My name is Brontë, and if you ask me, I’ll tell you my favorite book is Jane Eyre. This may or may not be a coincidence. Throughout my life, I’ve read this book a total of three times, although it would be untrue to claim that the same person read it each time, as I believe I’ve been drastically different people at each reading.

The first time I read it, I was in fourth grade. I’d been raised on a diet largely composed of poetry and dreams, nurtured by parents whose literary tendencies allowed me to read just about anything. My brother and I had spent most of our childhood wandering around the woods, creating fantasy worlds akin to those that we read about.

My family has books where other families have religion, as well as books where other families have furniture. Our coffee and tea mugs often perch haphazardly on shifting geological structures of multicolored novels. Most of their spines are broken, and my mother’s lacy annotations usually peep out from the yellowed pages. In our family, books are both carelessly treated, a place to stack a dirty dish in the absence of a table, and simultaneously worshiped. Each line is parsed, with cursive handwriting pointing out the important bits. Reading in my house is like having a conversation. In my parent’s books, I can pick up where they left off twenty-five years ago, writing my own replies to decades-old thoughts in the margins.

At first reading, Jane Eyre had everything a romantic eight-year-old could desire. The subtext was over my head, but I was completely entranced by the red room. The horror of it all piqued my curiosity: how would Jane survive the night?

I read Jane Eyre the second time, in secret, the summer after eighth grade. On “brain rest” for a concussion, I had missed the last two months of school and reading was forbidden, so I hid in my closet, or sat outside in the sweltering DC heat where I knew no one would follow me. I hid the book under my bed for nighttime forays when I couldn’t sleep due to an almost constant migraine. I was well into my fourth month post injury, with no real signs of progress. Reading made the pain almost indescribably worse, yet I couldn’t resist. I felt as though I was Jane in the red room. Escape was beginning to look unlikely. It was lonely and boring and nearly unbearable. I couldn’t understand how Jane was capable of moving on. That summer, it seemed unthinkable that either Jane or I could carry on with our lives after experiencing the horror of the red room.

The most recent time I read Jane Eyre, I was working at a center that provides temporary housing for homeless women and preschool education for their children. There, I observed many kinds of metaphorical red rooms. As I became closer to the teachers and mothers, they began to share pieces of the children’s stories with me. These young children had suffered in ways that were foreign to me, a fifteen year old, who had thought herself so mature. For example, a four year old boy, who grew to feel like my own child, came to school with increasing numbers of bruises and a black eye.

The thing that became most remarkable wasn’t how these children had suffered, but that they kept on living, learning, and developing. Everyone has a red room, and I’m sure I will experience many more as I mature. But, as Jane says, “I am no bird: and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”