Summary

In “A Valediction to Sleep” (175), Cusk reflects on all the sleep that she lost during the first year of her daughter’s life. She considers that without sleep, the darkness of night regains its “mythical terror” (177), suggesting that she felt this terror in tandem with her daughter. She describes the physical effects loss of sleep had on her, including daydreams and hallucinations. After a while, these effects faded and she felt that she had attained less of a need to sleep. She wondered if she had become “that dark stranger who walks the world of childhood wreathed in mystery: a parent” (179).

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Cusk recounts, the titular character is mistreated as a child by her Aunt Reed, who locks Jane in a room by herself for the night and punishes her when she cries...