’” was the answer. “I want you to
come here;” and seating himself in an arm-chair, he
intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before
him.
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years
older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age,
with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious
visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged
himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him
a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to
have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month
or two, “on account of his delicate health.”
Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he
had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the
mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and
inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s
sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining
after home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an
antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or
three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but
continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of
flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were
moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because
I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his
inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young
master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and
deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse
me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more
frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent
some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he
could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike,
and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly
appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if
he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without
speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and
on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his
chair.
“That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile
since,” said he, “and for your sneaking way of
getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes
two minutes since, you rat!”
Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of
replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would
certainly follow the insult.
“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he
asked.
“I was reading.”
“Show the book.”
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
“You have no business to take our books; you are a
dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you
none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with
gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do,
and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now,
I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they
are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few
years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the
mirror and the windows.”
I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when
I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I
instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough,
however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my
head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the
pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings
succeeded.
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You
are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you
are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed
my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn
parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared
aloud.
“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say
that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana?
Won’t I tell mama? but first—”
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my
shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really
saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of
blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of
somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time
predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort.
I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he
called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out
aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for
Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene,
followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I
heard the words—
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master
John!”
“Did ever anybody see such a picture of
passion!”
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined—
“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in
there.” Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and
I was borne upstairs.
Read more online here or here
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