Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our second reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter Twenty-five.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up to the end of Chapter 25, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

Read more

Instead of Footnotes this month, I give you a concept I’ve been exploring recently. It’s still forming, but I’m dying to share.

I have always found productivity-focused approaches to life irritating. In German, we say “es nervt,” or directly translated, “It nerves.” That the only purpose our lives have is to crank out more widgets so we can then buy even more widgets has never sat well with me.

In recent years, I keep seeing posts from men, tech bros one might call them, extolling the virtues of “monk mode” which, as far as I can tell, is foisting all life admin off on other people so the ‘monk’ in question can focus exclusively on work.

For writers and creatives, this is the dream — or so we think.

However, what it leaves out is the need for replenishment, connection, and curiosity. Living in monk mode means an uninterrupted stream of output, be that writing, art, music, or code. But I’ve never been able to create in a vacuum.

Whenever I’ve had time to myself to work with no other distractions, and this has happened for maybe two weeks total in my entire life, a natural rhythm develops: a few hours of writing and then some other creative activity that allows me to space out and daydream about my project, and then a third period where I read, watch a film, see an art show, or have a really juicy conversation with a friend.

The alternative: Governess Mode

Along with all the hype about monk mode, some friends and I have noticed a huge uptick in nun content: books, YouTube videos, and a general fascination with the nun life. While on the surface, nun mode appears to be the companion of “monk mode,” I don’t feel this is actually the case. Yes, nuns withdraw from worldly distractions, such as social activity, fashion, and secular culture, but most nuns don’t get the benefit that those touting monk mode champion: lack of responsibility for others.

Nuns often participate in charity and help the community they are a part of, even if that only extends to their nunnery. Actual religious orders of monks also have these responsibilities, but those on YouTube teaching monk mode seem to forget this. Nor is community and charity a negative part of life, unless you want to hole up in a cave and deal with no one else. (And I have had these moments, so I get the impulse.)

But the issue I don’t see any of these ways of life addressing is the wellspring of creativity: feeding curiosity.

We in the twenty-first century romanticize the governess. I adore the idea of a private tutor who might teach me many subjects in a comfortable setting where my skills and preferences, as well as learning quirks, were respected.

Rather than a monk mode that wants us to spew streams of code like black bile into the world, what if we could live in Governess Mode?

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The Credo of Governess Mode

We need to make a few adjustments to the 19th-century governess in order to make this mode suitable for today’s independent student. I propose the following adjustments:

Governess Mode: 21st Century Principles:

• You, the student, choose the subjects you wish to study

• The goal is to follow curiosity rather than to impress society

• An equal balance between learning and discovery and creating new art (writing, music, visual art, film, etc.) is ideal.

• The Governess exists as a learning fairy godmother construct to help you frame your discoveries and creative life

• No two people will have identical Governess Modes; it is, by necessity, custom-built to the individual

Let’s be clear: your enjoyment of Governess Mode is the point.

If you aren’t having fun, change something or give this up entirely.

This is not about following the steps that I use as my governess mode. It’s about deciding to pick a list of things that fascinate you, taking those interests seriously, and giving them time and space to grow as part of your investment in your creative work.

For me, being a writer is as much about reading book after book of textile history, working on my German and trying to revive my French, sewing clothes, reading a wide range of fiction and nonfiction as it is about typing words into a keyboard.

In fact, barely any words get typed if I don’t do all the things I listed above. We spend so much time as a society measuring the equivalent of words typed on a keyboard that we forget how exhausting that process becomes without sufficient inspiration to fuel it.

Even when we are inspired, writing books is damned hard work, and whenever I or anyone I know finishes writing one, we collapse in a heap for weeks afterward. Yes, it involves a lot of sitting and staring, but writing and all creative arts burn as much fuel as if we were running ultra marathons day after day.

Governess mode provides the fuel that gets art made.

Here’s how I started living like I have the best governess ever directing my education:

1. I pay close attention to what lights me up. If I get a spark and think, “fascinating!” I take that seriously and make a note of it.

2. I experiment with these topics for a bit. Some get boring quickly, but some stick. Not everything has to be a learning project.

3. Which teacher would be my dream instructor in this subject? They don’t have to be alive, and I can have more than one. Books, films, articles, and even live classes are all possible if I’m lucky.

4. A variety of subjects is ideal. I like to mix cerebral topics, like languages, with handicrafts, like sewing and knitting. Mixing these into my day means I get inspired by different experiences, and this is more likely to match my mood.

5. No goal-setting with these subjects. I pursue them because I find them fun. That is enough. This sometimes means reaching a milestone, like sewing a coat, but the point was the fun, not the coat as proof I’m using my time wisely.

It is so easy for us to morph activities we enjoy into work. The lure of the side hustle seemed to be a way to combine work and fun, but what it really did was to take everything we loved and turn it into our jobs. Not exactly the delightful outcome we hoped for.

I prefer to follow a governess of my choosing, one who seeks joy for no other purpose than the improvements it gives us every day. If I could have anyone as my governess, it would surely be Ruth Gordon as Maude in the iconic Harold and Maude,1 perhaps an even more subversive film now than in its release year, 1971.

I have recently finished reading the second book in a series by Robert Jackson Bennett. The first book is The Tainted Cup. The second book is A Drop of Corruption. A significant part of these stories involves the main character who has had his memory altered so that it is legally admissible. He’s called an engraver because memories are literally engraved into his mind, and how he holds onto these memories is to encode them with tiny vials of scent.

This feels delicious to me because I’ve noticed my memory functions similarly. There are scents that call up a particular time and place more vividly than photographs, more vividly than textures, more vividly even than going back to those same places. The scent of them brings them alive. For some reason, this seems to be true particularly with shampoos. I have two shampoos currently that capture times and places better than anything else I could have constructed for such a purpose.

Interestingly, neither of them was deliberately chosen. I simply had my hair washed at my hairdresser’s one day and inhaled a scent that transported me to the beach we went to for two weeks every summer when I was a child. It had the particular smell of the sunscreen that we used, which I think was Coppertone. And I don’t think that the smell of the sunscreen would completely capture the scent that this shampoo does. Now, when I’m in the shower, it’s steamed up and I’m washing my hair with the giant one-liter bottle I ordered, I am suddenly eight again, running across the sand, ready to run into the ocean. And the gift that this has given me is beyond what I could expect from just washing my hair.

The other shampoo is one I bought to replace one that had tragically been discontinued. I selected another scent, and when I smelled that one, I was suddenly 12 years old and back at camp. And I felt the rivets of the trunk I packed my clothes in. I can remember the books I read that summer. I can walk around in my mind inside the bathroom and shower where I was navigating the complexity of an early period. All of this came back to me, and I have learned I am now two-thirds of the way through this bottle of shampoo, which I have just used now to wash my hair in the bath and have realized I’m going to have to get another one so that I have access to these memories into the future.

The funny thing is we can’t control when these scents come, unless we’ve used a particular perfume for a long time. I have one, L’Ombre dans l’Eau by Diptyque, that calls up a particular Christmas when I bought it in San Francisco. I can put it on and I can feel like I’m in my 20s again, wandering in Union Square in San Francisco, just having finished graduate school. And there is a particular spark I can access when wearing that perfume that doesn’t come from other places.

I think part of governess mode is accepting that we aren’t just heads on top of bodies. I particularly love the description of this that Ken Robinson talks about in one of his many gorgeous TED talks in which he says that our education system was designed to crank out university professors. Successful graduates end up living in their heads and, as he puts it, slightly to one side.

And I think for a long time that was very much how I lived or how I wanted to live because it felt so much simpler. The body felt like a complexity or a liability, something I didn’t want to sink into. It’s very easy to see something like monk mode and to think, “Ah yes, finally I will be freed of the body.” But I realize now that I don’t want that because if I was free of a body, I wouldn’t be able to smell these smells and I wouldn’t have access to these versions of myself that come along with them.

What I want is to think of the body as a portal, to think of the body as a friend and to make it a partner and ally in this idea of governess mode. And it’s for this reason that things that people may find frivolous, like nice stationery, like makeup, like the clothing we wear, is part of the mode for me. I dress myself up like a character when I want to feel a certain way. I use a certain shampoo or wear a certain lipstick or choose which glasses I’m going out in for the day based on what version of myself or what portal to myself I want to activate. And this is part of governess mode too. It’s a discovery, it’s a continual discovery. It’s a relationship we build with ourselves and with our imagination because it is so ephemeral, the imagination, but it lives in the senses, too.

So the point is not to live in the least embodied part of ourselves, but to recognize the points where the ephemeral gets caught or where it clings onto reality in a physical sense, and to note those points of contact and to embrace them and to remember where they are so that we can pass through them to get back to that ephemeral way of thinking and being.

It reminds me a lot of Philip Pullman’s book, The Subtle Knife. It’s like senses can be that knife that cuts through into another reality. We think that the only way through is our mind, but I don’t think that’s true. So a lot of this operating in governess mode is an attempt to build a reliable way through, a reliable way—or maybe not reliable because that makes it feel too mundane. It’s more like a practice than it is a metal door we can open to see the same thing every time.

Finding governess mode is seeking portals to experience that light up your curiosity, like fireflies on a summer evening. We see the lights flashing around us and chase them, mostly for the joy of seeing where we go.

Most of us have so many adult responsibilities to attend to that we cross curiosity off the list as a waste of time. But curiosity is where we find answers that haven’t been available before. We need this now.

When you think of “governess mode” what comes to mind? And if you could have anyone as your magical governess, who would it be?

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If you’ve ever worried that writing or painting or making films or sewing or whatever creative pursuits light you up are frivolous or unimportant, please accept this conversation as our argument that creativity is ESSENTIAL.

Arts budgets are the first ones that get cut. Artists are hard to control. We need to continue not only to tell the truth but also to encourage others. When authoritarian regimes try to control and repress, whimsy confounds them.

We hope to continue this conversation:

What does whimsy mean to you?
How are you giving your creativity life now?

Leave a comment

Resources discussed in this live:1

• The inspiring Reel we mentioned at the beginning: Tara deFrancisco on why art matters.

• Oliver Burkeman. His newsletter from yesterday was excellent, as are his books, especially 4000 Weeks and Meditation for Mortals.

• Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted talks are iconic for a reason, especially the one on why creativity is as important as literacy. I love his definition of creativity, “The process of having original ideas that have value,” as well as the entire talk, honestly. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a MUST.

Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our second reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter 23.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up to the end of Chapter 23, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

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Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our sixth reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter Twenty.

**Please note: if you have not yet finished Chapter 20, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

Read more

Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our second reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter 17.

**Please note: if you have not yet read through Chapter 17, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

Read more

If you’ve toyed with keeping a reading journal but find it more of a hassle than a fun project, hopefully this live will change your mind. Thank you so much to those who joined us live yesterday. Nerding out about stationery is ALWAYS such a joy.

I am certain I will forget some bits I mentioned, so ask if I’ve left…

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Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our fourth reading debrief, which covers up to the end of Chapter Fourteen.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up to Chapter 14, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

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Light returns

Blue sky greeted me this morning as I drank coffee with Hugo in my lap. Sadly, he only got a short snooze today, as I’m off to Paris in the morning for a weekend of stationery and pastry hunting, plus some research for a project I’ll share soon.

The sun now assembles the cats in bright squares on the bed into the afternoon, and I don’t need lights on until after five. The season is shifting, and I’m ready for the brighter afternoons, the breeze coming in the windows, and lighter jackets outside.

Reading shifts as seasons do, and different choices pile up on my nightstand these days — I want my characters out on adventures rather than cozied up indoors. As I write this, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe is up next. A cover featuring a suit-wearing man with his head replaced by a massive red flame feels incredibly timely.

I’ve started keeping a super-simple reading journal this year, and it’s already changing the way I read and remember stories and details. Given our mutual love of school supplies, I suspect you’ll enjoy discussing this process in our March Member’s live.

Changing the name of this space has shifted more than the surface. Becoming the governess of my mind has opened up a new way of learning. Collecting a stack of books for the month has surfaced themes and threads to follow. Keeping a record of what I notice cements those connections for further snuffling. I’m a truffle pig now, which is no surprise given how much that bookshop smell entices.

One of my particular obsessions lately is resistance. How can one write and make art to take a stand? And how can this happen without total despair? Besides following book tunnels of ideas, discussions with friends have opened up the best kind of Pandora’s boxes.

This performance by First Amendment Dance reminded me of what art can spotlight. What our work can do. and I hit on the idea of whimsy as a path to resistance, and it lit us both up. We hope you will join us live in March for a conversation on what artists can do now.

In the meantime, feed the creative part of yourself. Read books that nourish, watch stories of artists, and look at work made in turbulent times as inspiration. I’ll get to see a collection of Leonora Carrington’s paintings in Paris, and as a woman who painted through the 1930s, she has so much to teach creatives today.

Take good care of yourself; keep reading, keep learning, and keep creating.

Lots of love,
Caroline

More to discover:

Inspiration from February:

• If you haven’t yet watched it, Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime performance is another joyous act of creative resistance.

• Short and sweet thoughts from on staying connected to your writing during a tough or distracting time.

• It’s Booker longlist season. Does anyone read the entire long or short list, or do you wait for them to announce the winner?

• went to India recently, and the photos she shared of the flowers there are almost as good as a holiday. In one there is an ENTIRE heap of flowers. I cannot fathom how many are in there.

• , founder of the beautiful LA stationery shop, Baum-Kuchen, shares stories of hand-binding notebooks and making hydrosols in a contraption that looks right out of a steampunk novel. I swooned, truly.

What’s on in March

March events for members:

• Jane Eyre continues, running until May.

• March 6: Member’s Live: The Be Your Own Governess Reading Journal (details here)

UPGRADE TO JOIN

Free for all:

• March 26: and I are going live to chat about creative resistance and whimsy. I can’t wait! This is a new time slot — later in the day for Europe and North America and extra super early morning for Australia (Details here)

Hope you can join in for a live soon!

Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our third reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter Eleven.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up through the end of Chapter 11, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

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We covered:

• Writing about craft on Substack

• How writing about crafting changes and deepens the experience

• How knitting, sewing, and other crafts feed our writing

• The increased desire to see human objects in the time of AI

• Some favorite patterns

• The neuroscience of crafting

• AND a very special pattern for an emotional support animal

Resources mentioned:

• Louise’s sweater by Tin Can

• Caroline’s sweater by Woolfolk

• Caroline’s tiny scarf by Petite Knit

• Emotional support knitting pattern

• Crochet version

• Caroline’s Tote by Modern Sewing Co. (tutorial also available to add)

• Betsan Corkhill’s website — book Knit for Health and Wellness is available there.

Everyone come join for my live with Louise on Friday, 20 February! Details here.

Books discussed:

• Fashionopolis, Dana Thomas

• Less, Patrick Grant

• Worn, Sofi Thanhauser

• Fabric, Victoria Fi…

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Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our second reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter Eight.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up to Chapter Eight, this reading debrief contains spoilers.

If you have not yet read through Chapter Eight, return to the debrief that covers the text you have read

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Welcome to Jane Eyre, a slow read from The Tattooed Governess

This is our first reading debrief, which covers the text up to the end of Chapter 4.

**Please note: if you have not yet read up to the end of Chapter 4, this reading debrief contains spoilers. We recommend reading the text for the week before listening to the debrief.

Chapters discussed: Chapte…

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To read this week: Chapters 1-4

At last we begin! Thank you everyone for your patience as I’ve prepared for our next slow read. We are off and reading today.

This week’s podcast covers:

• Updated slow reading practices as we begin our second book

• The structure for Jane Eyre debriefs

• What made me choose Jane Eyre

Going forward, you’ll receive a weekly podcast debrief of the reading, which will also appear as a written post if you prefer reading to listening.

This week’s post is free to listen to (or read below), but moving forward all slow read content is for paid members only. Listening today will give you a taste to help you decide if you want to join us at the last minute. (I hope you do!)

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Welcome to The Tattooed Governess and Jane Eyre

How I approach Slow Reads

There are multiple highly qualified people offering excellent slow reads on Substack and elsewhere. I admire many of them and have taken part in many of their slow reads. The first one I ever did was War and Peace with Yiyun Li of before it came to Substack. I've done the Wolf Crawl with Simon Haisell of and read Middlemarch with and have enjoyed these slow reads immensely.

I learned a huge amount running the previous slow read for Possession, and am excited to continue learning with Jane Eyre. We are exploring a classic this time, so there is more to consider about craft as it has changed over the nearly two centuries since Jane Eyre was written, which allows us to learn more about what we take for granted in today’s fiction.

Most of the sections we had in the previous slow read remain, but I’ve added a new feature that I hope you will all enjoy, but that will be a surprise coming in the first debrief next week.

As an extra resource, we added slow read journal pages to the 2026 Your Writing Year planner, which you can find here:

Why Jane Eyre?

I’m thrilled to bring you this slow read of Jane Eyre, and I wanted to share what drew me to this particular book.

First, it’s one of my favorite classics. But beyond my personal love for it, I noticed a gap: I hadn’t seen anyone else doing a slow read of this novel. Given how many of us adore this book, it felt like the perfect opportunity to create a space where we could explore it together.

Jane Eyre occupies a fascinating position—it feels simultaneously modern and old-fashioned, familiar yet distinctly of its time. This contrast makes it especially rich for close examination.

A Revolutionary Narrative Choice

One of the most striking aspects is Brontë’s use of first-person narration. This would have been quite unusual in the 1840s, as even up to the late 20th century third person was the preferred POV for literary fiction.

Brontë framed Jane Eyre as a fictional memoir as a way to make first feel natural for that era’s reader. For us as writers and readers, this makes it a fascinating text to study—at first this choice feels very natural to us, but we must remember that she was breaking rules with her POV choice.

The Original Reading Weirdo

But here’s what I think truly explains this book’s enduring power: Jane Eyre herself.

For those of us who spent our childhoods with our noses in books, feeling that books were more our friends than the world around us, Jane speaks directly to our experience. Her misfit quality, her earnestness, her passion for reading, learning, drawing, and discovery—combined with her struggle to fit in socially—has rung true for generations of reading weirdos.

There are many classics we encounter throughout our education, but Jane Eyre has always been the character I related to most, and I suspect many of you felt the same.

What We’ll Explore Together

Immersing ourselves in this world for an extended period gives us the chance to examine its construction: how Brontë built this novel, what she attempted, and how she succeeded in creating a character who feels relatable to readers even 150+ years later.

I look forward to spending time with Jane—and spending time with you—as we explore this remarkable book together.

Today, February 2, we begin reading.

Hopefully, you have your copy of the book already, but there's still time to catch up because the weekly reading is meant to be extremely manageable.

The way this is going to work is that every Monday you will get a reading debrief like this one, both as a podcast episode, which you'll be able to subscribe to and listen to, or if you prefer to read, it will be formatted just like this one was, as a post.

We’ll start sharing thoughts on our first section of reading next Monday.

You will read first, and then the debrief will come on the first day of our next week of reading. This is so you have time to read and form your own opinions and your own thoughts. In addition, there are some twists and turns in this book, so I want to preserve your being able to read them in the text before I comment.

Here’s a link to the reading schedule post, and it aligns with full chapters this round, making it even easier to use any edition you like:

I've heard from many people finding use copies, copies and charity shops, and this makes me really happy as it's one benefit of reading an older book that is not exactly a classic, but I think. We could make it one.

I invite you, if you're not listening to this already signed up to join us, we will have discussions about our reading starting from next Monday once we finish the first section, and to build our relationships to a truly, truly rich and delightful cast of characters that have been living inside my mind for months now and years ever since I first read the book. I expect you will have the same experience.

If you're not yet a member and joining us, I encourage you to sign up today. Let's build a beautiful space that we can enjoy and give ourselves a gift this year of immersing ourselves in story. I can't wait to begin. Happy reading, and I'll be back next week with our first debrief.

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Thank you for being here.

Welcome to The Tattooed Governess slow reads.

A few words on how we’ll keep this a safe space:

When we open commenting for the previous week’s pages, please confine your comments to the pages we’ve just read or those before that point. NO SPOILERS if you’ve read the book before. This novel has some twists and a mystery running through it. Any comments that break this rule will be deleted.

Please also comment and discuss with a spirit of kindness. Everyone here loves books and reading, but everyone here is a unique human with a whole life around them. People’s opinions about characters, events, and favorite passages will differ. Please confine your comments to your own thoughts. If anyone posts comments that criticize another participant’s reading, they will be removed.

Bottom line: comment and discuss as you’d like people to write to you. It’s a rough world out there, and I built this space to be a refuge. It will be moderated to maintain that safety.

If you’ve read (or listened) this far, and aren’t yet a paid member, now’s the time to upgrade your membership to continue on with us.

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** Special thanks to Emily Hawkins, my friend who composed our beautiful theme music once again.

2026 Begins

The northern lights came to Germany this past month, along with enduring snow. As I write this letter, the roof tiles are encased in ice, and the city feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting for warmer days.

It has been a freezing January, not only in temperature. I’ve been afraid to look at the news, and after looking, I’ve struggled to hold all that is happening. Writing has felt heavier, knowing the atrocities happening around the world.

What has helped is reading a massive amount of books. I’ve hit a book a day a few times this month, needing another world to escape into. Rereading Jane Eyre to prepare for the slow read was an excellent start to the year; her life has a painful start, and yet she finds the inner resources to continue. That example has kept me going through the dark days.

And yet, there are still little miracles around us. Friends up much later than me sent photographs of the Northern Lights, spotted from balconies across Berlin. What magic! I never thought this urban setting would allow us to see that gorgeous sparkle. If we keep our eyes open, and sometimes stay up past bedtime, there is still magic out there to find.

Part of that magic appears in community. I went to the most wonderful book club I’ve ever attended this month: nearly thirty people gathered in a small flat, crowded in with tea and cake, to talk about how much we all love books. There was no assigned reading beforehand, only an invitation to bring a book we’d enjoyed (or hated) in 2025 to discuss as well as a book we’d be willing to give away for a book swap.

I met multiple fascinating new people, and we introduced ourselves not with small talk, but with a book that we shared in small circles on the floor scattered throughout the flat. I, of course, ended up with the noise-sensitive people in a separate room with the coats to buffer the chattering crowd.

We ended the evening with an auction of sorts, with our hostess holding up the swappable books we’d brought and inviting the donor to give an intro. People called out yes for the books they wanted until we’d divided up the stack among eager new readers. It was a gift, spending a few hours with so many book lovers.

If we look around carefully, the readers are always there. Keep looking, keep reading, keep sharing. We will weather this time together, speaking up for what we believe in along the way.

Thank you for being part of this community — it has been such a help to know we will be reading together again very soon.

And now for my recent favorites:

Favorite reads from the end of 2025:

As a twist on our usual format, I shared a review of recent favorite books in our first member’s live of 2026. In addition, learn about my book stack project that is ongoing for 2026.

Inspiration from January:

• As we watch the world get crazier and scarier every day, ’s gorgeous post on Frederick Douglass’s notes and writing rang especially true.

• A friend shared this snail mail club, and it is the cutest thing I have seen in ages and might just change the world. (Beware - she designs especially good stickers.)

• ’s beautiful piece on Alex Pretti and the events in Minneapolis is essential reading for all humans.

• (also a local to Minneapolis) has excellent resources and links to follow up and help in this post.

• ’s beautiful piece about Norway and the work of two artists, a writer and a painter, cut short by the death and trauma during WWII, is both moving and timely.

What’s on in February

February events for members:

• February 2 Jane Eyre’s slow read begins, running until May.

• February 13 Member’s live: January favorite reads and book chat. (details here)

UPGRADE TO JOIN

Free for all:

• February 20 and I are going live to discuss the relationship between handcraft and writing — free for all. (Details here)

Hope to see you there — replays will be available for all lives, too.

We begin 2 February

For this slow read, you can use any copy of Jane Eyre as the schedule does line up with chapter endings this round. Many thanks to Charlotte Brontë for her consistent chapter length.

We will begin reading on February 2nd, and the debrief for Week One (2-8 February) will arrive on 9 February. Each week moving forward, you’ll get the debrief after you’ve read that week’s pages, so you have time to read and reflect before hearing my take and discussing with others.

In addition, we have a “catch-up week” mid-read, which many people were grateful to have during our last session. Life does take over from time to time, and this will give everyone space to catch up, as needed.

And now… on to the schedule!

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We have a theme!

Introducing the theme music for the Jane Eyre slow read. Once again, original track composed by the brilliant composer Emily Hawkins, who will be reading along with us.

During our last slow read, listeners requested a version of the track without me speaking over it, so here it is for you to enjoy on its own.

Many thanks to Emily for her incredible ability to grasp my strange notes and references to create something beautiful that perfectly captures the atmosphere of Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre reading schedule arrives 23 January

I’ll be posting the reading schedule this Friday so you can tab your books before we begin reading on 2 February.

Time to get excited!

If you haven’t yet upgraded to a paid membership and want to join us for Jane Eyre, this would be an excellent time to do so.

If you’re all signed up, share this post with any reading friends you’d like to have along with us. The more the merrier!

Subscribe now

I didn’t think this would be so hard.

I have heard this, or some form of it, from nearly every client and student I’ve ever had. When people come to me for coaching, often what they’re hoping to find is an easier way to write.

There is no advantage in making writing — or any creative art — harder than it needs to be. I don’t see any benefit in martyring …

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The post I referenced about making a monthly reading stack is here:

Other books mentioned:

• All Grown Up,

• The Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard

• Hark: How Women Listen,

• The Josephine Tey mysteries, starting with An Expert in Murder, Nicola Upson

• The Listeners, Maggie Stiefvater

• Heated Riva…

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