FOLLOWING CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S ‘FRANK TREAD’

The opening of Charlotte Brontë’s second novel, Jane Eyre, begins: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Jane Eyre continues, in the novel, by saying how she dislikes long, chilly afternoon walks. Despite Charlotte’s character’s aversion to striding out in the bitter twilight, set against my appetite for hiking at any time of day or night, I found many things that we did have in common. I was drawn through the thin veil that separates fiction from fact, deeper and deeper into her writing.

Charlotte Brontë’s two elder sisters, Maria and...