The outsider in the family

Some days ago we presented Diane Setterfield's new book The Thirteenth Tale. The Book Reporter interviews the author and some of the questions revolve around the Jane Eyre influences on her book:

Q: Several 19th century novels are mentioned throughout the story, JANE EYRE in particular. What inspiration did you draw from these novels, and do they play any significant role in your life?

DS: I was a child when I first read JANE EYRE. The book enthralled me, up to the death of Jane's friend Helen Burns. How I cried. But then, like Aurelius, I couldn't quite see the point of the rest of the book. I was too young, evidently. All my adult re-readings of the novel (which are not so numerous as Margaret's) have never quite erased the impression of that first reading. "My" Jane is still that unwanted child who finds friendship only to lose it again.

(WARNING: this next paragraph contains spoilers)
I had no grand plan in introducing JANE EYRE and other titles into THE THIRTEENTH TALE. It seems curious to me now how they crept in. For creep they did, in silence and behind my back. It is impossible to reconstitute the processes of writing after the event, but to the best of my recollection it went something like this: JANE EYRE was the first actual book title to be mentioned. It came at a very early stage when I was writing odd scenes as they occurred to me, in a rather experimental fashion, as a way of figuring out what I could do with my characters. At this point the mystery of the girl in the mist was still a long way in the future. I wrote a piece about a girl climbing the bookshelves in the library at Angelfield House: she ends up slipping, bringing the curtains down with her and dislodging a book as she falls. The book was JANE EYRE. This passage never made it into THE THIRTEENTH TALE, but Jane Eyre, having once got in, never left. Only much later, when the girl in the mist element came to be, did I realize the connection between Miss Winter's story and Jane's: the outsider in the family. So it's one of those instances where the writing was ahead of the writer in knowing what it was doing, and it illustrates the extent to which writing is more about discovery than invention.

Categories: Books, Jane_Eyre