A Girl Walks Into a Book

A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women's Work
Miranda K. Pennington (Seal Press, 2017)

     Even though my own acquaintance with the works of the Brontë sisters is slight, and unlikely to get better, reading about Miranda Pennington reading them is delightful. A Girl Walks Into a Book is a fine example of a genre I love: it combines historical insights about the lives of the authors with plot summaries and critiques of the books, and a memoir of Pennington's life as she encounters and rereads them. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Wuthering Heights (Emily) do not lose their strangeness and individuality under Pennington's scrutiny, yet she can take some lessons from them for twenty-first century life. 
 
     Not that the lessons come easily: "I do wish I could have filed away the most urgent lesson of Wuthering Heights: be honest with yourself if the person you want to marry is still obviously entangled with someone else." The romantic adventures Pennington shares call up in me a certain horrified fascination–how can so many bad choices come to a good end? But really, it's all about growth. When her father gave Jane Eyre to the absurdly bookish grade-schooler, he threw her a lifeline that would support her for decades. "At school,...I felt like a freak, awkward, dorky, and out of place, always spoiling for a fight. But inside, in the pages of Jane Eyre, I found sanctuary. And even when something unpleasant happened, I consoled myself that it gave me something else in common with Jane."

      Just as much to the point, as the book progresses, she has something in common with Charlotte Brontë. Both face the problem of supporting themselves in a world that is not exactly panting for what they have to say. Charlotte's early biographers contributed to myth-making that emphasized how far from the centers of culture she lived, and depicted an overnight success. As usual, that just means that all the work that led up to it fades into the shadows. The Brontë children wrote stories and created worlds among themselves; when Charlotte sent her publishers detailed instructions about the design of her books, she was not entirely new to the issues at hand, having made her own small books of her family's stories as a teenager.

     After Charlotte, Pennington admires the under-sung Anne Brontë. Her Agnes Grey includes little of the wildness of her sisters' better known work; its plot, about a governess who eventually marries a clergyman, is downright conventional. But the voice of Agnes, and her sharp views of her sometimes feckless employers, shows how much Anne was learning in her own situations, where she must have felt like the proverbial fly on the wall. Pennington says, "Truth in fiction never makes it weaker, but anchors it, unlike lying in non-fiction, which is like robbing a tree of its roots."

     Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's entry in the three-headed publishing sensation that Charlotte had begun, brings out Pennington's witty side. Of the second generation produced by Cathy and Heathcliff, she says, "They live as happily ever after as a pair of borderline inbred teenagers with seriously dysfunctional parents and an alarmingly small social circle could be expected to." And this lovely bit: "Retelling it all is Nelly Dean, a maidservant with an impeccable memory and the rare ability to survive for the duration of the book."

     The same might be said of the Brontës themselves, who originally numbered six. Their mother died when they were small, and her sister moved in to help raise them. The oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were mortally sickened by unhealthy conditions at the school they attended, dying a few months apart. The sole brother, Branwell, was perhaps an even greater tragedy: he was crushed by the pressure of not finding his way in the world, with three unmarried sisters sure to fall to his care. When he came home after losing a tutoring job, he went downhill by way of alcohol and opium to his death. Charlotte is the only one who survives to marry, a Mr. Nicholls, whose main attraction may have been that he was a clerical associate of her father's. Indeed, he remained in residence with Mr. Brontë after Charlotte died in turn. 
 
     But she certainly made a mark in the world, both in her own work and in supporting and promoting her sisters'. Though Pennington is, in a way, a tugboat alongside the Queen Mary, the smaller vessel has an important function. I have a much better idea of what I might like to sample of the various film and television adaptations, the biographical material, and, conceivably, the novels themselves. You never know.