The Mirror: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him. Francine Prose

      The Mirror

      Francine Prose

A short story from the collection

       Copyright

      Published by The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

      Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016

      The Mirror © Francine Prose 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.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008150594

      Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173401

      Version: 2016-03-09

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Tracy Chevalier

The Mirror – Francine Prose

       Author Note

       A Note on Charlotte Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY TRACY CHEVALIER

      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

       THE MIRROR

       FRANCINE PROSE

      READER, I MARRIED HIM.

      It turned out the sounds I heard coming from the attic weren’t the screams of Mr Rochester’s mad wife Bertha. It wasn’t the wife who burned to death in the fire that destroyed Thornfield Hall and blinded my future husband when he tried to save her.

      After we’d first got engaged, he’d had to admit that he was already married, and we’d broken off our engagement. He’d asked me to run away with him anyway. Naturally, I’d refused.

      But later, after we were properly married, he insisted that it hadn’t happened that way. It turned out there had been no wife. It turned out that it had been a parrot, screaming in the attic. The parrot had belonged to his wife. She had got it in the islands, where she had also contracted the tropical fever that killed her. She’d died long before I came to work for him as a governess. That was never Bertha, in the attic.

      Mr Rochester couldn’t bring himself to get rid of the parrot. He had the servants take care of it, because his wife Bertha had loved it, and because it was pretty. But its cries drove the whole household mad, so they shut it up in the attic. He was sad the parrot died in the fire – but no one said the parrot had set the fire, the way they said his wife did.