Book Review (Fiction) Jane Steele

Jane Steele

Lyndsay Faye

Headline Review 2016                                                420 Pages

The Gothic romance novel as practiced by Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Susan Howatch et al had a more respectable literary ancestor; Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte.

This landmark novel established the basic tropes of the genre – the much put-upon virtuous orphan-turned-governess who falls in love with her tall, dark and brooding employer whose gloomy, isolated estate harbors a mysterious dark secret. Much misadventure and travail usually culminates in the requisite happily-ever-after, with the lovers finally married.

Reading the Charlotte Bronte original, I often experienced extreme irritation at the eponymous heroine’s unrivalled ability to self-sabotage her own happiness based on pious notions of propriety and morality, besides the prevailing Victorian conventions of the times. Her patiently suffering Griselda act wore thin pretty quickly.

Jane Eyre is the favourite novel of the protagonist of Jane Steele, and each chapter starts with a quote from JE. However, I’m glad to say the anti-heroine of Lyndsay Faye’s affectionately amused pastiche is made of much sterner stuff than her literary model, and anything but passive.  Indeed, Ms Steele is active enough to retaliate against her tormentors in several creatively satisfying ways.  And there are quite a few, beginning with her uncaring aunt Patience Barbary, a bitter, pious hypocrite and her embryonic rapist son, young cousin Edwin.

“Reader, I murdered him” - at the tender age of nine years,  Jane inadvertently commits her first murder when fending off the awful Edwin ends with his broken body at the bottom of a gorge.  Packed off to the dreadful Lowan Bridge Charity School after the suicide of her mother Anne-Laure, an unstable French former exotic dancer addicted to Laudanum, the newly orphaned Jane then encounters an even worse monster – Mr Vesalius Munt, the sadistic headmaster.

The hypocritical bullies who tormented the protagonists of Oliver Twist and DavidCopperfield always seemed to be worthy of dispatch to a more hellish plane. This never happened to them, but happily, the odious Mr Munt (an ostentatious Christian of the hell fire-and-brimstone variety who delights in punishing his hapless charges on fabricated moral grounds, while exploiting and starving them) meets a well-deserved end, courtesy of a letter-opener through his neck - “It was the boarding school that taught me to act as a wolf in girl’s clothing should: skulking, a greyer shadow within a grey landscape.”

Jane Steele then moves on from relatively genteel Bronte territory to a very Dickensian London where the fugitive Jane and a fellow student, Rebecca Clarke, find refuge after the murder – and new identities as a writer/hawker of lurid penny dreadfuls/gallows ballads and a street side singer respectively. Emerging as a proto-feminist (and slightly sociopathic) vigilante to survive in the seedy underbelly of the British capital, the city forms Jane into  “a pale, wide-eyed creature with an errant laugh, a lust for life and for dirty vocabulary, and a knife in her pocket.” 

Many of the events in Jane Steele parallel the plot of Jane Eyre; the protagonist ends up as governess to a young foreign girl, has a slow-burning romance with her mysterious boss, and is bequeathed an unexpected inheritance. Upon seeing an advertisement for a governess at Highgate House, Jane writes false letters of reference and secures the position. Her late aunt no longer resides there and she is determined to explore the possibility of taking back what might be rightfully hers.

The story finally shifts to the backdrop of the British East India Company in 1845. The new owner of the Highgate House is Charles Thornfield, an army doctor who had been wounded in the Anglo-Sikh wars. His entire household staff are Sikhs (as is he, by conversion), and his ward's mother was a Sikh warrior woman while her late father was a representative of the British East India Company.  As an American, this enables Lyndsay Faye to take jabs at British mercantile colonialism and mine actual events that also figured in George MacDonald Fraser’s hilarious picaresque historical romp Flashman And TheMountain Of Light.

The author shows impressive literary skills in nailing Victorian diction and prose styles that take in not just Bronte, but Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray too. While this might occasionally try the patience of readers used to more contemporary modes of storytelling, there are myriad meta-fictional links between the two works, all crafted with intelligence and sophistication to delight literary aficionados.