This retelling of Jane Eyre by Rose Lerner popped up as an Audible freebie, and I think I had seen some people talking favorably about it in one of my Facebook groups so I went ahead and downloaded it and listened to it while getting some chores done.
I liked it, but I didn’t love it. The main character/narrator, Deborah, is a struggling guitar teacher in her early-to-mid thirties, so by pre-Victorian standards, she’s a spinster who has officially lost all hope of any man ever finding her attractive, much less marrying her. She inherited no fortune from her parents. Her mother was a Portuguese Jew whose parents survived the inquisition (barely), and her father was a gentleman who was disowned by his family for marrying a Portuguese Jew. He went to work in the Navy, but died a few years ago, leaving Miss Deborah Oliver to fend for herself.
Deborah has some generational trauma to deal with, having witnessed women being burned at the stake for a variety of crimes (leaving her with a horrible fear of fire), and hearing horror stories from her grandmother of Jews being tortured and forced to turn on each other. She urges Deborah not to trust anyone who calls themselves her friend, because they are not her friends, and that distrust is a theme that holds Deborah back from forging true friendships throughout the book. Although, when it comes to the manipulative Sir Kit calling himself her friend, Grandma was right.
Despite being proud of her Jewish heritage, Deborah isn’t sure she believes in Judaism, or any religion. So when she gets a job as a governess to a five-year-old girl in an old stone mansion in the countryside and her employer is insistent on his daughter learning her catechism, Deborah also has to learn her catechism. When her employer, Sir Kit Palethorp, asks about her need to brush up on her catechism, she talks about her father’s Methodism and avoids the subject of her mother’s religion.
Unlike Jane Eyre, Deborah knows from the beginning that her employer’s wife is alive, but the story is that she’s too sick to leave her room, so Deborah never sees her, but begins to wonder if she’s really ill, or if she’s just decided she can’t handle/doesn’t want to be a mother, and so has abandoned her daughter to Deborah’s care.
Sir Kit doesn’t do anything to improve his wife’s reputation in Deborah’s eyes, and Deborah starts fantasizing about what it would be like to be Sir Kit’s wife, to be mistress of Goldengrove, and to be a mother.
But, like the original, it soon becomes apparent that Goldengrove isn’t all it seems. Servants won’t let her leave the grounds and Sir Kit may or may not be reading and/or destroying Deborah’s letters before they can reach their intended recipient. Like Jane, Deborah hears people moving around at night and can’t figure out who it might be, despite the fact that, unlike Jane, Deborah knows from the beginning that the lady of the house is alive. It takes quite a while before she realizes Lady Palethorp is actually locked in her room and prevented from leaving.
Far from being a neglectful mother, Lady Palethorp is being forced to keep away from her daughter, but has managed to steal a key so she can sneak into her daughter’s bedroom and visit her in the middle of the night. Also, Lady Palethrop comes from a wealthy Jewish family and it’s her money that’s funding Goldengrove. Once Deborah becomes aware of this, she starts working with Mrs. Palethorp to arrange her meetings with her daughter.
The relationship between Deborah and Mrs. Palethorp is pretty interesting. At first, there’s a rivalry between them because Mrs. Palethorp assumes Deborah is her husband’s mistress and that she’s stealing Tabby’s affection, but no one can replace a mother, and when Mrs. Palethorp realizes Deborah does not welcome her husband’s advances, the two unite to team up against Sir Kit, and even become lovers (Deborah also had a sexual relationship with her best friend at school, so this is not new to her).
This book has been classified as a romance, but I’m not sure I would put it in that category. Yes, Deborah and Mrs. Palethorp end up together, but there are clues that Mrs. Palethorp isn’t that much better than her husband. When she first meets Deborah she threatens to burn her alive (not realizing it’s her worst fear), and later threatens to throw her off a cliff and renege on her promise to back up Deborah’s story about the fire that killed Sir Kit. I know Mrs. Palethorp has been locked in her room for a few years and that would drive anyone crazy, but to say this relationship gets off to a rocky start is putting it mildly. By the end of the book, I wasn’t sure she was any more trustworthy than her husband and I kind of wanted Deborah to just peace out of that whole toxic mess.