This is a collection of short stories inspired by Jane Eyre.
I’ve read Jane Eyre five times now, I think, and this year decided to do something different. So I picked up this collection of short stories “inspired by Jane Eyre”, and the line: “Reader, I married him”, in particular being the prompt for many of the stories. The line is stated to reveal “not just Jane Eyre’s determination, but Charlotte Bronte’s too”.
A few of the stories take their cue directly from Jane Eyre and adding details from different angles. Others merely include elements from the book, such as the moors. Many tell stories of weddings, some of married life, with no real attempt to tie back into the book.
I ended up giving this book a one out of five stars on goodreads. It was disappointing in just about every way possible. I had hoped to get some writers contributions on backstories of various characters, or something that would add to my understanding of Jane Eyre, a book I’ve come to love. Of the 21 stories included, three attempted to do that. The rest took the prompt “Reader I Married Him” and simply wrote their own stories of falling in love and marrying, or not. Of the three stories that actually did attempt to add more depth to the original, two stood out.
In one, Grace Pool gives her testimony about what happened when Jane showed up. She claims to have had an earlier affair with Rochester and was left pregnant. While away she gets smallpox, which has destroyed her looks, so Rochester is no longer interested. She returns to nurse Bertha and has a genuine concern for her, but Grace is deeply distrustful of Jane and sees her as a conniving interloper.
OK, like it or not, that’s a genuine attempt to add depth to the original.
Another has Rochester secretly writing his version of events, claiming that he really did love Bertha, and was in fact trying to reconcile when Bertha fell off the roof and died. Then Jane came in and sort of railroaded him into marriage, actually preferring him in his degraded condition because it gave her more power and control over him. Don’t love that take, but ok, things could have gotten to that point, and it does add some continuation to the story.
The third one is Rochester and Jane going to therapy, where Rochester and his therapist seem (to Jane) to be trying to portray her as mentally unstable because she insists that she saw Bertha. Rochester, says it was nothing more than a parrot, and Bertha had actually died. The implication is that Rochester is now trying to get Jane declared mad, as he had done with Bertha earlier. I like this even less than the second, but again, it’s at least related to the original. Rather than adding depth to the original, it’s more like an alternate story. Don’t really care for the therapy angle.
On the exact opposite of the spectrum is the story of a woman in Zambia, whose granddaughter is engaged. The granddaughter and her fiance are caught having sex in the shed, and, if I understood the story, afterward, the dude takes off and the story ends. The writer is a Zambian-American woman, and ok, she wrote something that she knows about, but I can’t see that it had anything to do with Jane Eyre, OR the prompt. There were several stories like that.
Anyway, as I mentioned, this book was a giant disappointment for me.
The summaries of the stories are below. I bolded the titles that were actually about Jane Eyre.
My Mother’s Wedding- Tessa Hadley
A hippy wedding where the mom is supposed to get married to a younger guy, but the daughter ends up proposing to him after the younger sister hurts herself in protest to the proposed wedding. The finale was supposed to be the husband and wife wading naked into a pond, and after the daughter proposes to him, she wades in naked first… the story ends with him hesitating on the shore.
Luxury Hour- Sarah Hall
A woman goes swimming in October in an open-air pool. After she finishes, and is walking back home, she meets an ex-lover. They exchange small talk and then she breaks it off and heads on. As the story ends, she is regretting that she hasn’t told him that she has a child that was apparently his.
Grace Poole Her Testimony- Helen Dunmore
Grace gives her testimony about what she saw in the Rochester household. She is jealous and resentful about Jane as she speaks. She talks about what she saw and heard as Rochester has Dr. Gallion do a phrenology exam on Bertha, and how she (Grace) feels that every judgment was rendered against Bertha during the exam.
Grace shares that she started at around 15 as a girl in the house, and that she was lovely and often got attention from men much older. Rochester was drawn to her and they have sex, and she gets pregnant. He pays for her to have the baby elsewhere, promising to provide. While away she gets smallpox and her looks are ruined. She returned to Thornfield and, not wanting to be seen by anyone, she begins to wait on Bertha. She soon learns Bertha’s preferences and has a genuine concern for her.
