Arthur

Faultless my husband is not—faultless no human being is; but as you well know—I did not expect perfection.

—Charlotte Brontë to Margaret Wooler, August 22, 1854¹

Of all the crossovers I wanted to see between the Brontës’ literature and their lives, the one I most hoped for was Charlotte ending up in a blissful marriage with someone she loved as much as ever Jane loved Rochester. I wanted Jane Eyre to have become autobiography after the fact, essentially, as much for Charlotte as for myself. What I never anticipated was Charlotte becoming the wife of a safe, rational St. John type.

By the time she accepted Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte’s expectations for marriage had become very practical. In a letter announcing her engagement, she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell,

Things have progressed I don’t know how. It is of no use going into detail. After various visits and as the result of perseverance in one quarter and a gradual change of feeling in others, I find myself what people call engaged.… He is to become a resident in this house. I believe it is expected that I shall change my name in the course of summer—perhaps in July.²

She wanted someone she could respect, and someone to keep her father company, and Nicholls suited. He had been Patrick Brontë’s curate for many years. He was never terribly popular with the parish, but he was efficient and performed his duties well. By 1846, rumors were already flying about his feelings for Charlotte—Ellen Nussey got firmly rebuffed in a letter for having the audacity to ask about them—but he didn’t propose until 1852. Initially Charlotte rejected him largely on the basis of her father’s objections (Patrick thought Nicholls wasn’t important enough, or able to support Charlotte, which is especially surprising since Charlotte was doing a dandy job of supporting herself), but she also had reservations about his “odd” and “brooding” temperament.

In response, Nicholls sulked and moped around the pulpit so dramatically that Charlotte was touched by the depth of his attachment and began to reconsider. Elizabeth Gaskell did her best to find him other opportunities through her network of friends. He even found a job to take him away from Haworth, but Charlotte and Nicholls corresponded secretly for months. At last Patrick was persuaded by Nicholls’s willingness to come live at the Parsonage with them. I’m more puzzled by Patrick’s attitude than Charlotte’s. His daughter was nearing forty: Who did Patrick think would magically come along and be good enough? Thackeray? Wellington?

Before they were married, Charlotte seemed to find Arthur as puzzling as he was endearing. He wrote her that he was ill, leading her to worry in a letter to Ellen that she’d chosen a partner with serious health issues; by her next letter, he’d arrived in Haworth to visit, prompting her to tartly observe, “When people are really going to die—they don’t come a distance of some fifty miles to tell you so.” She continued, “Man is indeed an amazing piece of mechanism when you see—so to speak—the full weakness—of what he calls—his strength. There is not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for the spoilt petulance of his willful nonsense.”3 However much Charlotte had grown and softened, there was some vinegar in her yet.

Any time I get deeply interested in an author, I go see if their correspondence has been preserved—Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, Dawn Powell—and I devour it. Discovering that dozens of Charlotte’s letters had survived in the hands of her school friends and her publishers was like finding out that Christmas was not only arriving early, but every day in small doses, like an Advent calendar. Letter-writing Charlotte is opinionated and ambitious, though sometimes depressed, and frequently annoyed by the scarcity of options available to women of her class. And this is silly, but her letters also assure me of a gratifying piece of trivia: she knew my name. She signed one of her letters to Ellen Nussey “Caliban,” which means she read The Tempest, which means we would have had at least one small spark for conversation, had we ever met.

In addition to this encouragement, and the appealing daily snapshots of life in the early mid-nineteenth century, the letters Charlotte wrote to Ellen have one strong advantage over her more literary writing. With Ellen, she talked about love. Without Ellen’s guardianship, I wouldn’t know what Charlotte’s voice sounded like when she was young, eager, tired, or grouchy. Charlotte’s letters to Elizabeth Gaskell and W. S. Williams are written by a writer, a thinker, someone aware, however distantly, of a public presence in the world. The letters to Ellen, though they were frequently passed between family members, are more private, free from the constraints of professionalism. Without these letters, we’d have no hard proof of how she felt about romantic attachment, or that when Ellen’s brother Henry, a minister, proposed marriage to Charlotte in 1839, he was kindly but firmly rejected:

