Jane Eyre has a certain kind of orphan power. A certain kind of magic, charisma, magical powers. And when Mr Rochester first spies her in the woods outside Thornfield Hall, he thinks he sees a sprite, a woodland sprite, a fairy, an elf. Jane Eyre has orphan power. Orphan power. All my books enact a form of orphan power.

a dramatic dynamic between a child and a carer or guardian figure in which the child is usually attached to some sort of literary character. Literary character. A reading life, a writing life with writer and teacher Sally Bailey. I'm interested in characters who carry what I call orphan power. Jane Eyre has orphan power.

As does David Copperfield. As, I think, do I. And in my first literary novel, Girl with Dove, there are characters or characters standing in for me with orphan power. And in order to make myself into an orphan, creatively speaking, I had to send myself away from myself. I had to turn myself into an orphan. Orphan, from the Latin.

Orphanus, meaning parentless child. Meaning one bereft. Meaning one deprived. Meaning a fatherless child. A child whose lineage and genealogy cannot be fully traced. And so there is mystery. There is a mystery surrounding this child. But there was never any need to feel sorry for me because at a very young age,

I had already created an enormous internal family. And that family was largely of Victorian providence. Probably because I grew up in a cold, late Victorian seaside terrace, which I would like to say was a villa. But that wouldn't be true, would it? House it was. But it was also a slum.

Filthy, filthy, decrepit, full of decrepitude, dust and mould and back doors that never closed properly so the draught ran through and carpets with holes we were always trying to cover with ourselves.

But in the worldview adopted by my rather fanciful mother and aunt, that slum was quickly turned into a fantasy ballroom, a palace. And we were, so they seemed to believe, aristocrats. Aristocrats. Grand folk.

Think Cinderella. Think Cinderella in her ball gown, underneath glassy chandeliers, catching the light. Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. Think Wedgwood China on the mantelpiece. I'll have some of that, thank you very much. I'll have some of that. Think china teacups. Think roses running along an old brick wall.

Think ancestry, think antiques, think heritage. No orphans to be found here then, but it was all a fantasy. And I learned the art of fantasy, and I learned the art of fanciful escape from an early age, inspired by the extravagant fantasies of my first family, no doubt, and the crumbling bricks and mortar around me, no doubt too.

I soon became a voracious reader of Victorian novels and mysteries. Mystery, mystery. Related to the word hysteria, meaning dark space or womb. And I knew that I wanted in some way to climb back inside that dark space and hide out there for some time.

And so I was drawn to the sorts of places like Thornfield Hall and Gateshead House, where Jane Eyre was to be found hiding behind the curtains reading Thomas Berwick's book of... And the very first set of novels I devoured involved another Victorian, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, who's located in the Victorian era by Christie.

Because Miss Marple is almost certainly a popularized version of the Victorian fairy godmother of the sort beloved by Charles... Charles? Charles Perrault. P-E-R-R-A-U-L-T. The French writer of the Cinderella tale, twinkly chandeliers, sparkling ball gowns, and princes. And princesses.

And as for Miss Marple, well, she had magical powers too, of intuition and divination, which also came from Victorian fairy tales, where Victorian fairy godmothers, beloved by the Victorians, appear.

The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, The Arabian Nights and all of that English folklore and fairy tale which William Shakespeare turned into a form of changeling child. All changing children see a Midsummer Night's Dream, see pop, see the fairies, see peas blossom and moths aged about eight.

I was sure that I too was a changing changeling child and that I wished to be adopted by Miss Marple as my personal internal fairy godmother, my sympathetic supervisory force.

And I was sure that when I grew up, I was going to be a version of Miss Jane Marple. And I started to believe I was her and I could be her and that I was in fact both the fairy, the changeling child, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre, and also the fairy godmother with her special powers. What were her special powers? First,

to dig deep into the knowledge of others and all those characters around her from her beloved village of St Mary Mead where I believed I wanted to live when I grew up because it had the most perfect arrangement of types of characters which I could recognise and move around in my childish imagination and put them in the places I presumed they were to be found in. Everything was neat and orderly.

There were people who lived in the manor, there were people who lived in the village, and there were people who lived with Miss Jane Marple. Those were usually the maids, and their names were something like Mary, which by the way is my middle name. And I wanted to be like Miss Jane Marple. I wanted to dig the truth out of all those characters in that pretty English village, and find out what it was they were not telling.

And I started to adopt those characters. I started to adopt them and take them inside my heart and mind. And I began to teach myself their characteristics, their traits, and I began to understand, so I thought, their personal lives and histories. I started to keep case notes.

