Another chilblain morning, another small sleep-late, and here I sit, rested and warm, faced with a cup of hot coffee and a disgruntled cat who loves to air his grievances.

Yesterday I spread my desk with seed catalogs and last year's seed packets and worked out what I needed to order for this year. I thought about a friend's poem-draft questions. I talked to my kid on the phone, and I did a little cleaning in the basement. I finished Mansfield Park and started Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature. I watched the Ravens game and enjoyed the three raven mascots jumping around under the goal posts. (They're named Edgar, Allan, and Poe, according to my son.) I did not go for a walk, which was lazy, but I guess one Saturday without exercise won't kill me.

All day long, fat snowflakes flurried without accumulating. The cold was deep and the air smelled sharp and clean when I stepped outside to the recycling bin. I read about the Bronte sisters. Hardwick writes:

A study of the Bronte lives leaves one with a disorienting sense of the unexpected and the paradoxical in their existence. In them are combined simplicities and exaggerations, isolation and an attraction to scandalous situations. They are very serious, wounded, longing women, conscious of all the romance of literature and of their own fragility and suffering. They were serious about the threatening character of real life. Romance and deprivation go hand in hand in their novels. Quiet and repressed the sisters may have been, but their readers were immediately aware of a disturbing undercurrent of intense sexual fantasy. Loneliness and melancholy seemed to alternate in their feelings with an unusual energy and ambition.

This seems absolutely accurate to me. In The Vagabond's Bookshelf, I wrote about Charlotte's novel Shirley, how in it her authorial voice lurches back and forth between vaunting pride and tight self-hatred, but also, oddly and uncomfortably, assumes that the reader shares her self-mythology. When I glance back at that essay, I wish I'd written it differently, but still I take my point, and it aligns, I think, with Hardwick's, which I hadn't read at that time. The Brontes were paradoxes. And all these years later, their strange books remain explosive.

I've been writing hard lately, and I've been reading hard. I've been managing a house, and I've been teaching young people. These are exactly the same things that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to do--all of us with varying degrees of success. The lives of obscure literary women cling to a pattern. Yet Charlotte, the last survivor of the three, died in 1855 at age 39 . . . the better part of 200 years ago.