I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you—but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you.… I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose—you would think me romantic and eccentric—you would say I was satirical and severe—however I scorn deceit and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid^* take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.⁴

Eat your heart out, Lizzie Bennet. Charlotte would afterward add, in a letter to Ellen,

I asked myself two questions—Do I love Henry Nussey as much as a woman ought to love her husband? Am I the person best qualified to make him happy—?—Alas Ellen my Conscience answered “no” to both these questions.… I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him—and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband ten to one I shall never have the chance again but n’importe.5

These were all actually fairly radical thoughts for the eldest of three grown daughters to be having; Charlotte may talk about her duties as a wife, but I think she was also fully aware that Henry Nussey could not have made her happy; nor could the social obligations of the marriage he was offering her. Regardless of what Charlotte settled for later in life, she was once as passionate and headstrong as I, and as certain she would require a life-or-death attachment in order to commit herself to matrimony.

It was also to Ellen that Charlotte addressed her thoughts and rationalizations about George Smith in 1851, demonstrating the maturation (or perhaps deflation) of her romantic ideals. Smith was eight years younger than Charlotte, and she felt herself very provincial by comparison:

Were there no vast barrier of age, fortune &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which are now impossible. If men and women married because they like each others’ temper, look, conversation, nature and so on—and if besides, years were more nearly equal—the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance—but other reasons regulate matrimony—reasons of convenience, of connection., of money.⁶

I think she sounds like she was working very hard not to be in love. The dynamic between Ellen and Charlotte is also marked by the disparity in their intellects and interests, which Charlotte never interpreted as a fault of Ellen’s, but as a sign of her own deficiency in what was good and proper for a young woman to value. Charlotte is pretty much my ideal woman, so it sometimes feels bizarre to me that she should look up to Ellen so ardently. Then I remember, it probably looked to Charlotte like Ellen was doing everything right, and was happy doing it. Ellen wasn’t chafing at the hand life had dealt her. She didn’t need to escape from reality for hours at a time to scribble secret stories. Ellen had brothers who were not drunk and disorderly, who could help support her if need be. She had access to a more sustained education, and she never had to go to work. She probably got bored, truth be told, but felt free enough to travel occasionally among the relations that lived nearby. While it’s possible she was being disingenuous, I get the sense that Charlotte really thought her own ambition and creative energy made her deficient, or even broken. Charlotte felt so exactly like I felt, and still feel, if I’m honest—as though everyone else found it easy to be who they were supposed to be.

Ellen is the source of the vast majority of Charlotte’s surviving letters, despite explicitly promising Nicholls she’d destroy them. She became the main custodian of Charlotte’s legacy, and she talked about her famous friend to anyone who would listen until she died at the ripe age of eighty. Friendship, like love, is a skill that has to be practiced, and the lesson of Charlotte’s staunch loyalty to Ellen is that the effort is worth it. So figure out who the Ellen in your life is, and try to stay on good terms.

THERE’S a certain temptation to leap straight from getting engaged to being married, skimming over the messy, lonely year and a half in between. I could just tell you that eventually, I wrote us into Jane Eyre, and not bother to spell out how. But that wouldn’t be true. He wouldn’t be him, and I wouldn’t be me. This would have been a whole different story.

As a young girl I dreamed more about getting into Narnia than walking down the aisle; I wanted a good marriage, not a perfect wedding. Eric’s proposal had been emotional and spontaneous—maybe a little too spontaneous. He still had some deep-seated reservations about actually getting married, it turned out. He never wanted to talk about it—and not in that cliché “men never plan weddings, they just show up” way. He didn’t want to exchange a single word on the subject—not to figure out when, or where, or who to invite. Not to write a ceremony, not to plan a menu, not to make a single decision. I hadn’t expected putting together a small, laid-back ceremony would remind me quite so much of pulling teeth. I could have written off Eric’s reluctance as typical late-thirties commitment-phobia, but whenever I offered him an out—we could just keep living together, we could go to City Hall, we could elope somewhere else, and believe me, breaking up was still an option—he’d vehemently insist that his hesitance wasn’t a reflection of his feelings for me, but a knee-jerk reaction to everything matrimonial.

