Diary – 10 March 2016

Have you ever set your face against a book? This year sees Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary and the novelist Tracy Chevalier has edited a short-story anthology each based on the climactic line of Jane Eyre — ‘Reader, I married him.’ Everyone knows it. I agreed like a shot because the brief fitted something I had been mulling for a while, and yesterday the handsome finished volume arrived. In the notes about contributors, it says: ‘Susan Hill has never read Jane Eyre.’ Lamentably, that is true, and now I suppose I never can. But the fact is, I have set my face against it, as my daughter has set her face against Animal Farm. Neither of us remembers where or why it started but we’ll never give in. But oddly, I actually believe I have read Jane Eyre, I know so much about it. Mr Rochester, the blindness, the mad wife in the attic…There are a lot of books like that, Oliver Twist being a standout (‘Please sir, I want some more’, Fagin’s gang, Bill Sikes the woman-beater).