If You Love Jane Eyre...

I went to see the new Jane Eyre movie with a few good friends.  It was wonderful – atmospheric, brooding, everything a film adaptation of Jane Eyre should be.  The casting was particularly inspired.  But then I have had a love affair with Jane Eyre since my first reading of the book in high school.  I have read the book five or six more times since, including once with the library book club, and have seen nearly every film version. 

My first encounter with Jane set me on the path to gothic romance; by the end of high school I had read every novel published by Victoria Holt and gone on to Daphne Dumaurier’s Rebecca.

Why this obsession with Jane Eyre?  I fell in love with the gothic romance, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre being the superlative example of the genre.  I couldn’t get enough of isolated English manors, preferably located on lonely wind blasted moors, with a brooding lord of the manor and perhaps madness in the family thrown in and definitely with something creepy or spooky going on.  Who could resist that?

To this day the gothic has a hold on me but in the current literary manifestation that I like to call contemporary gothic, sometimes also called neo-gothic.  I have a few favorites in the contemporary gothic genre. 

I loved The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  The Thirteenth Tale draws so much on the tradition of Jane Eyre that we paired the two books for discussion a few years ago in our book club. Setterfield centers her novel on Vida Winter, a popular author who after 60 years of making up stories about her background has promised to finally tell the true story of her life.  She chooses Margaret Lea, a reclusive writer and daughter of a London bookseller, to write her biography. 

When Margaret travels to Yorkshire (ah, those lonely moors) and begins to unravel the mystery surrounding Vida’s stranger-than-fiction life, she is forced to confront her own painful link to a long-dead twin.  She becomes immersed in Vida’s haunting story of crumbling mansions, madness, a hint of incest, betrayal, death, feral twins, a fatal fire, and perhaps even a ghost or two.  What more could a fan of the gothic novel ask for? Plus Setterfield totally gets the connection between storyteller and listener and the passion for books that exists in the souls of reading addicts everywhere, and especially in this librarian’s soul.

Last summer I discovered another take on the contemporary gothic that intrigued me so much I chose it for the book club last fall – Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry.  When she dies of cancer, Elspeth Noblin leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina, the American daughters of Elspeth’s twin sister, Edwina.  Is that enough twins for you?  Hmm, there were twins in The Thirteenth Tale, too.  Are twins a requirement of contemporary gothics?  But wait, the really cool part is that the apartment is located next to Highgate Cemetery, a really famous Victorian cemetery in London where famous people like Karl Marx and Mrs. Charles Dickens are buried. 

Julia and Valentina are mirror twins with a very intense attachment to one another.  When they move into Elspeth’s flat, they come to know the other residents of the building:  Martin, a brilliant crossword puzzle creator who is severely hampered by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin’s loving but stressed out wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s heartbroken lover, a researcher on the history of the cemetery.  The twins become involved in their neighbors’ lives and learn that perhaps their aunt can’t leave her old apartment behind.  I was haunted by this story of identity, secrets, twin-hood, and the reach of life and love beyond death.  Plus I couldn’t resist the allure of a book that included a pet called the Little Kitten of Death.  I definitely have to put Highgate Cemetery on my list of places I must visit on my next trip to London.

So, if you’re a Jane Eyre fan, and I know there are lots of you out there, try a contemporary gothic or two to feed your craving for that madwoman-in-the-attic feel.  Check out The Thirteenth Tale, Her Fearful Symmetry, and other Jane Eyre readalikes at Groton Public Library.