“Maybe we can suss out what marriage means to us, outside of what it means to everyone else,” I attempted. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he replied. “I just proposed because you clearly wanted me to.” He apologized, but that sting lingered. Every time I tried to dig deeper I just found another layer of the wall he was building. Drafting our vows—an element that could be entirely reflective of us and what we wanted—left Eric literally curled up on the couch in the fetal position while I took the dog for a walk and bawled. The social script around weddings is not helpful in moments like this. Either everything’s a red flag and you should run, or it’s all standard pre-wedding jitters, and nothing to take seriously. I felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you wake up in a bull-fighting arena waving a white ball gown you never wanted in the first place, and have to fight your way out clutching a bouquet and glowing radiantly.

To make matters worse, my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier that year. For months, as my mom prepared for treatments and surgery and recovery, an alarm was going off in my head—“Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom.” It only subsided when I set an actual alarm to remind me to check in every other day. In Shirley, the daughter gets sick and the mother provides the magic cure, but I wanted to be the one who provided exactly what my mother needed. We’d never had that dynamic before, but suddenly there was an urgency to find it. The anthology launch party that marked the unofficial end of graduate school fell on the same day her chemo started—I can see the tension in our faces in those pictures, the last ones in which my mom had her own hair that we took for a long time. We sat in a midtown restaurant and looked at wig catalogues like everything was normal. I collapsed into Eric’s arms afterward.

In addition to the shelter of her ferocious love, I also grew up under my mother’s fiercely critical eye. I think she imagined that by making me aware of my faults—my too-loud laugh, a flash of fleshy stomach between my shirt hem and my waistband, my appetite, my affectations—she would enable me to avoid the judgment of outsiders. But by the time my mother realized I was pudgy, awkward, and loud, I already knew. The world makes sure you know. Years later, she is so proud of me that she is in persistent denial I could ever have been unhappy or felt unlovable. She would do anything for me, if I called her in a panic. She once drove eight hours to hear me read for fifteen minutes. During this cancer year, I tried to make sure all of the baggage we carry between us stayed strapped in the trunk—I didn’t fight the battles I would usually fight or keep the distance I often keep. I felt vacant and weepy a lot. I couldn’t write much; when I did, my feelings about my mom seeped into everything.

I made my presence known any way I could. I came to visit and brought movies to watch on my laptop during chemo appointments. I tried to be at her disposal, helping around the house, playing whatever she wanted on the piano, and singing without worrying about how I actually sounded. When she scheduled a lumpectomy, I met the family in Baltimore, and did what she would do, which was stock the hotel room with candy and magazines and lotion and tissues and place the room service orders afterward. I texted the extended family with updates. I held her wedding and engagement rings while they wheeled her in for surgery. Later, I was the one who stepped forward when the doctor asked who would help with her drains. Despite a lifetime of squeamishness, I didn’t faint when it came time to empty them into beakers and measure the contents.^*

If this was even one one-thousandth of what Charlotte Brontë went through as she faced the illness and death of her brother and sisters, I am in awe that Shirley was ever finished, that she was able to even conceive of Villette. Throughout my mother’s year of treatment I clung to Eric, to my books, and as I hadn’t done since I was a little girl, to my mother herself. It was like a trade-off—my hard-won independence in exchange for the assurance that I was doing everything I could to make sure she knew I loved her.

Naturally she wanted to help plan the wedding, but despite her proud track record of feminist nonconformity, she turned out to have a number of traditional ideas. Every alternative element that appealed to me—a private ceremony, a small dinner with family and friends afterward, a colorful tea-length dress, no bridal shower of any kind—appalled her. She couldn’t understand why I would want to go off and get married by myself (even though she and my father eloped); I couldn’t believe she thought I should be surrounded by a large group of people during an intimate moment, no matter what’s “traditional.” Every “mother-daughter moment” that TLC would have me believe was an essential part of being a bride ended in tears; I felt unheard and unseen, she felt unappreciated and excluded.

Eric took my distress as a sign that I would regret not having the big wedding she wanted, instead of a sign I needed his support to stand firm. He didn’t believe me when I insisted that eloping was what I wanted, and he withdrew into his own thoughts and feelings. He became less thoughtful and spontaneous, and spent most evenings at his desk in the living room. Some of this was normal “settling down.” It can’t be all roses and declarations of love under the full moon. At a certain point you have to get work done and clean house and be regular people. But I didn’t realize just how abandoned I was feeling until about two weeks before we were supposed to elope. After much coaxing and many roundabout approaches, we had planned a small ceremony in Maine, to be followed a few weeks later by an intimate family dinner in New York.

