Becoming – and Understanding – the Madwoman in the Attic

And how our perspectives on books change alongside our life experience

When I was a child growing up on my council estate there weren’t an awful lot of books going round. That is not to say that people from council estates do not read books, it’s just to say I did not grow up in a particularly bookish household. And yet, here I am, a writer.

I can still retrace the floorplan of that house that I arrived in with my mother in 1982, when I was five and she was newly separated from my father. I remember the bare walls and tiled floors, the echo my voice made as I raced from room to room, the tap of my footsteps on the bare, narrow floorboards upstairs as my mum showed me which room was mine.

‘And,’ she said, pointing out of my bedroom window as I stood on tiptoes, ‘that will be your new school.’

Even now, more than four decades on, I remember that red-bricked house that we lived in until I was 18. On nights when I can’t get to sleep, I retrace my footsteps around it, up the stairs, along the landing, past my bedroom and then my mum’s, towards the bathroom.

Years later when we did have carpets and curtains and eighties furniture in there (a cane sofa with puffy brown and orange cushions, a smoked glass kitchen table, not too dissimilar to the ‘vintage’ one I am sitting at as I write this), I would stop outside my mum’s bedroom and dare myself towards her bookshelf. It was the only one in the house, and it only had a small selection of books, like many people from unbookish households they were those leather-bound classics, similar to those leather-bound encyclopaedias that people sold door-to-door. There was one book among them in particular that I was drawn to, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I’m not sure looking back how much I knew of the story then, but it wasn’t the words that concerned me, it was an image, a black-ink illustration inside, one frightening enough to give me nightmares.

When my mother downsized in her seventies, moving from what later became our family home to a small apartment, she got rid of much of the life we had accumulated, but I asked her for a handful of books and Jane Eyre was one among them.

I pulled it down from my own bookshelf to write this piece, and as I opened the book to describe this drawing to you, I felt myself brace as I flicked through its pages, getting closer, wondering if I would still find it as terrifying...

First perhaps I should describe it to you,