From the obligatory high school English reading of Wuthering Heights, I have slowly made my way over the past three decades through the novels of the Brontë sisters. For my sixteenth birthday, my mom gave me a beautiful copy of Jane Eyre. Inside the front cover is the date and an inscription about how much she loved the book when she was that age, and hoped I would, too.

Over the years, I’ve returned to Jane Eyre more times than I can recall. As with any old friend, each reacquaintance brings new revelations, new pleasures–and new problems. I’ve returned to other Brontë novels as well–Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette. Sometimes I am delighted by the narrative structure, the utter unreliability of any Brontë narrator, the love story, the sheer quirkiness. Sometimes I am kind of salty with some of these Brontës for the problematic relationships they uphold as romantic ideals.

Somehow I missed Charlotte Brontë’s other novels. I am often amazed and mortified by the gaps in my own literary knowledge. This past November, for NaNoWriMo, I started on a new project–an Appalachian retelling of Jane Eyre. The impetus behind this endeavor is twofold: 1) I am sad that I have run out of Brontë novels to read for the first time; and 2) there is a tension between how much I love Jane Eyre and how uncomfortable I am with the multi-layered power imbalance between Jane (small, young, poor, friendless, female, employee) and Rochester (physically strong, older, wealthy, connected, male, employer). Oh, and that whole “madwoman in the attic” thing. Sooooo many problems…..

My goal is to write a Brontë novel–not some kind of designer imposters version (anyone remember those? “If you liked Jane Eyre, you’ll LOVE Jane Eyre with Dragons!”)–but a novel that could have been penned by a Brontë. An imaginary fourth Brontë, a really weird one. One who brought the magic of the Brontë juvenilia fully and unapologetically into her mature work. And got rid of the honestly really gross romantic relationship power imbalances. More on this another time, perhaps. What I’m trying to wordily get at is that in order to attempt to write like a Brontë, it seemed logical that I should immerse myself in Brontë novels–so I revisited the familiar ones, and then set out to track down the ones I hadn’t read.

My search led me to The Professor. Much to love–Charlotte writes like a dude! Audacious! And also soooo many problems. If you thought the Jane-Rochester thing was maybe a lil’ squicky but you weren’t 100% sure, try this one. Young male teacher rates his female students by their physical appearance! I could write a thesis on this, but I’d get sidetracked as well as nauseous, so suffice it to say for the moment that this book made me deeply uncomfortable.

And then I finally tracked down a copy of the last Brontë novel: Shirley. The last in every sense. For me, it’s the last Brontë novel I’ll ever read for the first time. It was the last novel Charlotte would complete before her death from severe morning sickness at the age of 38. And, Charlotte having outlived all her siblings, it was the last Brontë novel of them all, ever. Period. The end.

I’m almost at the end of the book, and there is a part of me that doesn’t ever want to finish it, to read the ending. I could stop now, and then I would never have read all the Brontë novels there are to read, never fully exhausted that store of wonderfully weird and gorgeous and troubling literature.

Of course I’m going to finish it. But I’m also sad about that. Shirley is a bizarre text. Like every Brontë novel, it is so many things. One one level, it’s a genuinely weird story that starts with three characters who basically get dropped from the story a few chapters in; doesn’t get to the title character for about ten chapters; is maybe only 1/4 about Shirley when she does finally show up; is the first instance in English of the name “Shirley” being used for a woman; proves that Charlotte cannot drop the weird teacher-student love thing which was largely autobiographical but is still gross; includes Luddites destroying machinery, some fascinating gender-bending and pronoun confusion, and a shooting; and contains multiple insistences by the narrator that the reader will not like this book, delivered with the sense that said narrator really does not give a damn whether said reader even finishes said book. On another level, it’s an artifact testifying to Charlotte Brontë’s superbly audacious ambition. She tries strange things in this book. Sometimes they work. She goes for it regardless. Her writing of Shirley was punctuated by loss, tragedy, and love. She left it for a while, sunk in grief. She fought her way back to the page, and dared there to challenge literary convention and everything a woman was supposed to be, do, think.

I am not ready to finish this last book by the last Brontë. I’m going to, but I’m also going to be sad about it. There are no more Brontës after this. So I’m going to try to write one. When I type that, it looks so audacious and weird. But maybe that’s an audaciousness and a weirdness that a Brontë could respect.