It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him. Jane Gardam
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It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies
Jane Gardam
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
It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies © Jane Gardam 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: 9780008173371
Version: 2016-03-09
Contents
It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies – Jane Gardam
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
MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Gertrude, was born in the lonely seaside village on the northeast coast of England where most of her family had been born, worked, idled and died since the days when, so it was said, bad girls stole away at night from low parts of the town around Fisherman’s Square to lie with the seals under the darkness of Hunt Cliff after sunset.
Back then there was still talk of babies born with webbed feet and whiskers, though nobody had ever seen one. My grandmother, Gertrude, did once strike us all dumb by saying that her toes tended to stick together and were long as flippers if she did not curl them up. Looks were exchanged. When I knew Granny she was old but she did have some whiskers which she used to remove one by one with silver sugar-tongs. I have inherited the sugar-tongs, though not the toes and whiskers.
Once, I told my best friend at school about the seals. It was when we were paddling around in the pools in the cliff’s shadow. The shadows were sometimes dappled rather in the shape of seals at rest and I said, “My granny got a baby down here, but it died,” and Mary said, “Where d’you get that sort of fancy from?” and I said, “They go honk-honk together and fling about and later there’s a baby. With flippers. Someone said.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ask our maid,” I said. “And there’s a bit of shawl at home made of seal-cloth. They made them up to cover the faces of the babies if they died. Most of them did. There was one baby died in our family, called Bertie.”
“Did he have flippers?”
“They never said.”
I used to imagine my solemn and ever-bewildered grandmother (she could be bewildered by a boiled egg) going honk-honk at the sea’s edge, the white lacy water running, and then just sitting for long, long hours at home. Just sitting. She and her two busy sisters.
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