Fayne

If you find that this synopsis has some evident Brontë echoes, you are quite right. A new novel published in the last months:

Fayne

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Tramp Press

ISBN: 978-0735276635

In the late 19th century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast moated castle that lies to the misty southern border of Scotland, ruled by Lord Henry Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, Peer of Her Majesty’s Realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Charlotte, strong and insatiably curious, has been kept from the world by her adoring father, owing to a mysterious ‘condition’. She revels in the moorlands and has learned the treacherous and healing ways of the bog from the old hired man, Byrn, whose own origins are shrouded in mystery. Her idyllic existence is shadowed by the magnificent portrait on the landing in Fayne House which depicts her mother, a beautiful Irish-American heiress, holding Charlotte’s brother, Charles Bell. Charlotte has grown up with the knowledge that her mother died in giving birth to her and that Charles, the long-awaited heir, died at the age of two.

When Charlotte’s appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter. But when Charlotte and her tutor’s explorations of the bog turn up an unexpected artefact, her father announces he has arranged for her to be cured of her condition and her world is upended. Charlotte’s passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets and to the heart of her own identity.

Now Toronto, Chaätelaine, and The Globe and Mail review the book:

 This captivating coming-of-age story of the fiery, insatiably curious adolescent protagonist Charlotte Bell – surely an amalgam of Charlotte Brontë and her male nom de plume Currer Bell – has the narrative drive of a thriller at the heart of which lie closely guarded family secrets. Charlotte, herself an enigma, justifies her isolation on the family estate (the titular Fayne) in the company of her loving widowed father Lord Henry and their servants by what she’s been told: “I understood my Condition thus: I was morbidly susceptible to germs.”  (Janet Somerville)

It tells the story of Charlotte Bell (an homage to Charlotte Brontë and her male pseudonym, Currer Bell), a 12-year-old growing up on the cusp of the 20th century at Fayne, an estate on the border between England and Scotland. Sheltered and brilliant, Charlotte is kept from society due to an unnamed medical condition. Her world consists of a doting father, a handful of staff, a library of philosophical text and the sprawling wetlands that seem to have a life of their own. “This book harks back to when I was a kid and just wanted to live in stories,” says MacDonald, who first read Jane Eyre when she was “nine or 10” and was immediately hooked on the story’s gothic atmosphere. (Anna Fitzpatrick)

Fayne harkens back to the Brontes (both of the aforementioned books make an appearance in the story) and the kind of literature that made MacDonald fall in love with the craft. She was 10 when an older sister suggested she read Jane Eyre. “And it just totally changed my life,” says MacDonald. “So I’ve had a relationship with late 19th century Victorian fiction from a very early age.” (Marsha Leiderman)