Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

and it is beastly to be seated across from a bluntly handsome fellow when one looks about as captivating as gravel. Had

if the endearments I showered him with, all the languidly falling petals of my shaken tree, were written rather than spoken, so much the better—he could read them over whensoever he liked, shove them in a drawer if he preferred, and my love would have some permanence, the way whispers made in the dead of night do not. I

Swallowing, I placed the cheque in my reticule with the two letters. I did this, reader, because the most idiotic thing that Jane Eyre ever did other than to leave in the first place was to depart without her pearl necklace and half Mr. Rochester’s fortune, which he would gladly have given her. If she had been eaten by a bear upon fleeing penniless into the wilderness, I should have shaken that bear’s paw. “How

You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years—to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you—and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.