I thought of the spring blooms at Lowood in Jane Eyre, and more generally of the novels of the Brontë sisters, who had lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire and whose novels had accompanied me from my pre-teen years through graduate school and on to a professional life in the academy as a Victorianist. What was clear to me in that post-COVID spring was that the landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives. A specificity that demanded what I thought of as a kind of field-guide to the novels—what the Victorians called a “flora,” and which in the book excerpted here, I call a botany. (Read more)
Film Threat reviews Wuthering Heights: House Of The Damned.Charlotte, the debut novel by Elizabeth Ferris, is a historical reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s life during the turbulent year she wrote Jane Eyre. Facing rejection from publishers, financial pressures, and expectations that women abandon their literary ambitions, Brontë refuses to surrender her dream of becoming a novelist.Ferris is a writer and writing teacher based in West Virginia. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and has taught at the Studio School at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Richmond Young Writers.Charlotte will be published by William Morrow on April 6, 2027, the anniversary of Jane Eyre’s publication. It is available for pre-order now!Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Charlotte, designed by Elsie Lyons. Below, Ferris discusses drawing inspiration from the Brontë Parsonage Museum, incorporating the tools of Charlotte Brontë’s writing life, and how a simple ink blot captures the determination and frustration of one of literature’s most celebrated authors.While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?So much of writing Charlotte was about trying to live inside Charlotte Brontë’s head—seeing through her eyes, feeling through her consciousness. I think I didn’t dare conceive of a cover for fear it would break that spell, make me too self-conscious to take on the task of embodying such an iconic and mused-about author.Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?My editor, Jen, and her assistant Katie asked me to pull together some examples of recent covers I liked, as well as tell them anything I didn’t want in a cover. As a first time author, I was not expecting to be invited to have this much input—it was exciting, but also a bit daunting! We knew we wanted to have some element that gestured at the writing process itself—since the heart of the novel is really Charlotte’s struggle to produce Jane Eyre. It was Jen’s idea to feature a quill. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth has preserved much of the paraphernalia of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s writing life, so we were able to use their photographs as reference. I’m not a visual artist, and I’m a big believer in letting experts do their thing, so I really only had one request: If you do include an image of Charlotte Brontë, don’t make her look too pretty or too docile.What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?It took me a long time to draft Charlotte, including multiple revisions with my agent. I kept expecting each new step of the process to be the one that made it feel “real”—the first meeting with an interested editor, getting the offer, signing the contract, etc. In the end, it was seeing the book cover with the title and my name on it that convinced me I had really written a book and it was going to be published. There was also something full circle about the experience—I wrote a debut novel about Charlotte Brontë writing her debut novel (and like Charlotte I had a previous, unpublished attempt)—so I felt as if I was joining her in the experience of seeing that effort become tangible.How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?I love my cover! I think book covers are a gut thing. Do you want to pick up the book? Does the cover suggest a world you are compelled to enter? The cover Elsie Lyons created feels fresh and feminine, but also like it has the promise of tension and frustration. If there is one word that I would use to describe the Charlotte Brontë I met through my research and that I hoped to make live for readers, it is indefatigable. I love the ink blot that forms the “O” of Charlotte’s name. When I see that ink blot, I see Charlotte—fierce, frustrated, determined. That’s the Charlotte Brontë I fell in love with over the course of writing this book and that I hope the reader will fall in love with, too.What do you think Charlotte Brontë would think about the cover?I’ve thought a lot about what Charlotte Brontë would think of my attempt to represent her—as well as all the adaptations and think pieces about her work and life. My sense is she would be equal parts self-conscious and vindicated. She was someone who both craved recognition and shrank from the idea of exposure. Charlotte’s first creative ambition was actually to be an illustrator, so I think she would appreciate the vividness and intricacy of the patterned background. I suspect she would also love all the small details and flourishes that exist inside the book. This would be familiar to her—while book cover designs were not common in her time, touches of illustration and design inside the pages of a book were.
Hirani at least highlights the most gothic aspect of the Brontë source material: the doomed couple fit only for each other angle. That Heathcliff and Catherine are both far too dark for this world, yet perfect for each other, makes the pair ripe for the Gomez and Morticia treatment. Instead, Wuthering Heights: House Of The Damned just makes Heathcliff a psycho prick, and gives us a Catherine who is dead. Also, Townsend-Green strikes exactly the wrong chord by playing Lockwood for laughs. The whole stuffy-as-funny makes his suffering impossible to take seriously. He comes off as a hifalutin Mr. Bill, there for comic relief from watching him get clobbered repeatedly. And I mean repeatedly.The biggest problem with Wuthering Heights: House Of The Damned is how it just goes into the murk and stays there. Once it gives you a taste of its brand of cruelty, it repeats the brutality until the clock runs out. It ends up being one note, like toast with too much Vegemite on it. At one point near the end, the audience is treated to squeezing boils FX, in close-up. Imagine the planning and preparation for “Boil Day” in the production, now try to picture how that didn’t send up a warning flare. As Nina Garcia says on those fashion competitions: “Your level of taste concerns me.” Wuthering Heights: House Of The Damned ends up being a long slog up and down Buggery Hall until you fall flat. May make a decent sleep aid. (Michael Talbot-Haynes)
Speaking of reading a lot, one thing I loved about this novel is how it’s in conversation with the nineteenth-century novel. There’s a wonderful meta-moment about halfway through that I can’t stop thinking about. Louise senses a sympathetic response from her awful nosy neighbor, and Fremlin compares it to “the warm, genuine sorrow that an author can feel for his heroine when he is about to plunge her into yet worse disaster.” I don’t think I’d be brave enough to include a moment like this, but I love the way that it hearkens back to writers like Trollope, and there are definite Jane Eyre vibes in the ending.Yes, and Greek tragedy is in there too. Throughout the novel, Vera Brandon keeps mentioning Medea, and you could say that in a way, Fremlin was trying to update Medea for the contemporary era. As I said, I don’t know if Fremlin was reading crime fiction when she wrote this book. I think she was just so interested in domestic life and figuring out the darkness that lay not so far beneath the surface, and that was what she was preoccupied with. I think at one point she said that her favorite things were gossip and what people were up to, and just the day-to-day vagaries of life. This was somebody who really drew a lot of inspiration from what we might characterize as “mundane,” but clearly she saw so much rich material to mine in those situations. (Polly Stewart)
“Jane Eyre” has been haunting my life since high school. This may seem strange, but after completing a thesis project on Charlotte Brontë’s novels my senior year, I continue to see its tropes and versions of its characters everywhere. The “crazy first wife” or “madwoman in the attic” trope was popularized by “Jane Eyre” and, despite the changes that the trope has undergone, our culture still appears fascinated with how this trope portrays the dark female psyche. Bertha Mason — Mr. Rochester’s first wife — and Jane provide symbolism and commentary beyond their characters, making the novel compelling even all these years later. However, many modern interpretations often lack this nuance and focus on the “madwoman” aspect to create more thriller-esque works (hello, “Verity”).In “Jane Eyre,” Bertha serves as a dark mirror of Jane and essentially is the hidden and repressed side of Jane’s personality. With Bertha’s desperation to escape the locked attic and cause destruction in Jane’s life at Thornfield Hall, she is the embodiment of the violent and angry parts of Jane that are begging to be seen. While her symbolic existence as Jane’s darkness diminishes her as a character in her own right, it makes for more development of Jane’s characterization, feelings and reactions, stemming from her childhood all the way to becoming Mr. Rochester’s second wife.Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea” — a companion novel that serves as a postcolonial critique of “Jane Eyre” — explores Bertha’s marriage to Mr. Rochester, and seeks to correct the lack of characterization that Bertha receives. The book goes a step further by delving into her Creole heritage and implying Mr. Rochester is at fault for the devolution from the bright young woman at the start of the novel to the deranged woman seen in “Jane Eyre.” The relationship between these two books also depicts an aspect of the narrative that is common in modern versions of “the crazy first wife” trope: The husband is usually the driving factor in the wife’s descent into “madness.”While more recent works like “Verity” and “The Housemaid” are both variations of this “madwoman” trope, where the first wife appears “crazy” to the new woman in the house by the admission of the often-suspect husband, they don’t include the original context of having the “madwoman in the attic” as a representation of the darkness within the main protagonist’s psyche. They instead use the mystery surrounding the “crazed” first wife and why she’s locked up as a vehicle for the protagonist’s conflict with the love interest, rather than as an opportunity to explore the dark nature shared between the first wife and the repressed psyche of the protagonist. [...]While I enjoy seeing homages to the beloved “Jane Eyre,” modern media should strive to more wholly incorporate the dark, unpleasant thoughts that are often inherent to womanhood without commiting to demonizing their characters. The internet is obsessed with society’s acceptance, or lack thereof, regarding “complex female characters,” but I hope that we are moving away from separating the “madwoman” from the heroine. (Maeve McGinn)
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