So, as I read up on this novel, it was originally titled Adele when it was released in 2000, and renamed The French Dancer’s Bastard in 2006. It is a spin-off/supplementary story to give more context to Adele, the child for whom Jane Eyre is hired as a governess.
The book gets a lot of hate for its confused narrative and rewriting of the original story. I think it holds better to the original than many of the spin-off books, but that’s not to say that the author didn’t take some wild liberties and end up making the original a lie in the process. Spoiler alert for the following.
The essentials are that Adele is happy in Paris with her mom, but Rochester misunderstands her night out with the Viscount and kills him in a duel. Her mom is then left destitute, follows a new lover to Italy, and leaves Adele in France to be taken in by Rochester. He does so, but Adele is lonely and miserable in England. Curiously, the Jane Eyre novel makes it clear that Adele has a French maid with her, Sophie, yet Sophie is nowhere mentioned in this spinoff. Perhaps because it would get in the way of Adele’s wandering through the house and finally making contact with Bertha. She finds some comfort in Bertha, who also speaks French, but in Adele’s mind, understanding that Rochester is already married to Bertha, Adele reasons that Bertha is an impediment to Rochester being reunited to her mother Celine, and all three of them living happily ever after.
There is one chapter where I read it as Adele locking Bertha on the roof, and then setting the room on fire. But later on, Adele says she locked the room, which forced Bertha to try and climb down a drain pipe, at which point she falls to her death. This precedes the fire at Thornfield so the body is apparently disposed of, but Rochester is afraid the cops will come looking for him. And oh, by the way, it was the drunkard Grace Poole who fell off the roof at the fire. Yep.
Fast forward five years after Rochester and Jane’s wedding, Adele is now 14, and returns to Paris to find her mom. She joins the circus where her mom had worked (not an opera dancer) as a high wire walker, hoping that her mom will return there. Then she learns that her mom had died, and ….dun, dun, DUUUUUNNNNN…. she has a twin brother!!! I’ll skip some of the silliness to say that she finally gives up looking to her mom for any kind of reference in life and decides that while she decidedly did NOT like Jane earlier, she recognizes Jane has been the real guide for her life, and returns home.
An even more surreal postscript tells us that in fact, Adele didn’t kill Bertha, it was Mrs Fairfax who plotted the whole thing by drugging Adele and making her think it was her. Mrs Fairfax is revealed as the evil behind the entire plot and swings for her efforts. Well… take THAT, fans of the original novel!
The writing really is difficult to sort through and thoughts seem to jump around without anything much like a narrative structure. The chapters are narrated by various characters in turn, most by Adele, some by Edward, a few by Grace Poole, and one by Mrs Fairfax.
Overall, for the same reason I have disliked almost all of the spin-off supplemental Jane Eyre stories, I didn’t like this one either. It seems like every writer makes the original into a lie hiding dark secrets, rather than bringing more depth.