Because I understood even at an early age that Miss Marple was interested in that thing which Jane Eyre calls natural sympathy. Sympathy. Which is not the same as empathy. No, it is not. I think empathy is much easier

And perhaps it is a lazier mode of pretending to know somebody because it doesn't require all the complicated case notes and historic details. How he likes his tea, how he likes to sit, where he puts his newspaper, what kind of tobacco he smokes, why it is that that old Colonel sitting in the window of his Grand Manor house is so sad on a Sunday afternoon when I used to

pass by on my way to the library and it's true there was a retired Colonel in the hometown, my hometown where I grew up by the sea. There was and he had a wife and they were sad because they had no children and they had never

And I understood that in order to understand a bit more, I had to watch and observe and pay attention. And when I grew older, I understood that it was a kind of kindness which I now call sympathy. Sympathy. Sympathy.

which suggests we are not the same as the other person in front of us. I am not Colonel Prothero, trimming his roses, pruning his roses, watching me walk by slowly as I turn around and peer back at him. I am not Colonel Prothero, who goes walking through Lobswood, that little triangle of green grass where I used to sit,

On the way to the library and on the way back to the library, starting and finishing my books, I was so hungry to devour them. No, I was not Colonel Protheroe marching through Lobswood with his stick, imagining that he was still in the army. I was quite, quite different.

But my job, if I was going to be a good reader and also a writer, was to understand the difference between us. The details, the small, hidden details in the way that his legs marched and mulched over the wild parsley crunch.

Why did he do that so often? And what was on his mind when he walked through that green triangle on the way to the sea, past our crumbling house, which I'm sure he never looked at twice? Why would he? Why would he? And so you see, I started to practice the art of sympathy from a very early age.

Because I had read my Jane Eyre and my Miss Marple stories and I knew that the facts of people's lives are often hidden, undisclosed. Remember that will that Aunt Read cruelly keeps locked away from her niece, Jane Eyre? "You little beast! You little bastards!" my aunt used to say. "You little bastards!"

Jane Eyre, another little bastard. But one day a letter comes for her and her cruel aunt Reed, who is jealous of Jane. Jealous because she has imagination and sympathy and what is more, a temper. She has character and nerve. She has courage.

And Aunt Reed would reduce her to that small, demure mouse climbing the stairs. Clippity-clop.

A letter arrives that will tell Jane, if only she knew, that in fact she has a wealthy uncle in Madeira who would like to adopt her and take her to sunnier climes, to provide for her, to care for her, to take her under his wing, to make her kin like him. But sympathy

Real sympathy takes a lot of work, and you have to read to the end of the novel to find all of that out. You cannot jump to conclusions at the start. The will comes later in the novel, much later, and it is hidden away in a drawer. Aunt reads private drawer, kept in her private chamber. Not for you, Janess! Stay out! Sympathy.

is a difficult and complex business and it takes time. The whole length of a complex novel, the whole length of a complex life, the passing of historic time, hours and hours of the clock ticking by, days and days and months and years of the calendar which you rip off impatiently until

You come to the end of the novel and you realize that what you knew about Jane Eyre was in fact very little. Very little. Very little indeed. And so I understood from an early age that in order to

be sympathetic, truly sympathetic. I could never be fully Jane Eyre, and Jane Eyre could never stand in fully for me. Always there would be the differences between us, because although I had an aunt, she was not like the cruel Aunt Reed of Gateshead House. There was no will for one thing, there was no inheritance.

And although they were cousins, they were not cruel like John Reed is cruel to Jane Eyre, who hits her and she hits him. No, no, things were quite, quite different. I did have a mad aunt and her name was Diane, or Di for short, but she did not mean to be cruel intentionally, and her madness was delivered by something quite her own suffering.

and her own history. And so even, even in the process of adopting my mad aunt Di, I had to take her into my heart and my mind. I could not leave her out in the cold if she was going to work within the world of my novel. I had to rehabilitate her. I had to try and love her. I had to adopt her.

and see through the screaming and the shouting and the livid faces and the swearing, you little bastards! You bloody little bastards! No. In order to adopt my character properly, I had to take her into my heart and mind and allow her the space of my sympathetic, rehabilitating, revisioning, sympathetic imagination.

And that, that took a very long time. I want to say my whole life, my whole life. Because I knew that, because I knew that by the time I'd finished reading Jane Eyre, I knew that you can find missing people inside books. You can find them if you try.

Jane Eyre, who reads a lot of books, calls these natural sympathies. And sympathies are relatives you never knew you had, the ones you always wanted. Sympathies are family ghosts and fairies, and sympathies keep you up at night. I decided that my sympathies were Jane Eyre and Miss Jane Marple.

And once upon a time, a long time ago before I was born, they had been walking through an English village looking for Verity. Verity! Verity! Verity! But Verity is dead. She's dead. You can kill people you love, you know. And in mysteries, this happens all the time. Miss Marple knows this, and Jane Eyre too, because like Miss Marple,

Jane Eyre sees and hears everything. She wanders everywhere, swifter than the moon's sphere. And what she knows, and what she sees, and what she hears, she doesn't tell us all. Thank you for listening to A Reading Life, A Writing Life.

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