We’re all predisposed to love an attic aren’t we? The chance of finding a long lost treasure, the secrecy of a huge room, hidden at the top of a house, the thrilling idea that it could be a private space just for us?
It’s little wonder they feature in so many books, both fiction and factual. The attic is a metaphor for the brain - a space right at the top of the house, where all manner of creative and imaginative happenings might occur, a place where memories are stored, and made. How many writers scribbled in garrets, locked away in a dusty loft, after all? You don’t hear of many writers furiously penning novels in sparkling open-plan kitchens, do you? They’re a space to get away, feel ‘above’ mere mortals bumbling about in living rooms and bedrooms. Here we celebrate five literary attics:
1. Thornfield Hall’s attic in Jane Eyre
The first Mrs Rochester is the inhabitant of the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s best-known novel. Jane hears various crashes, moans and the like and it transpires that the source of them all is Bertha Rochester, one-time beauty and now ‘demon’ in the attic who starts fires, bites visitors and chews up Jane’s wedding veil. Since we know Rochester is about to marry Jane bigamously, frankly we’re with the first Mrs R on this one and think the veil-shredding (and probably some of the biting) is fair enough. (Also, Mr Rochester is pretty irritating. We might have bitten him too.) Poor Mrs R jumps to her death during a fire at Thornfield but holds a special place in our hearts as the first and our favourite ‘mad woman in the attic’.
2. Jo March’s attic in Little Women
Like many women writing in attics, Jo is a bit of a bluestocking, who wished to be a boy and found her skirts cumbersome. She writes her way out of her femininity, wearing a ‘scribbling suit’ of a black pinafore to soak up the ink and a feathered cap, like a master craftsman, and into a comfortable inhabitation of confident womanhood. Again, the attic is both an escape and a sign of Jo’s superior intellect. And we loved her for her inky hands and the rats that nibbled her pencils.
3. Anne Frank’s attic in the secret annex
Never could an attic be more thrilling than the real attic in Amsterdam in which Anne Frank enjoyed some fresh air, away from the stuffiness of the rest of the annex each morning. Anne wrote her famous diary in the secret annex in which she was hiding and the rat-infested attic, which was mostly used for storage was her escape, with one little window that it was possible to look out of without fear of being seen.
4. The attic in Flowers in the Attic
Much though we love a creepy Gothic tale in autumn, we might not linger too long on this very disturbing tale by VC Andrews of incest and abuse that haunted many of our teenaged years. Suffice to say, the attic here holds many a secret and spawns many more secrets of its own. <Shudder>
5. The attic in The Yellow Wallpaper
It’s the decor that’s the real star of this novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. When a young woman is sent to spend a period of rest in a colonial mansion at the turn of the last century, she’s shut up in the old nursery on the top floor of the house. Far from resting her mind, the room itself turns her imagination inside out as she endlessly describes the wallpaper, comes to believe there is a woman trapped inside it and then becomes that woman herself. A beautiful feminist novel that’s deliciously creepy, too. You aren’t sure whether you want to never go upstairs again or disappear to the top of the house forever.
In our September issue our My Place feature is all about (much less creepy and much more beautiful) attic rooms like this one above by @finlay_fox. Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe
