D.M. Thomas. In Memoriam

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The poet, novelist, biographer, playwright and altogether controversial creator D.M. Thomas (1935-2023) passed away a few days ago. The Telegraph publishes an obituary:

DM Thomas, the novelist, poet, playwright and translator, who has died aged 88, was hailed by some as one of Britain’s most remarkable writers, but the dark and sexually explicit content of much of his work (“I am obsessed by sex,” he once admitted) led others to dismiss him as the “dirty old man” of English letters.

In 2000, he published Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre:

A manuscript is discovered purporting to be the work of Charlotte Brontë. The manuscript, both remarkable and surprising, offers a darker, alternative ending to the story of Jane and Mr. Rochester in the classic Jane Eyre.

Freed from the constraints of Victorian modesty and subservience, D. M. Thomas' modern 'Jane Eyre' is sexually and politically enlightened, but also troubled and sometimes cruel. Jane's damaged personality resonates at the centre of this haunting book.

D. M. Thomas uses the basic elements of Jane Eyre to tease the tangle of Victorian melodrama into a new form. By transporting the action to modern day Martinique, he examines the changing patterns of slavery and colonialism. Pursuing the unforgettable characters of Jane and Rochester through time, D. M. Thomas brings them into focus for the modern reader.

The writer was quite proud of his work:

 I was invited by a publisher to write an unorthodox continuation of 'Jane Eyre'. So this starts in Victorian fiction and style and continues in the age of feminism.

It oughtn't to work, given that it was written to a challenge, and also at a dark time in my life; but on re-reading, ten years on, it seems to. And it has two serious inter-related themes, the change in woman over a century and a half and different forms of enslavement and dependence.

The reviewers of The Telegraph, as quoted in the obituary, were considerably less impressed:

Charlotte (2000) was a revision of the final chapters of Jane Eyre as written by Miranda, a millennial reincarnation of Charlotte Brontë, who exercises her libidinal freedom in Martinique, where she is attending a “post-feminist, second-stage dialectic” conference on women writers. 

The headline on one review read “Reader, I had sex with just about everybody”, but in the face of the furious reaction the book provoked in some quarters, Thomas was unrepentant. “I don’t think the Brontë scholars should get annoyed,” he said. “They just shouldn’t read it.”

And, of course, he had a point.