Grace sees Jane as an interloper that could never really stir Rochester as she did.
At the end, Grace has made Bertha a custard and spoon feeds her as one would a child.
Dangerous Dog- Kirsty Gunn
This is a story about writing a story. A woman takes a writing class and they are looking at Jane Eyre: the scene where she is locked up by Mrs. Reed in the red room. On the way home from class she comes across 4 young men mistreating a dog. The writer sees “red” in that moment and confronts the four boys. She engages them by settling the dog down, calling him “Rochester”, and explaining how the dog just wanted to be understood and loved. She tells the four what she knows of the story, and they give up on the dog, though dismissive at first about the lady writer and what she has to say. She ends up getting married to the teacher of the writing class.
To Hold- Joanna Briscoe
The story begins: “Reader, I married him, because I had to. You see, we did in those days. There was no glimmer of a choice.” The young protagonist is approached by Dougie, a young man she had only limited contact with for marriage. She had her eye on another, but he had not asked, so she accepts, though she doesn’t love Dougie. They have a few kids and awkwardly attempt to establish some kind of depth to the relationship, but they are just too different. However, the writer finds a deep friendship with a teacher friend of hers.
Dougie is killed in a work accident though and she is immediately courted by her first love, likely for an affair rather than marriage, but she resists. Then she marries another teacher at her school, Robert, whom she genuinely likes. She continues to grow in friendship with her friend Mary, until it crosses into a romantic relationship. Robert finds out and divorces her.
Then she finally marries her first-love, John. But she insists that their wedding night be consummated on the moor.
It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies- Jane Gardam
Gramma tells her story about her life with her husband, a sailor. About the only connection to Jane Eyre is she states “I married him”, when speaking of her husband.
Since First I Saw Your Face- Emma Donaghue
The story is based on real correspondence of Ellen Hall and Minnie Sidgwick. They are both temporary residents at a curative spa in Weisbaden. Minnie is the wife of an older man, who has produced 6 children in 11 years. Ellen is unmarried. The two become fast friends and Ellen falls in love with Minnie. Minnie recounts that her husband had noted her from when she was 11, and taken the care to groom her intellectually. When she was of age, he married her. She feels trapped and, while she respects him, she doesn’t love him. As Minnie is summoned to return home, Ellen tries to talk her out of it, and offers to let Minnie stay with her. But Minnie has committed herself to her marriage and returns.
The note at the end explains that Minnie continued to fall in love with various women, and after her husband died, she lived with one until she died.
Reader, I Married Him- Susan Hill
Story of an American girl who married the heir to the English throne. The King’s name in the story is David, which was the last of seven names for the Duke of Windsor, Edward VIII, who actually did abdicate the throne rather than give up his love for Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Simpson had been married and divorced twice, the second time to Ernest, who is also mentioned in the story. So this is a fictional retelling of Edward and Wallis.
The Mirror- Francine Prose
This story is written from Jane’s point of view, but after she and Rochester have been married some years. He then tells her that his wife Bertha had not lived in the attic, she had in fact died back in Jamaica. There was a parrot that Bertha had kept, which Rochester brought back to England, which made so much noise, it drove the household nuts. So the parrot was kept in the attic. The mad woman that snuck around the house was a local crazy that would sneak in cause problems.
Jane protests that several trustworthy people had testified to the wife being upstairs, but Rochester insisted they had gotten it wrong, and wondered if Jane was calling him a liar.
After a few years, Jane and Rochester start couple’s therapy……with a Dr Collins, chosen by Rochester himself. The issue was Jane’s “crazy ideas” about the madwoman in the attic. The doctor provided a document certifying Bertha’s death back in Jamaica, which, Jane notes, is a bit of a strange thing to do for a therapist, but they moved on.
During the therapy, Jane feels that there is entirely too much focus on HER history and problems, and not enough on who exactly sliced her wedding veil.
Early on in the history of the therapy, Edward takes her to a zoo and, finding a parrot, asks her if she hadn’t heard something similar. Jane insists that it wasn’t like the parrot.
