My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2)(3)
“She thinks she’s intelligent, anyway.” Jane smirked.
Charlotte lowered her glasses. “I thought you said she wasn’t anyone in particular.”
“Oh, she’s not,” Jane said quickly. “You know how it is. When I paint people they sometimes come to life in my mind.”
Charlotte nodded. “The person who possesses the creative gift owns something of which she is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.”
Jane didn’t reply. Charlotte lifted her glasses to look at her. Jane was staring off at nothing. Again.
“You’re not leaving Lowood, are you?” Charlotte asked. “Are you going to be a governess?” (That was really the only viable career choice for girls at Lowood: teaching. You could become a village schoolmistress, or an instructor at some institution like Lowood, which is what Jane had done, or a governess in some wealthy household. Being a governess was really the best any of them could hope for.)
Jane glanced at her feet. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I was just . . . imagining another life.”
“I imagine leaving Lowood all the time,” Charlotte said. “I’d leave tomorrow if the opportunity presented itself.”
But now Jane was shaking her head. “I don’t wish to leave Lowood. That’s why I stayed on, after I graduated. I can’t leave.”
“Why ever not?”
“This place is my home, and my . . . friends are here.”
Charlotte was beyond flattered. She’d had no idea that Jane had stayed at Lowood simply because she hadn’t wished the two of them to be separated. Charlotte was, as far as she could tell, Jane’s only friend, thanks to Mr. Brocklehurst. (Charlotte had never given a fig to what Mr. Brocklehurst had dictated concerning Jane.) Friendship was indeed the most valuable of possessions, especially for a girl like Jane, who lacked any family to speak of. (Charlotte was the middle child of six—which she counted as both a blessing and a curse.)
“Well, I think you should go, if you can,” Charlotte said gallantly. “I would miss you, of course, but you’re a painter. Who knows what beautiful things there are to behold outside of this dreary location? New landscapes. New people.” She smiled mischievously. “And . . . boys.”
Jane’s cheeks colored. “Boys,” she murmured to herself. “Yes.”
Both girls were quiet, imagining the boys of the world. Then they sighed a very yearning type of sigh.
This preoccupation with boys might seem a little silly to you, dear reader, but remember that this is England in 1834 (think before Charles Dickens, after Jane Austen). Women at this time were taught that the best thing that could ever possibly happen to a girl was to be married. To a wealthy man, preferably. And it was really good luck if you could snag someone attractive, or with some kind of amusing talent, or who owned a nice dog. But all that truly mattered was landing a man—really, any man would do. Charlotte and Jane had few prospects in this department (see the above description of them being poor, plain, obscure, and little), but they could still imagine themselves swept off their feet by handsome strangers who would look past their poverty and their plainness and see something worthy of love.
It was Jane who broke the spell first. She turned back to her painting. “So. What marvelous story will you write today?”
Charlotte shook the idea of boys out of her brain and took a seat on the fallen log she always perched on. “Today . . . a murder mystery.”
Jane frowned. “I thought you were writing about the school.”
This was true. Before all of this business with Mr. Brocklehurst, Charlotte had begun writing (drum roll, please) her Very-First-Ever-Attempt-at-a-Novel. Charlotte had always heard that it was best to write what you know . . . and all Charlotte really knew, at this point in her life, was Lowood, so the First Novel had been about life at a school for impoverished girls. If you’d flipped through Charlotte’s notebook, you would have found page after page of her observations of the buildings, the grounds, notes on the history of the school, detailed renderings of the individual teachers and their mannerisms, the girls’ struggles with cold, the Graveyard Disease, and, above all, the abominable porridge.
Consider the following passage from page twenty-seven:
Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess: burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved most slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.
That had all been fine, Charlotte thought, especially that bit about the porridge. But this was supposed to be a NOVEL. There had to be more than just simple observation. There had to be a story. A plot. A level of intrigue.
She was on the right track, she was fairly certain. The main subject of Charlotte’s novel was a peculiar girl named Jane . . . Frere, a plain, penniless orphan who must struggle to survive in the harsh environment of the unforgiving school. And Jane was smart. Resourceful. A bit odd, truth be told, but compelling. Likeable. Charlotte had always felt that Jane was the perfect protagonist for a novel (although she hadn’t told Jane that she had the honor of being immortalized in fiction. She was waiting, she supposed, for the right time for that conversation). So the character was good. The setting was interesting. But the novel itself had been somewhat lacking in excitement.