‘Mr. Rochester’ is a new view of Jane Eyre’s love
Reader, he marries her. (But you knew that.) What you didn’t know but now learn, over the course of Sarah Shoemaker’s satisfying new novel Mr. Rochester (Grand Central, 449 pp., ****), is how closely Edward Fairfax Rochester’s early life mirrored that of his famous love, Jane Eyre.
In Charlotte Brontë’s revered novel, we meet the man as an adult: the moody, cryptic owner of imposing and secretive Thornfield Hall, where Jane arrives as a governess to Adele, Edward’s ward.
But in Mr. Rochester we discover Edward as a young boy, sent from his home by a cold and formal father to be raised by strangers. One of the novel’s strongest sections depicts Edward’s time in a boarding school run by the inscrutable but fair-minded Mr. Lincoln, who schools him in historical battles and Latin, and nicknames him “Jamaica” for the far-off island where his father holds a plantation.
It is away at school that Edward meets Carrot and Touch, other smart and lonely boys whose friendships will carry meaning throughout his life.
For devoted Jane Eyre fans, one of the keys to Rochester’s life is certainly the doomed Bertha — the woman he meets and marries in Jamaica when sent there to manage his father’s property. The origin story of one of literature’s most famous madwomen has already been deftly imagined by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. Here, Shoemaker focuses on Edward’s inner life as he becomes so entranced by Bertha’s beauty and charm that he allows himself to be rushed into marriage despite warning signs.
Jamaica’s violent slave history is an effective part of Edward’s story, too, and Mr. Rochester suffers when this thread is dropped as the action transfers back to England.
The book’s last third will be familiar to Brontë’s readers, but there is a distinct pleasure in encountering Jane
Eyre’s characters — Grace Poole, Mrs. Fairfax, Miss Ingram — from another angle, and Shoemaker vividly renders each in a recognizable yet new role.
Oddly, it is Jane herself who comes least into focus in this book, perhaps because the two lovers’ famed banter is less compelling when seen from the rich master’s eyes, rather than from his smart and poor employee. And no change in viewpoint can rescue a scene as memorably wacky as Rochester disguising himself as a gypsy in order to toy with Jane’s affections.
Plot events pile up rapidly toward the end so that Rochester must contend not only with dangerous hidden Bertha but with a young usurper to Thornfield Hall who bears a distinct resemblance to Rochester’s wayward older brother.
If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, suspense is keen as the climactic end approaches. If you have — as will most of those who come to
Mr. Rochester — the novel’s dramatic final act provides the quieter pleasure of revisiting one of literature’s great love stories from a fresh perspective.