During the therapy, Edward brings up Jane’s having been locked in the red room, and being terrified of ghosts, and asks if that trauma could perhaps explain Jane’s imagination about the ripped veil?
The doctor asks Jane if she had a history of sleepwalking, but Jane says no. Her stay at Lowood is brought up Jane begins to wonder why Rochester would want the doctor to think that she was mad.
Jane wonders if this is some sort of repeating pattern in Rochester’s life: marry a girl, drive her nuts, burn the house down, marry someone else, repeat. But she settles that she had married him, and they had a child. If things got dangerous for her or her child, she would leave, but overall, both she and Rochester did a decent job of raising the boy. Rochester’s eyesight continued to improve and Jane feels like she is noticing that he sometimes doesn’t like what he is seeing in her. She mentions that she took pride in not being vain, so had let her appearance go. But they continue in therapy, always discussing her life as a series of traumas that had to produce a damaged adult.
As little Edward turned two, he began crying a lot, so they took him to a doctor. He was pronounced fine, so they took him to a child therapist. Dr Grey sees Jane as a resilient woman, and the child as basically ok, but sometimes anxious. But she notes that Rochester himself seemed to be depressed.
But little Edward continues crying. Rochester hires a governess for him to help make him more independent and less neurotically and morosely attached to Jane. The governess herself was vaguely pretty, but slightly resentful and sullen-looking woman. During the interview, the governess tells Jane’s story as if it were her own. When she mentions that the previous house she worked at had a crazy woman locked in the attic, Rochester states that it wasn’t a wife, but a parrot. At this point, Jane wonders about her own future, stating it felt like she was a visitor from the future, looking into a mirror.
A Migrating Bird- Elif Shafak
A Turkish girl, Ayla, meets a Dutch man, Gerard, in Turkey to study the language. She is reluctant to speak to him but slowly develops romantic feelings for him. Her friends and family try to talk her out of it, but she is convinced he loves her too, and that he will convert to Islam for her. She finally sends an email to him confessing her feelings but he responds that she has misunderstood his feelings, and that he is not interested in her. He will not be returning to Turkey. She tries to move on, but recognizes while nothing has changed, nothing will be the same either.
Behind the Mountain- Evie Wyld
An English woman moves with her husband to someplace on the edge of the wild in Canada. She briefly meets a mountain woman/recluse, Old Annie, who was nearly scalped by a bear. Yep. That’s the story.
The China from Buenos Aires- Patricia Park
Teresa lives in Harlem, a recent Korean-Argentine immigrant from Buenos Aires. She has been sent to America to study and hopefully do better, but she struggles to learn English and fit in. She runs across Yuna, another Korean-Argentine girl she knew in Argentina. She is invited to the house for a meal, where she also meets Yuna’s brother Juan. They strike up a friendship and find places to eat that carry Argentine food.
Teresa gets a call that her father has had a heart attack, but the economic situation in Argentina is so bad that there is no money for the family to fly her back to see him.
Juan confesses he loves her, and buys her a round trip ticket to visit her family. While in Buenos Aires, Teresa is informed that the family’s shop will be sold, and Teresa understands that her family can no longer support her, now she must support the family.
She knows the better opportunities are in NY, but hesitates leaving Buenos Aires again. However, she asks her mom if she loved her dad from the start, and her mom replies no, but that it grows in its own special way. Teresa makes up her mind to return to NY and accept Juan’s offer because it will help her family.
Reader, She Married Me- Salley Vickers
This story is written from Rochester’s point of view. He tells the story of his marriage to Bertha. They first lived near her family, but he found them unbearable, and so moved to the far side of the island where they lived for 2 years. Bertha is pregnant and gives birth to a little girl, Clara. Clara is sickly and cries a lot, and Bertha changes in character, from easy going to shrill and distraught. Rochester says that her race is superstitious, so Bertha begins to declare the child wasn’t her own, but had been switched out. Soon, Bertha disavows the child and refuses to see her. Rochester decides to take Bertha back to England, hoping the change of temperature would help. They leave the child, hoping that Clara would join them soon.
