A chat and a review

The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë by Laura Joh Rowland is released tomorrow. The Times-Picayune devoted not one but two articles to it. First there is a conversation with Laura Joh Rowland.

In this engaging mystery, Rowland takes Charlotte from her sheltered life in the village of Haworth to the palaces of London and beyond, with many parallels to the path of her fictional counterpart Jane Eyre.
"There are definite parallels between Charlotte and Jane," says Rowland, noting that both worked as governesses, something that plays a part in her book. "Both had a lot of passion. They were ambitious -- they had the fire to be something more than they were. Like the classic heroine, they wanted to go places."
And in Rowland's book, Mr. Slade, an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, is a delectable stand-in for Jane Eyre's beloved Rochester.
"The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte" is a sure bet for the fans of Jane Austen, who've sprung up all over the place lately, as well as anyone else who fancies an entertaining trip through the highs and lows of Victorian England. Trying to solve the murder of a woman she meets on the train to London leads Charlotte away from her quiet village existence and pseudonymous writing career into a world of global politics and intrigue.
Reader, she's spunky and adventurous and a die-hard romantic all the way. She's a heroine for our times.
"Charlotte is the patron saint of all wannabe female authors," said Rowland in an interview in her home on Arts Street. "She shows us that if you want something enough, if you put enough time into it, and if you follow your heart, it will take you amazing places.
"Charlotte cared what people thought of her, but she did what she wanted to do and took the hits. She triumphed over the everyday things that circumscribed her life."
Some of those things were fairly catastrophic. Charlotte had to teach in terrible schools and be a governess to "awful young people," Rowland points out, while dealing with the dismaying toll that disease took on the family.
"There are definite parallels between Charlotte and Jane," says Rowland, noting that both worked as governesses, something that plays a part in her book. Charlotte's mother and two older sisters died when she was a child; her only brother, Branwell, become a ne'er-do-well laudanum addict. She and her other sisters, Anne and Emily, lived most of their adult lives with their father, Patrick, in a humble village parsonage. Charlotte had a late-life marriage, after Anne and Emily succumbed to tuberculosis, and she herself met an early, tragic death.
In her new novel, Rowland is determined to give her heroine the exciting experiences her real life didn't allow. She hopes the book will be the first in a series, perhaps a trilogy taking Charlotte to the end of her life.
The family of unlikely authors -- Emily wrote "Wuthering Heights"; Anne, "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" -- offers lots of book fodder.
"I love Charlotte's letters," Rowland says. "She was amazingly frank. She's always carrying on about something, or telling someone off. She was a very vocal correspondent."
"The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte" also had to overcome a few obstacles. It took Rowland more than seven years to finish the book, which is carefully researched. She wrote it in spare moments between continuing her samurai detective series at more or less a book-a-year pace and carrying out what she terms the business of writing. Since 1993, Rowland has published 12 Sano Ichiro books; number 13 will be on the shelves in November.
"It was also hard to come up with a plot that took advantage of that fascinating time," she says. "I didn't want to write a small and limited village mystery. I had to learn all of European history of the period to send Charlotte on her adventures."
The driver for part of the plot is the opium wars that were fought between Great Britain and China from 1839-42 over Britain's right to import the drug from India to China.
"England in the Victorian era had a finger in every pie in the world," Rowland says. "Charlotte was passionately interested in politics and the world around her. I couldn't have her limited to her own life in Haworth -- she wanted to do more." (Diana Pinckley)

And secondly there is a review of the book:

Like the Victorian governess she was for a time, Charlotte Bronte was meant for better things.
She's a famous author and her "Jane Eyre" is a classic, acclaimed from the very date of its publication in 1847. But Charlotte herself was stuck in a tiny British village, living in the drafty parsonage with her aging father and her two sisters, who were also novelists but not nearly as successful and not above the occasional jealous remark. Virtually no one knew she was "Currer Bell," the pseudonym under which she published, and there were no dashing eligible men to engage her passion.
Laura Joh Rowland has rescued our heroine, giving her a generous measure of excitement combined with more than a dash of romance in "The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte." You'll want to go adventuring right along with her.
A train trip from Charlotte's home in Haworth to London sets the intricate plot in motion. Her publisher believes that the novels "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" are all penned by Charlotte. Never mind the fact that there are three different pseudonyms for the three novelists, all having the last name of Bell. When he accuses Charlotte of breach of contract, the only way she knows to settle the matter is to present herself and her sister Anne, author of "Agnes Grey," to him to prove there are indeed two of them. Their sister Emily, author of "Wuthering Heights," is a semi-recluse who can't be convinced to accompany them.
On the train to London, quiet Anne sleeps while extrovert Charlotte meets Isabel White, an attractive governess laden with the kind of moral baggage you can't stow. Charlotte's experience as a parson's daughter, expected to help troubled souls, inclines her to offer a sympathetic ear. But she has no idea that the attractive governess will turn desperately to her for help in the next several hours, minutes before being stabbed to death in an alley near Charlotte's hotel.
The game's afoot, taking Charlotte from Haworth and London to Brussels, Scotland and the high seas to solve the mystery, putting herself in danger to save her country even though she has doubts about the wisdom of its foreign policy. Her family remains doubtful about her actions, even as they encounter dangers that destroy the calm of the parsonage.
As Charlotte guides us through her expanding and increasingly hazardous adventures, her courage never falters. And her voice always rings true to her Victorian time -- "The coast was a line of golden sunshine, touched with viridian green" -- while never seeming stiff or stilted.
Rowland is a proven creator of finely drawn societies that are exotic to our modern eyes, with a dozen books in her popular Sano Ichiro samurai detective series set in 17th century Japan. Her portrayal of the daily details in 1840s England is equally sure. And there's a lot of action in this book, too.
And after you finish this engaging read, you're likely to wander through your life preoccupied by when you can return to Charlotte's world. (Diana Pinckley)

Oh, indeed. And BrontëBlog's own review of the book should be online in just a few hours.

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë