The Self-Seeding Sycamore: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him. Lionel Shriver

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       Copyright

      Published by The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

      Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016

      The Self-Seeding Sycamore © Lionel Shriver 2016

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

      Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

      Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008150594

      Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173494

      Version: 2016-03-16

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Tracy Chevalier

The Self-Seeding Sycamore – Lionel Shriver

       Author Note

       A Note on Charlotte Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY TRACY CHEVALIER

      Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?

      Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.

      Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.

      All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.

      Tracy Chevalier

       THE SELF-SEEDING SYCAMORE

       LIONEL SHRIVER

      JEANNETTE HAD NO IDEA that plants could engender so much hatred.

      For years, she’d left the garden to Wyndham. Weekends outdoors provided an antidote to the windowless stasis of his lab. Though their plot was sizable only by London standards, she’d humoured him. (Whatever was there to do? A little watering during dry spells, a ten-minute run of the hand mower round the lawn.) Having begrudged the dear man neither his solitude nor his superfluous pottering, she treasured snapshots of her husband in muddied khaki trousers, bent over a bed, doing heaven-knew-what with a characteristically intent expression. Now, of course, she knew exactly what he’d been doing. How much he’d spared her.

      While still cosseted by mutual spousal existence, she’d scanned with indifference bitter first-person articles about how fiercely people avoid the bereaved – a revelation her own friends had amply illustrated for a year or more. She didn’t blame them. Unintentionally, she and Wyndham had fallen into the heedlessly hermetic unit of two that’s so off-putting from the outside. If she didn’t need friends then, she’d no right to demand their solicitations now. Besides, she’d grown less compelling to herself. A widow of fifty-seven had both too much story left, and not enough. It was narratively awkward: an ellipsis of perhaps thirty years, during which nothing big would happen. Only little things, most of them crap.

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