DON’T MISS THESE MODERN ‘JANE EYRE’ MASHUPS
‘Jane Steele,’ ‘The Madwoman Upstairs’ twist Brontë classic
On the 200th birthday of Charlotte Brontë, two clever new novels riff on Jane
Eyre, her much-loved classic about a mistreated orphan who becomes a governess and falls in love with her boss, the unattainable Mr. Rochester. It’s a love story that has launched dozens of films, plays and blog postings, not to mention myriad romantic fantasies.
In Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele (Putnam, 420 pp., out of four),
eeeg Jane’s self-righteous sensibilities lead her to become, well, a serial killer in 19th-century England. Her first victim is her creepy cousin, who tries to rape her — unadvisedly, near a steep ravine.
Jane coolly makes her way through a police investigation by the thoroughly intimidating Constable Sam Quillfeather and is soon shipped off to a boarding school ruled by the sadistic Vesalius Munt, who pits the girls against one another in a battle for food that makes The Hunger
Games look civilized. When Munt denies food to Jane’s beloved friend, Rebecca Clarke, Jane solves the problem with a well-placed letter opener to his jugular.
Reader, can you blame her? Clearly, he deserved it, as do all of Jane’s victims. This Jane’s Mr. Rochester is a sexy Englishman named Charles Thornfield, who wears kidskin gloves to deny himself the pleasure of human touch, a form of self-flagellation related to the Sikh Wars. But why? Jane wonders.
Faye’s first novel, Dust and Shadow, featured a match of wits between Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper; clearly, she has a way with serial killers. The literary love match that is Jane Steele Author Lyndsay Faye already has been optioned for a movie. Devour this book, reader, and join me at the multiplex.
For those who like their Brontë with a side of wry, turn to the hilarious The
Madwoman Upstairs ( Touchstone, 337 pp., out of four) by first-time
eeeg novelist Catherine Lowell, set in mod- ern-day academia. Our heroine, Samantha Whipple, has fled to Oxford University to study literature after her devoted but alcoholic father dies in a fire. (Brontë aficionados will enjoy the ways both novels use plot points from
Jane Eyre: a mysterious inheritance, ghostly dreams, a devastating fire, a twisted ankle, “Mr. Rochester’s” secret.)
A cousin of the legendary Brontë sisters, Sam is obsessed with them, while being hounded by reporters claiming she has inherited the “missing Brontë estate.” She and her professor — the arrogant but irresistible James Orville — trade barbed banter about literature and life. Reader, he had her at hello.
When Sam begins receiving copies of her father’s Brontë paperbacks that should have been lost in the fire, she enlists Orville in her pursuit of the mystery, in hopes of finding her true inheritance. Sam and Orville’s tutorial sessions occasionally lapse into gradstudent tedium, but mostly, Sam’s quips are LOL hilarious and do Ms. Brontë proud.
There’s no need to know Jane Eyre before reading these novels, but Steele and Madwoman could inspire you to seek out the self-empowering girl who inspired them.