When I was 10, I walked into Duncraig Library as I'd done every week of my life thus far. I'd already worked my way through all the Enid Blytons, all the horse books, all the Chalet School series and all the Nancy Drews. The librarian wouldn't let me into the adult section of the library until I was 12. So I had to find something else in the children's section to occupy me. I decided to start reading the classics. Yes, I was a nerdy, bookish 10-year-old.
I started with the "A" section, but some other nerdy, bookish 10-year-old must have visited the library that day because there were no Jane Austens left. I continued onto "B", and found a book called Jane Eyre. More than half the front cover featured a large image of Rochester on his rearing horse. In the bottom left-hand corner, taking up only about one-eighth of the cover space, was a woman. Yes, the woman whose name was on the front cover of the book was the smallest thing on that cover. That didn't strike me as particularly odd at the time — feminism hadn't quite found its way to Warwick, where I lived.
I took the book home and started to read. Within a couple of chapters, I was lost forever to the magic of Charlotte Bronte's story. In an interview with Emerald Fennell about her Wuthering Heights adaptation, she said that her movie reflected the impression the book made on her when she first read it as a 14-year-old. That resonated with me. Back when I read Jane Eyre, what stayed with me was the so-called madwoman in the attic and Jane's best friend dying of consumption. Mysterious fires in bedrooms, men stabbed and bitten, an entire house burned down by the madwoman. It was only much later that I realised the main character of Jane had left hardly a mark on my consciousness.
But when I reread the book as an adult, I couldn't believe that I'd been so seduced by the darkness and that I'd entirely overlooked the best part of the book — its heroine. (...)
It was time to find a different era and setting for my next book, meaning I'd have to brainstorm an idea from nothing for the first time in years. (....)
What if I reimagined Jane Eyre in some way? Immediately I could see Rochester's gothic Thornfield Hall transformed into the gothic Chateau Marmont. I had my book idea. I'd write The Chateau On Sunset, a reimagining of Jane Eyre, set at Hollywood's infamous Chateau Marmont during its 1950s and 1960s heyday. And I would tackle the sense of dissatisfaction I'd had with Jane's story since rereading it as an adult.
What was I dissatisfied about? Well, there are many occasions in the book when Jane looks out at the hills that form a barricade between her and the rest of the world. She longs to cross those hills. She yearns to see the world, to have adventures. On the very first page of Bronte's novel, Jane's reading a book about birds and she imagines what it would be like to travel to the same places those birds do — the Arctic, Siberia. Does she? No. There's just one occasion in the book when she escapes beyond those hills. She runs across the moors and finds herself in a house with a man who's probably even more obsessive than Rochester. She promptly escapes back to Thornfield and her true love, Edward Rochester. It's no spoiler to say that, reader, she marries him. It's a romantically satisfying ending. As a child, I was completely happy with it. But as an adult I wondered — did Jane ever regret not having seen the wider world that she so longed to experience? Was there a way to give Jane Eyre an ending that was both romantically satisfying and personally satisfying?
That's what's so wonderful about literary reimaginings. Jane Eyre is one of the first feminist heroines of literature. Who can forget her declaring to Rochester, in an era when the word feminism was foreign to most, that she was his equal? (
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