Jane Steele Review

This week's novel is Jane Steele, a retelling of Jane Eyre with more murder, by Lyndsay Faye. 

Orphaned Jane is mistreated by her bitter aunt, and (after she accidentally kills her creepy cousin) she is sent to boarding school where she's mistreated by her creepy headmaster.  She decides that since she's already a murderer, she might as well keep it up to protect the people she loves who have no agency of their own, and if she ends up going to hell, at least she'll be reunited with her suicidal mother.  When he aunt dies, Jane takes a job as a governess in the house in which she used to live.  She learns that the new master of the house, Mr. Thornfield, is surly, all the servants have knives, and there's a mystery involving stolen jewels and the East India Company.  Secrets!  Lies!  Murder!

Full disclosure: I did not like Jane Eyre at all.  This book was a lot of fun.

I think my main problem with Jayne Eyre was that Mr. Rochester is THE WORST.  I don't like him, I don't like that Jane Eyre thought he was so great, and I don't like that our culture romanticizes his behavior.  Remember how he called her "pet"?  Remember how he dressed up like a "gypsy woman" to try to trick her into admitting that she liked him?  Remember how he kept his wife locked in the attic? 

In this book, Mr. Thornfield doesn't do any of this nonsense.  He's blunt and he swears, he was raised in Punjab and is Sikh and more open minded than the English people think he ought to be.  His secrets honestly aren't hurting anyone.  He's surly, but he's affectionate with his ward and with his staff.  Early on, Jane mistakes him for a bandit and pulls a knife on him, swearing a blue streak, and he makes fun of it for her for it while letting her know he heartily approves.  He's not verbally abusive and he never threatens Jane or his staff or his ward.  He's more sassy along the lines of Howl from Howl's moving Castle, and I can get behind that.

So my main irritation against Jane Eyre wasn't there.

Beyond that, the style of this novel does a nice job of mimicking Bronte.  The diction and sentence structure are similar.  Take the tag line, for example: "Reader, I murdered him."  Perfect.  The story beats align--a bit to the story's detriment because that second-act-breakup was a bit flimsy and I kept waiting for there to be a wife locked in the attic (I have good news on this front). 

It was similar, but the more proactive protagonist made it more fun.  I would say the story is also changed with a more modern sensibility, but I'm not sure that's accurate.  It's not true that in Victorian England there were no people of color and it's not true that in Victorian England women didn't have special-men-friends or think about sex.  It's just that they wrote about it way less in literature of that era.  So the presence of people of color is a more modern way of telling a story and fits more with what I want to read.

It's fun, but there's still an awful lot of violence against women.  Furthermore, I apparently have no understanding of how the East India Company works, because this all sounds ridiculous.  I think I'll survive with not understanding.

***

Next week: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, short stories by Ken Liu.