Jane Eyre's Daughter

A new Jane Eyre sequel is published in a few days:

Jane Eyre’s Daughter
By: Elizabeth Newark
Sourcebooks, Inc
Product ISBN: 9781402212376
Price: $12.95
Publication Date: September 2008

With Jane Austen sequels proliferating, it’s about time someone created a sequel to Austen’s rival Charlotte Brontë!

In this sequel to Jane Eyre, young Janet Rochester is consigned to Highcrest Manor and the guardianship of the strict Colonel Dent while her parents journey to the West Indies. As she struggles to make a life for herself guided by their ideals, she is caught up in the mysteries of Highcrest.

Why is the East Wing forbidden to her? What lies behind locked gates? And what is the source of the voices she hears in the night? Can she trust the enigmatic Roderick Landless or should she transfer her allegiance to the suave and charming Sir Hugo Calendar?

Riding her mare on the Yorkshire moors, holding her own with Colonel Dent, or waltzing at her first ball, Janet is a strong and sympathetic character, and like her mother, she will need all her courage ...

Hollywood Today talks with the author Elizabeth Newark:

“My two favorite all-time books are ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Jane Eyre’,” says ‘Jane Eyre’s Daughter’ author Elizabeth Newark. “I took longer to get started on ‘Jane Eyre’s Daughter’, which needed a different kind of writing style. I replayed some incidents from the original book…Janet’s meeting with Roderick Landless in the lane, the mystery of the noises in the night…and my book became, I felt, an echo of the original book.”

In ‘Jane Eyre’s Daughter’, Jane’s daughter Janet is left in London at a girls school while her parents and brother Oliver go to Jamaica. Janet grows more independent, but misses her family. When letters become few and far between, and then nonexistent, Janet fears the worst. What’s happened to her family? Is she an orphan?

“One reason I took to writing sequels was that I couldn’t write modern dialogue,” says Newark. “In East Africa I moved in a limited circle of government employees, where the English was roughly BBC. In America, I was defeated by accents and words that were all over the place. Writing sequels in the English of earlier times was a solution.”

“Jane Eyre’s Daughter took me about two years to write,” says Newark. “It was self-published in 1999. Once again, I enjoyed myself hugely.”

“I started writing, to my own great surprise, when I was thirty and was living about 10 miles outside Nairobi, Kenya, beyond the National Park,” says Newark. “At that time I had a baby and a job, so you can tell the impulse was strong.”

“One evening, at about ten o’clock, my husband and I were standing on our verandah, giving our dog a last run, when an African askari [policeman] came up our drive and told us that there were two lions at the entrance to the drive,” says Newark. “Go inside, he said. We collared Tina, our Alsatian, but still stood outside the house, listening and watching.”

“All at once, Tina’s fur began to rise on her neck and she gave a low growl,” says Newark. “Then we heard rustling and crunching from the dead leaves behind the hedge that made a half circle around our house. Tina turned slowly as the lions moved round the back of the hedge. We never saw them but we knew they were there.”

“Well, there you are,” says Newark. “A story waiting to be told. So I wrote it and eventually sold it to Dent.” ‘Lions and Karen’ was published 1964 under the name Betty Dinneen, Newark’s married name.

“In fact I wrote three sequels,” says Newark. “The last being the world’s only mouse version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ entitled ‘Eligibility, Being an Account of the Romance Between Miss Elizabeth Mouse and Mr. Fitzwilliam Souris’. “I haven’t yet found a publisher for this, but I feel it would, if published, find its way into the Christmas stocking of every Jane Austen reader in the country.”

Elizabeth Newark is originally from the heart of London, in Rutland Gate Mews, Knightsbridge. She currently lives in Berkeley, California. Newark has written ten books, seven children’s books and three sequels. (Gabrielle Pantera)

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Sequels