Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

times be a little high-spirited, but then, what boy was not? As for the girl, well, she was perhaps a little nervous, a little sensitive, and a little highly strung. Of course, both of them were used to the most tender of treatment and were unaccustomed to hearing a harsh word.
    Was this good news? she wondered. She told herself that it would take time to get to know this place. She would try hard to please: she would be diligent; she would win them over, and surely they would see what mental wealth, what moral certainty, she had to offer. She thought of all the books she had read, her French, her talent for painting. She thought these people would gradually see inside her; they would be interested, surely, in the value of her mind.
    She caught a brief glimpse of the master of the house, a blond, ruddy, and energetic-looking man who was coming down the stairs with rapid steps, a riding crop in his hands, a large Newfoundland bounding at his side. He impressed her rather more than the wife. Sticking his crop in his boot and restraining his dog with one hand, he was gracious enough to extend the other to her and welcome her with sincerity and good humor.
    It was only when she realized that the maid was leading her up to the third floor, the servants’ quarters, that the crash came, a rapid descent from a high cliff of expectations. Alone in the room, she looked down through the paned Georgian windows and watched the guests’ carriages arrive. She listened to the sound of the men’s and women’s gay voices as they descended and entered the house. She heard a woman say, “You will not!” followed by a man’s laughter. No servants, these. What had she done to deserve this lonely fate? Why was she destined for nothing but toil and solitude?
    The next morning she rose, hungry and filled anew with expectations. She would show them all what she knew. Had she not read all of Scott, Bunyan, Byron, Milton, the Elizabethans, and even George Sand? Her employers probably had no idea who George Sand was!
    By the end of breakfast, which she took with her two very young charges on the second floor, in the nursery, it came to her that she was to be the nursery governess. She was in charge only of the two youngest children and not the older two. There would be no need for Byron or Scott. She would be obliged to eat upstairs in the nursery-cum-schoolroom on the second floor, with her turbulent charges, or in her own room and not, as she had hoped, with the family or their many guests whom they entertained below in the dining room.
    She sat stiffly at the table, starving but unable to swallow a mouthful of oatmeal all through this first meal, or to enjoy the radiant scene of the park in the May sunshine beyond the three bay windows. It was only thanks to the good-natured Irish housemaid that her charges were kept at the table rather than under it, and the food from flying through the air.
    One hand on her waist, the other holding firmly on to the platter of fried eggs and rashers, the housemaid turned her head and said to the little boy, “Now you stop playing with your porridge or you won’t get any of these nice fresh eggs.” This command, which had consequences, he listened to. Humiliated, hungry, her hands shaking, their governess was obliged to wipe the boy’s smutty nose and shovel his thick porridge into his mouth. She rose again and again to fetch the little girl’s pinafore from the floor.
    “If you don’t behave, I’ll have to tell your Mama,” she said finally, and tucked a napkin around the stout little boy’s thick neck. He looked up at her with his wide face, waved a plump arm in the air, and shouted, “You are a servant and stupid, and she won’t believe you. She will punish you instead!”
    She understood then that these people would never know her, nor the children look up to her. On the contrary. She was simply a necessary commodity, brought in to perform certain services, which she was beginning to suspect