id="ua378f56d-a240-54b0-91a5-8222b0e9fa1c">
The Mash-Up
Linda Grant
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
The Mash-Up © Linda Grant 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: 9780008173487
Version: 2016-05-10
Contents
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 WEDDING WAS PERFECT, up to a point.
Because we were what Ali called a mash-up couple, we had to find a way of celebrating our marriage with a nod to both families, a ceremony that would make them feel their traditions were respected and that neither side had the upper hand. These things can turn ugly if not handled properly, with slights and sulks and stormings out and long-borne grievances and grudges stumbling to the surface like aggrieved old drunks. At least on my side of the family. My grandmother has not spoken to my aunt Dolly for forty-three years, since she was not placed at the top table at Elaine’s wedding.
We went online and found a character called Rabbi Larry Peirera. He was prepared to conduct a wedding ceremony of our own devising, like those websites Ali used where you could customise your Nikes. Rabbi Larry, as he told us to call him, was an endearing fellow, a little mushroom of a man with a black boyfriend. When we met with him for the first time, at a bar in Shoreditch, we spent several ice-breaking minutes discussing the symbolism of our three sets of tats and he told us wonderful stories that started funny, and ended in heartbreak, of the long-ago centuries in the Sephardic world where Jews and Muslims lived side by side. “But I’m not a Muslim,” Ali reminded him. “I’m Persian
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