Eric’s twin brother Jason’s wife went into labor with their first baby on a Monday morning; Eric called me to tell me the good news; I congratulated him, texted Jason to say I was thrilled, and got on the train back uptown. Back in Inwood, my phone revived as I stepped into the elevator, and I picked up expecting to hear an excited uncle’s voice. Instead, the man on the other end bore almost no resemblance to the Eric I thought I knew so well.

He was confused about what train to take to Long Island, but rather than consult a map, ask someone employed by the MTA, or just take a breath and wait for the next train, he was calling to demand I get to a computer and help him figure out what to do. Startled by his urgency, I dropped the dog’s leash, got my computer open, and tried to find the hospital’s address so I could give him directions. In the back of my mind, I was wondering why he hadn’t just done this himself on the phone that he was currently yelling into, which contained the entire Internet. In the few seconds it took for my computer to boot up, Eric’s anxiety brewed into a state of agitation I had never seen before, at least not directed at me. It would later turn out he was actually crumpling under the weight of the convergence of his thirty-ninth birthday, our impending wedding, and the idea that since his brother was having a baby, it meant we had to have one and his life was over. Our already frantic conversation broke down into inarticulate and almost menacing pieces as his panic became my panic until he finally snapped, this is useless, thanks for nothing, why did I even bother, and hung up. In tears, I texted him the name of the train stop that had at last appeared on my browser, and the name of the train he should take to get to it. “Are you screwing with me?” he texted back. It took the better part of an afternoon to even realize why I was so shaken.

Nobody had yelled at me like that since I was a child—maybe since my dad had discovered I’d snuck out of the house and gone to visit the neighbors, worrying my then-pregnant mom. He’d strong-armed me into my room, tossed me on my bed, and hissed in my face. There had been other explosions over the years, the kind that steamroll any response until the only possible reaction is hysterical crying. I had learned to marshal my anger, turn it into reason, present it like a closing argument instead of an instinctive reaction. Hearing Eric on full blast triggered helplessness and fear I never thought I’d feel again. I was due at work shortly afterward, so I cried on the floor of the shower until it was time to pull myself together. Once I got on the train I buried my face in a book and tried to stop shaking; then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

It was my college friend C.J.! We had always flirted but never dated, despite the shared love of jazz and the Marvel Universe that had kept our friendship warm. He was supposed to be in Israel, but some quirk of fate had put him on that train, on that day, to give me a big hug and ask why I looked like I had seen the end of the world. I gave him a slightly defensive version of the truth, and without taking sides or passing judgment, he managed to acknowledge that people lose tempers, and I also had every right to be hurt. He let me vent a little while longer, and then we pulled in at my stop. “Being happy is a choice,” he said to me, squeezing my hand. “I know you’ll know what to do.” It was like a Jane Jane Jane moment, calling me back to myself.

The Incident, as I think of it now, brought to light what a fight-or-flight mode Eric had been in since well before we got engaged. Maybe I’d been walking on eggshells since I’d first tentatively begun to bring up marriage, a year before. Maybe since my building in Brooklyn had been put on the market and we talked about moving in together. Maybe since his dad died. Maybe if Eric had been more communicative under duress it wouldn’t have happened; maybe if I had been more experienced in relationships or less burdened by childhood baggage, I wouldn’t have been so rattled. But I was rattled, and scared, and eventually angry. I’d watched my mom navigate the emotional minefield of being married to someone who screamed during arguments—she and my dad had made it work, but it was not what I wanted.

I talked to friends, I talked to counselors, I tried, of course, to talk to Eric himself. The first day, he offered me a brisk apology, and when I was still upset he acknowledged he’d been wrong to lose his temper. He didn’t seem to see the crack in our foundation. The next night, armed with the validation of people with more relationship experience, I tried again. It was an uphill battle in the pouring rain. It was apparently very important to him to be in a relationship that allowed him to absolutely lose his shit at the woman he loved, without consequences. I curled up in a ball, clutching Roxy, who was panting with worry, and tried to make sense of it.

