Journal

As we’ll see, Shirley is quite a bit worse than that. I want to explore the
slippery relationships between fiction; reality; fiction about reality; and fiction
about fiction. Coming back to Oakwell Hall, and also the fact that Caroline
Helstone was based on Anne Bronte, we could additionally say that we’re
looking at realities which are about fiction.
I was initially interested in the relationships between the author, the characters,
and the reading audience – although I was rapidly to discover that there were
quite a lot of entities which might reasonably be regarded as constituting the
‘authors’ of Shirley; more than one audience; and a bewilderingly large and
disconcerting set of interactions between a whole menagerie of fictional
characters, both upwards to their author and downwards, if you like, to the
reader.
What piqued my interest in Shirley was the bald statement in the middle of
page 1 that ‘something real lies before you’.
Here’s the passage of interest, to set the scene:
If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is
preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you
anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion,
and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them
to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you;
something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work
wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake
themselves thereto. It shall be cold lentils, and vinegar without oil; it
shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs – and no roast lamb.
I looked up ‘real’ in a dictionary and three-volume works of fiction were not
included amongst the list of examples.
Nevertheless, my habits of literalness are deep-seated; and I did try to
accommodate, rather than heed, the warning signs for as long as I could.
Title pages for me are labels; I expect what’s inside the tin to correspond to
what’s on the label; and here was the original title page: a picture of the sea by
Rene Magritte, and a picture of a picture of a sea. Picking up on ‘Tale’, I
assumed I was being invited by the book into an imaginary reality, in much
the same way that a painting operates.
Reading the first few lines of the novel, I was actually feeling more
conservatively relaxed than in Jane Eyre, when the first person Author abruptly
jumped out at me and declared: ‘Reader, I married him’.
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