Charlotte: Bronte Revelations: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre - Softcover

Thomas, D.M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0715630946 ISBN 13: 9780715630945

Publisher: Duckworth Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

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

"Reader, this is a very different picture of my marriage from that which you were presented with in what I would call my "romantic" version. Reality, however, does not often conicide with romance. I will remind you: "When his first born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes as they once were--large, brilliant, and black" Well, events did not quite happen like that."

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 center 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 changing patterns of slavery and colonialism. Pursuing the unforgettable characters ofJane and Rochester through time, D.M. Thomas brings them into focus for the modern reader as their sexual and moral actions are starkly and unflinchingly exposed in this deeply entertaining work of imaginative brilliance.

About this title

About the Author:

D.M. Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1935. He is a poet and the author of several novels, including The White Hotel (1981), which won international acclaim and was awarded the P.E.N. Prize, Cheltenham Prize and L.A. Times Fiction Prize. D.M. Thomas still lives in Cornwall, and recently received much praise for his biography, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life.

From Publishers Weekly:

Of the making of sequels and prequels to Jane Eyre, there seems to be no end. Thomas's novel is conscious of the tradition, saluting Jean Rhys as well as Charlotte Bront‰. Miranda Stevenson, the narrator through most of the book, is the daughter of an English eccentric, a scholar and artist who engaged the young Miranda in ambiguous incestuous playacting. Now nearly 40, Miranda is a wife and mother. Having just come out of a "breakdown," she goes to Martinique to recuperate, taking advantage of an offer to give a lecture on Charlotte Bront‰. While there, she satisfies a surreptitiously racist fetish by seducing black men. Miranda's account of her sexual exploits is interspersed with political commentary she is the type who deplores the imperialist, genocidal foundations of Western affluence while relying wholly on the perquisites it gives her. Into this framework, Thomas inserts a continuation of Jane Eyre. This derives from a fraud Miranda perpetrated on her father a long time ago, when she successfully imitated Charlotte Bront‰'s handwriting to pen an account of Jane's brief, unhappy marriage to Rochester. Rochester, it seems, is not entirely satisfactory in bed, and she is finally enlightened about the sexual act by a friend. When Jane confronts Rochester with his sexual reluctance, he rides off into the night and breaks his neck. Unfortunately, Thomas's pastiche of Bront‰ is so dreadful that if Miranda's father were truly an eccentric genius, he'd easily see through it. Miranda's Eurotrash narrative is a variation on Thomas's exploration of the "landscape of hysteria," as in The White Hotel, but the book fails to justify its exploitation of Bront‰'s story and name.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duckworth Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0715630946
• ISBN 13: 9780715630945
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160