Eric had always had tempestuous relationships before, and thought the occasional explosion was normal. The fact that we’d never had a big fight in nearly three years of dating was an anomaly in his eyes, not an ideal. True, I had never gone through significant ups and downs with another person, but I had endured my share of confrontations. There had to be a better way to handle them than abandoning all veneers of civility just to get to the Long Island Medical Center. Besides, my sensitivity was something I hoped he’d recognize and want to protect, not something to brush aside.

“I can’t be with someone who screams at me,” I finally said, in a moment of courage.

“Then I guess I have a lot of thinking to do,” Eric said with contempt, before going to sleep on the couch. When I woke up the next morning, after he had already left for work, it was time to map out my exit strategy. I made an appointment to see a nearby apartment share, emailed movers for a quote, and made plans to crash with Kate in the meantime. The only thing that calmed my nerves was faith in my own competency—if I needed to go, I could go, and it would be okay. Jane Eyre 101.

Before leaving for work myself, I packed up the essentials. A few days of clothing, toiletries, food and toys for the dog, my laptop, the teddy bear that had accompanied me around the world, and the battered copy of Jane Eyre that had started this whole thing. My plan was to go to work, come home after my shift to break the news to Eric, and then head to sanctuary in Brooklyn.

When I walked in, he was at his desk in the corner, quiet but still defiant. I think he expected to go for round three. He thought the fact that I didn’t want to live without him would conquer my sense of self-preservation. He had reckoned without the combined power of the Brontës. I quietly explained that I didn’t want to be with someone who tried to diminish my joy in what I loved, who didn’t want to protect me where I was vulnerable. Because if I can’t go to my partner with my pain, my fears, who can I go to? I wasn’t going to try to talk him into being someone he wasn’t. I didn’t have the answers. I couldn’t script my way out of this.

There was a moment of silence.

“So what now?” he said.

A long pause. And then, a moment of truth.

“I think I have to go,” I said.

He could have said nothing, and let us shake apart. Or tried to thunder me into staying, which is what Rochester would actually have done. Instead, something remarkable happened. Eric left his desk and joined me on the couch.

He took my hand, and quietly said, “Please, don’t go.”

In the next few hours, I watched him voluntarily demolish all the walls he’d bricked around himself. I didn’t have to say much; he was finally ready to talk. He still didn’t know why he was so tangled up about marriage, but he knew full well he’d been an ass—and not just that week, but for months, he’d spent the entire time fending me off as I worked to knit our lives together. He’d been scared and stubborn and arrogant, and he apologized wholeheartedly.

The next few days felt wrapped in cotton—we were each gentle and ginger. I felt bruised; he knew how thin the ice was. We dismantled the tiny wedding, and since all our tickets were nonrefundable, I took two of my closest friends to Maine for a strange weekend of spa treatments and restaurant reservations in the shadow of our phantom nuptials (which I do not recommend). The lock we’d placed on the dock of Old Port was gone—whether it had spontaneously cracked like the Dark Crystal or was removed by the board of tourism to make room for the next batch, I couldn’t be sure.

Every day since, I’ve looked for Eric’s concerted efforts to be open, to listen and to reach out to me—the way he did when I fell for him, while we worked side by side. For months after we decided to stay together, I was defensive at the slightest conflict. I am still impatient, always racing ahead, prone to great expectations, and hating to have them thwarted. But I stand up for myself more consistently in matters large and small, whether Eric likes it or not. Eric is still more patient and more cautious than I am, still goofy and sweet in turns. Our solid foundation, six years of friendship, is always there when we reach for it. We jockey for independence and seek out moments of collaboration, usually in good humor. We have to remember to be romantic, and to get away from the city together as often as we can. I always thought “relationships take work” was a cliché that referred to making decisions or compromising on big choices like furniture or apartments. Now I know it’s a daily effort to be attentive, to fight the urge to tune out, to apologize for hurt feelings even though you said exactly what you meant, to coordinate making dinner or walking the dog without sighing in exasperation because we just did this a day ago. It’s just what I hoped for, when we both work at it, and plenty I didn’t expect. As Charlotte herself said of matrimony, “it tends to draw you out of, and away from yourself.”7

WHEN Jane and Rochester finally got married (and let’s not forget their first wedding attempt was a way bigger disaster than ours), they just slipped down to their local church. Afterward, Jane casually informed the household servants they’d been married. “Huh,” they said. Life went on. It was not a fairy tale after all—two people met on a windswept road and decided to keep walking it together.