Bertha does seem to get better, but when they send for the child, they are informed she has died. This grief brought back Bertha’s madness. Rochester begins to regret not having brought Clara back to England.
On the night that Thornfield burned, Rochester found Bertha on the roof, with one of their child’s toys. At that moment, Rochester had hoped for a reconciliation with Bertha, but she jumped to her death.
Rochester then recalls Jane’s story that she had heard his voice calling in the night and how she had come to him. He confesses that at that moment he was not in love with Jane, but she persisted and Rochester gave up and consented. He questions her having heard him call her name, for he can only recall crying out Clara’s name. He also wonders if his initial attraction to Jane might have been because she reminded him of Clara in a way.
As his vision had recovered, he feels Jane preferred him maimed, so that she could exert control over him, particularly since, given his guilt, she holds the upper hand. One night he finds her writing down her story, and Rochester is certain she will paint herself as the morally triumphant heroine, which is why he wanted his own version written down.
Dorset Gap- Tracy Chevalier
Ed meets Jenn after an all-night rave. She leaves on a walk and he tags along wordlessly. They stop along the way where Jenn pulls out a copy of Jane Eyre to read. He tries to make small talk but she isn’t that interested. They go to the Dorset Gap and there at a junction, is a book where people leave quotes. Jenn quotes Jane Eyre: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” She explains it is from Jane Eyre. He writes the one line he could remember of the book: “Reader, she married me.”
Party Girl- Nadifa Mohamed
A Somali-English girl’s story about struggling to find solid work after university. She is attractive and has gotten a lot of attention from me, but was never really responsive to it. She then meets an immigrant man and they develop a relationship.
Transference- Esther Freud
Woman goes to a therapist, develops feelings for therapist, they talk about it, nothing happens.
The Mash-Up- Linda Grant
A Jewish girl and a Persian man, Ali, get married. They and their families are all secular, so they decide to avoid any religious symbolism at the wedding. They hire “Rabbi Larry”, a homosexual who will officiate the wedding according to their wishes. As the ceremony is moving along, Ali has to step on the glass and when he does, a piece breaks off and goes through his foot. He spends the rest of the day in the hospital. When the wife comes back home, she finds him asleep with the mother lying next to him, who informs her that she’ll spend the night there. The marriage doesn’t last 6 months. A friend of the bride attended another wedding officiated by Rabbi Larry, where the bride was accidentally locked in a bathroom, causing the wedding to be delayed an hour. The story ends with “Say what you like, in my opinion, Rabbi Larry is a f***ing jinx.”
The Self-Seeding Sycamore- Lionel Shriver
Jeanette loses her husband, who was the one who had maintained the garden. After a while of neglecting the garden overall, she decides to tackle it in memory of her husband. She soon realizes that the neighbor has a ‘self-seeding sycamore’ that spreads spores all over her yard. She tries to convince him to have the tree taken down, but he refuses. Finally she decides to cut down what is hanging over her side, but she falls and injures herself. Her neighbor, Burt, comes to her rescue and they strike up a friendship that seemingly leads to a romance.
The Orphan Exchange- Audrey Niffenegger
The characters are Jane and Helen, but the setting is some modern day war-torn country, we aren’t told which. Helen doesn’t die, but is sent away. As they grow older, Jane gets a job at Rochester’s house but none of the romance of Jane Eyre occurs, instead she is free at 18 to do as she likes. She returns to her city and meets Helen. Helen was used as a disease testing guinea pig, given small-pox and the cure, which didn’t work. They live together and get married.
Double Men- Namwali Serpell
Young girl in Zambia gets ready to have marriage ceremony but she and fiance are caught having sex before the wedding… he takes off… I didn’t care enough to figure out what this had to do with Jane Eyre.
Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark- Elizabeth McCracken
Two homos take their adopted son to a German themed waterpark in Galveston Texas. During the river ride, the son gets dunked and loses his bathing suit, but one of the dads, terrified of drowning, is so happy the son’s alive, that he proposes at the end of the ride.