Sometimes, when I'm feeling maudlin, I wonder if there can be anyone on earth who loves reading more than I do. Of course, there are better readers, and smarter readers, more prescient readers, more analytical readers, readers with more stamina, braver and more adventurous readers, more precise readers. But do any of those readers adore their friends as much as I do?

I think of Charlotte Bronte. Yesterday I was almost complaining about her, but truth be told: while Emily is the more fashionable Bronte, Charlotte is all mine. On the simplest level, like Louisa May Alcott, she created characters who gave her readers hope. Jo in Little Women is encouragement for all bookish girls . . . yes, life is for you! And Bronte's heroines are encouragement for all plain and thorny girls . . . yes, you too can engage in aggressive, erotic warfare with the most interesting man in the room, and he will like it. But of course Bronte's writings are far more than romantic fantasy. They are delineations of self-repression. If Alcott's Jo yearns to leap into life with her arms open, Bronte's Lucy Snowe knows from the beginning that she must always stay wound in barbed wire. Though no matter how tightly she armors herself, there are chinks.

These tiny harsh women, wending their way across strange and unforgiving landscapes: they are nothing like me, either physically or spiritually, but I suffer with them again and again on each rereading.