During the last snow of winter on the first day of spring, Eric and I stood in front of a Justice of the Peace at City Hall—or rather the Marriage Bureau at a federal building a block away. Out front, where enterprising New Yorkers will sell you everything from wedding rings to photography services, stand up as your witness or polish your shoes, I bought pale pink roses for Sally, who was our witness, photographer, and maid of honor all in one; I chose hot pink roses for myself, and a white one for Eric’s lapel. I wore a silver bracelet from my mother, blue glass earrings from my Aunt Bobbie, purple ballet flats Sally had brought for me to borrow, and a tea-length black dress.

The whole ceremony took two and a half minutes. We didn’t anticipate we’d actually get to say the vows we’d written, so when the officiant asked Eric, “Do you have anything to say to Miranda?” and paused expectantly, we had to wing it. Eric said this was the happiest day of his life. When it was my turn, I went blank, and truthfully said it meant a lot that we’d even made it there that day. When we were first dating, I used to hold my breath before saying “I love you,” which Eric said felt like a tiny leap of faith, every time. We agreed to make that leap together, as often as we could. The officiant almost forgot to have me slip Eric’s ring onto his finger.

We called my parents to tell them the news. My dad welcomed Eric to the family and put us on speakerphone, my brother gloated that he’d known about it the whole time, and my mother icily congratulated us from across the room. A few weeks later, we made plans to go down to Virginia for a visit—what the Victorians would have called a bridal tour. Mom began planning a small gathering for her best friends that immediately became a formal dinner at a nearby historic house, decorated with large pictures of Eric and me, and featuring a suspiciously white three-tiered cake. It was not a wedding, but it was all the proof my mother needed that had she been allowed to throw me one, it would have been a tremendous success. I do think part of my resistance to a big wedding was a lingering uncertainty that anyone would care to attend, and it was wonderful of my mom to show me that I needn’t have worried. It was a beautiful party full of family and friends who’ve known me practically all of my life. I have no regrets—except to wish I’d brought home more of the cake.

WHEN Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls were quietly married in 1854, his profession on the marriage license was “clerk”; hers was “spinster.” Ellen was fairly antagonistic toward Nicholls, but when Charlotte finally walked down the aisle, Ellen helped her with her bonnet and Miss Wooler gave her away.

Charlotte approached the married chapter of her life with independence and low expectations. Her letters reflect respect, compassion, and appreciation for her husband, if not passion or adoration: “I make no grand discoveries—but I occasionally come on a quiet little nook of character which excites esteem—He is always reliable, truthful, faithful, affectionate; a little unbending perhaps—but still persuadable—and open to kind influence. A man never indeed to be driven—but who may be led.”8 Her higher estimation of Arthur began when she accompanied him to his hometown in Ireland on their honeymoon. Seeing Nicholls through the eyes of his family and his neighbors helped her reexamine his strengths; he was greeted enthusiastically and praised highly wherever they went together. I recall the first time I saw Eric and his brothers all together with their families—particularly the way he played with his nephews and niece. Let’s just say it was not ineffectual that even on the day of The Incident, I received a picture of him holding a newborn.

Like Gaskell, who said, “I like his having known… all she has gone through… and being no person who has just fancied himself in love with her because he was dazzled by her genius,” I do appreciate that Arthur knew Charlotte as a writer—and probably loved her well before he knew about her literary fame.⁹ After all those years of hiding her literary life from Ellen, it must have been marvelous for Charlotte to know that the man who loved her also loved her work. Talking with Eric about my writing has occasionally been more fraught than discussing how long to stay at either family’s Thanksgiving.

