Reader, I Married Him: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him. Susan Hill
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Reader, I Married Him
Susan Hill
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
Reader, I Married Him © Susan Hill 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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173395
Version: 2016-03-09
Contents
Reader, I Married Him – Susan Hill
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
THERE WAS NOTHING THEY did not say about me, no name I wasn’t called. I was abused to my face and behind my back.
But there was truth among the lies. They said I was ambitious, hard and ruthless and would stop at nothing to get what I wanted.
They did not know what that was, of course. How could they? They thought it was simply the King, and the title, because they could never have understood my desperate need to acquire something they had always had and taken for granted, as their birthright. And that was security. Financial. Social. Domestic. Marital. Security was all I ever longed and struggled and schemed for, because since very early and forgotten childhood, I had never had it, and my deepest, my driving fear through it all was that I never would.
Security.
Did I achieve it?
If I did, it was through men, not through my own effort. I realise now that it was always an illusion. Even after that final, dangerous, all-or-nothing throw of the dice, even when I should have felt safe at last and overwhelmingly secure, I knew at heart that I was not. Loser had lost all.
But I am running ahead. I always run ahead now.
Poverty begot the insecurity, of course, and shame came out of it all. As I grew out of childhood, which does not understand any of this, I became aware that my father was dead and now we were poor. Genteel poverty is the worst of all, because of the contrast. My mother had aspirations. She had some small talents. She could not see herself as poor. But she had to do something about it, use the small talents, and so she embroidered things, modest little nothings, cushion covers and tray cloths, and sold them at a Women’s Exchange Shop. They made very little money. But if there is nothing truly shameful about doing business with a talent for something as genteel as embroidery, my mother’s next attempt to make frayed ends meet was not only a financial disaster, it was a social one. My face burns, even after all these years, when I remember. We had moved into a house converted into apartments and my mother sent around cards, asking the other tenants to dine – and pay for the pleasure. Few came, the cost of the food was more than they paid. We