Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of literature’s best-known Gothic novels and certainly one of the most commonly read—and for good reason! Jane Eyre was at the forefront of a wave of a new variation on the genre that really gave the Gothic Romance a sense of the romantic. The interplay between Jane’s fierce independence and her blossoming passion for the brooding and Byronic Mr. Rochester is a love story as relatable today as it was in 1846. And I do mean today: 2021 seems to be the year for revisiting Jane Eyre. Of course, there have been reimaginings of Brontë’s story in years past—most famously Jean Rhys’s feminist and postcolonialist vindication of the “madwoman in the attic” with Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. But something in the air seems to have everybody returning to this Gothic classic all at once right now. Below are a few Jane Eyre retellings that all came out within the last year:
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins
I was introduced to this book when I tried to recommend The Wife in the Attic (discussed below) to a friend, and she accidentally read The Wife Upstairs instead! Not a difficult mistake to make when the two similarly titled novels came out a month apart from each other at the beginning of 2021. This novel modernizes the story of Jane Eyre, sets it in Birmingham, Alabama, and changes it into a mystery/thriller. In Hawkins’s novel, Jane is a grifter with a dark past who aims to use her new dog-walking gig to nick valuables from wealthy suburbanites in the gated community of Thornfield Estates. Eddie is a handsome widower whose wife recently died under mysterious circumstances. In this twisty thriller, no one is quite who they seem and everybody has secrets. The novel echoes Rebecca as much as Jane Eyre and adds quite a few new surprises of its own.
The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner
If this title sounds familiar, that’s because I reviewed The Wife in the Attic shortly after it was released as an Audible Original audiobook in February of this year. Apart from renaming all of the characters and even the estate, Rose Lerner incorporates two major twists on Brontë’s story. The first is to make it a Sapphic romance, focusing on the relationship between the governess and the imprisoned wife. And the second is to reimagine the wife in the attic not as a creole woman from Jamaica but as a persecuted Sephardic Jew in the aftermath of the Portuguese Inquisition. As the descendent of conversos, who clung secretly to some aspects of their Jewish identity, the governess relates to the angry and abused wife in the attic and learns to look past the rumors of madness to see a woman worthy of love.
John Erye: A Tale of Darkness and Shadow by Mimi Matthews
John Eyre was another book I reviewed earlier this year, back when it came out in July. Though completely different in almost every sense from Rose Lerner’s take, John Eyre also had two major deviations from Brontë’s original. As should be obvious from the title, this version of the story is gender-swapped—with an impoverished male tutor coming to stay at the estate of the wealthy widow Mrs. Rochester. The other difference was completely unexpected and only slowly revealed over the course of the book (though becomes obvious fairly quickly to the careful reader): it incorporates elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula! I never would have thought to blend Dracula and Jane Eyre, perhaps the two most popular Gothic novels of all time. But it works surprisingly well, thanks to Matthews’s close attention to the way the supernatural is alluded to in Brontë’s original novel. The romance in this one is also deeply satisfying.
Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood
The most recent to come out, Within These Wicked Walls was released just last month. It quickly became the talk of social media after Britney Spears was seen reading it on her Instagram. Blackwood relocates the basic premise of Jane Eyre to an Ethiopian-inspired fantasy world filled with curses and evil spirits. Andromeda is an exorcist who has been hired by the wealthy Magnus Rochester to cleanse his castle of evil. The evil that lurks in these halls might be more than Andi can handle, but she can’t just leave Magnus to his horrible fate… This book is definitely going next on my TBR!
Have you read any other retellings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? Did I miss any that came out this year? Want to weigh in on why Jane is having such a moment right now? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!