An unfortunate (but not unexpected) consequence of Charlotte becoming Mrs. Nicholls was that his clergy duties kept her from writing. Most of the surviving letters written during her marriage feature some form of “Arthur is calling me, I must go,” or, “My time is not my own now; Somebody else wants a good portion of it—and says we must do so and so. We do ‘so and so’ accordingly, and it generally seems the right thing—only I sometimes wish that I could have written the letter as well as taken the walk.”10 If they had lived longer together, I imagine Charlotte would have reclaimed her time eventually. Even without having kids, truly functioning as part of a couple is tricky, for a variety of reasons. My writing thrives when I have several weeks at a time to log four- or five-hour shifts without distractions, until the dog’s persistence drags me out into the world to blink at the sun and stretch. If Eric and I get serious about having kids, I know the balancing act will get even more precarious. I’m looking forward to it anyway. Most of the time.

As if it wasn’t enough for Arthur to co-opt Charlotte’s evenings, he also interfered in her correspondence, particularly with Ellen; Charlotte quoted him as saying “such letters as mine never ought to be kept—they are dangerous as lucifer matches.”¹¹ He even exacted a pledge that Ellen would burn Charlotte’s letters, threatening to censor the content if she refused! Instead of giving him a Shirley Keeldar–style dressing down on the rights of women correspondents, Charlotte found it amusing, and said, “It is a man’s mode of viewing correspondence—Men’s letters are proverbially uninteresting and uncommunicative—I never quite knew before why they made them so.… As to my own notes I never thought of attaching importance to them, or considering their fate—till Arthur seemed to reflect on both so seriously.”¹² This is the Victorian equivalent of the “you’re not going to tweet that, are you?” conversation we have at our house regularly before I post something ridiculous Eric has said online. Maybe Arthur’s tone was lighter than comes across in Charlotte’s letters, or maybe she fully intended to write whatever she wanted regardless, but her laugh-it-off reaction seems odd. Arthur’s attitude is at best patronizing and at worst heretical, at least in the eyes of this fan, who treasures her ability to snoop in Charlotte’s private correspondence. I have to acknowledge he was also right to be cautious; neither of them could have imagined how many people would read Charlotte’s letters in the next two hundred years.

The fact is, I do not think I like Arthur Nicholls at all, even though he was clearly a comfort to Charlotte as her father’s health failed, and even more so as her first trimester of pregnancy left her seriously ill. Nicholls obviously loved Charlotte very much. The house in Ireland where he retreated after Patrick Brontë’s death, which he later shared with his second wife, was full of Charlotte’s drawings, her letters, her books, and even those precious Young Men’s Magazines. Many of the Brontëana collections around the world take their provenance from the auctions of the Nicholls estate.

But first of all, he seems like a bore. Second, his handling of Charlotte’s legacy was exasperating—when he and Patrick hand-selected Elizabeth Gaskell for Charlotte’s biography, they guaranteed that Charlotte’s reputation as a shy, sheltered girl who grew into a weak and sickly woman would endure for decades. Nicholls folded the Branwell portrait in quarters and put it on a shelf, and worse yet, agreed to publish The Professor without significant revisions after Charlotte’s death. Even Charlotte knew The Professor was beyond redemption! And it is! Unless maybe I just need to read it again.

I’m frustrated with Charlotte, too—I don’t know how to reconcile the wild, romantic young woman, whose Jane Eyre reached into my heart and switched the light on, with the practical thirty-nine-year-old bride who just didn’t want to be alone anymore. I decided being with Eric was worth the price of his imperfections and that I could trust him to accept mine—but when it came down to it, I would have managed being alone again just fine. Then again, who am I to judge what Charlotte determined would suit her best as she got older? At least she picked a husband she could tease.

I suppose it makes me angry that Charlotte spent the last two years of her life on a man who kept her from her work—whose career she knew would keep her too busy to write, and whom she didn’t even love, not the way she knew love could be. In her final illness, she wrote to Ellen Nussey, “I want to give you an assurance which I know will comfort you—and that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support—the best earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience never fails and it is tried by sad days and broken nights.”13 That is some consolation. After her death, Nicholls fulfilled his promise to continue caring for Patrick Brontë until his death at the age of eighty-four—he outlived the last of his children by six years.

Charlotte Brontë Nicholls died on March 31, 1855, of “phthisis” associated with tuberculosis. It was exacerbated by hyperemesis gravidarum, the excessive pregnancy-related vomiting and dehydration lately suffered by the Duchess of Cambridge during both of her pregnancies. We can be reasonably sure Charlotte knew she was expecting, because she wrote to Ellen asking about a mutual friend’s pregnancy symptoms; she found the similarities reassuring, but in the end her illness was much worse.

It will have to be enough that Charlotte got what she wanted. It doesn’t matter that it’s not what I wanted for her.

THERE are moments you don’t see in literature when authors pan forward ten and twenty years—the dynamic contractions and expansions that mark the days and weeks and months of a life together. It’s odd to have to remind myself that in my marriage, the only behavior I can successfully modify is my own. I’m constantly squirreling away parts of myself that don’t fit the “couple” version of me. Later I rediscover the art supplies, the romance novels, the Bollywood DVDs, the old radio shows, the video games, and realize how much I missed whatever it is I instinctively hid. Eric doesn’t ask me to set these things aside—it wouldn’t even occur to him, any more than he’d think to conceal parts of himself. No, I hide these things voluntarily, and then consider myself bereft.

I don’t ever want our marriage to become a dilapidated mansion with rooms boarded up or curtains drawn, whole wings abandoned while we crowd into the kitchen to step on one another’s toes, or worse, stomp out into the night. I want this marriage, our marriage, to be a much kinder ending than a shipwreck. And so far, it is. We have low moments, when we find unexpected corners that jab or rough spots that chafe. I measure our lives with my eyes on the minute hand, while he marks leisurely hours and feels content instead of anxious. I am learning it’s okay to be mad; he’s learning it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s difficult, but I make myself turn toward him to ask for what I need, again and again if necessary. I try to remember he likes it when we go to the store together, that his feelings get hurt sometimes too. I count myself lucky that Eric is a decided romantic, better at big gestures than anyone I’ve ever known. I never doubt that he is glad we got married.

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, we returned to the island in Maine where we got engaged. We took the same ferry, visited the same restaurants, and laid the ghost of the canceled elopement to rest. One evening we walked over to the rocky beach where Leslie got married. On the way, we talked through that unpleasant year. It felt like releasing a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I filled my lungs all the way up for the first time in ages. After everything, I would still choose Eric. I do, in fact, every day. Almost every day. By the end of the day, for sure.

Sometimes I mourn that starry-eyed girl who had such faith that marriage would mean she felt adored and beloved forever; that’s a fairy tale nobody could have provided. But I don’t feel sad for too long. Instead of a perfect happy ending, or even her favorite weird ones, she has found a partnership worthy of Shirley, a healthy sprinkling of caution from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and a M. Paul Emanuel of her very own. That shining spark of Jane Eyre’s passion has survived too, and she prizes it all the more for nearly having lost it.

ONE of Charlotte’s final relationship lessons for me is a pragmatic one: when she arrived home after their honeymoon, she wrote to Ellen, “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” and signed it “Yours faithfully C Bron Nicholls.”14 I love that. It’s like Charlotte’s pen didn’t want her to forget who she was.

I am about to run out of road, so to speak, on the Brontë life map. It does feel perilous, losing this line along which I’ve paced my steps so far. It also offers a great many possibilities. If I start a new job, if I relocate for my career, if I have kids, I’ll be telling stories Charlotte never got to tell.

Though she will never write another book, and found leading a classroom to be an ordeal rather than a vocation, Charlotte is still a born teacher. After I finished Charlotte’s letters, I began to notice her influence in my life in subtle ways. I use lessons I’ve learned reading and writing about the Brontës in the hope of inspiring my students the way the Brontës inspire me. I have started to appreciate my imperfect friendships differently; I write to my friends more often—a quick check-in message, a “saw this and thought of you” email. I even pick up the phone occasionally to leave Sally long, rambling voicemails. I spearheaded a writing retreat for my grad-school friends, and we have plans to make it a semiannual event. I make an effort to return holiday cards and inquire after family members. I call my parents regularly and try to be as nice to my brother as he is to me. I may not have a large group of people in my constellation, but the ones I do have are loyal, kind, and funny, and I value them immensely.

I finished the last of Charlotte’s letters thinking, this is it. This is all there is.

But there was still one place left.