Jane Somewheyre

Sharon Lynn Fisher, Salt & Broom

A grim and gruesome spectre haunts the corridors of Northern England’s isolated Thornfield Hall. Edward Rochester, lord of the manor, doesn’t believe in ghosts, but his people do. So he requests the Lowood School, famous for training witches and other spellcasters, send someone to exorcise his home. With some reluctance, the school sends Jane Aire [sic], who is an expert herbologist but has little experience with the outside world.

Veteran classic literature readers will recognize the broad outline of events described. Sharon Lynn Fisher has published several volumes combining science fiction or fantasy with romance; for this volume, she’s chosen to put a fantastic spin on one of the foundational texts from which romance writers frequently draw. Charlote Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captivated audiences for 175 years with its combination of weight and whimsy, and its deep dive into the human psyche.

Fisher’s adaptation omits the portions of Jane’s “autobiography” centered on the Reed and Rivers families, and reduces Lowood School to background. She cares more about Jane’s interactions with Rochester, with the assorted denizens of Thornfield Hall, and with the first Mrs. Rochester—whose story here is aggressively altered. The emphasis lies heaviest on the romance aspects, as the fantastic components are very loosely draw.

Thornfield Hall is the epitome of Gothic intricacy: miles of sprawling corridors and countless disused rooms. Jane finds a household staff plagued by phantoms they can’t easily explain, but which they also haven’t really seen. Unlike in Brontë’s original novel, everyone here is completely forthcoming about the first Mrs. Rochester, and her tragic end. They’re more circumspect about what came before her demise, or why they can’t release her memory.

Rochester himself resembles the original, a private man, cautious in displaying his feelings. His staff of hundreds depend on his wealth, and high-class bachelorettes pursue him, but he has no real friends. Jane struggles to understand: is he still mourning his wife? Did he ever truly love her? Is he even capable of love? Because the longer Jane interacts with Rochester, the more she experiences feeling she’s never known before.

Sharon Lynn Fisher

Before continuing, let me acknowledge: I’m not this book’s target audience. Fisher writes for audiences who consume classic semi-romance literature, like the Brontë sisters or Jane Austen, as casually as paperback novels. Her low-friction storytelling elides the coded language common in 19^th Century literature, and the almost Monty Python-esque humor beneath the sometimes starchy surface. This book feels like Charlotte Brontë retold as beach reading.

Jane practices a lite-beer form of Wicca, one broadly compatible with staid post-Georgian British Christianity (the story includes references to religion, but only in passing). Her witchcraft consists mostly of making talismans, in the broadest sense, and speaking rhymes. Though the magical system matters greatly to Jane, and drives parts of the story, Fisher doesn’t much explicate it. One suspects she cares little for mechanical details.

The romance feels similarly hasty. Jane says she’s approaching thirty, and has spent nearly her entire life at Lowood School. She’s had few interactions with men who aren’t either stern patrician figures or earthy tradesmen. Her sojourn at Thornfield, an unspecified span of months in Brontë’s telling, is herein reduced to days. Yet she feels so passionately for Rochester that she disobeys instructions, exceeds her training, and trusts Rochester completely.

Fisher implies a complex, heady, multisensory world behind her story. Jane, our narrator, expounds on the complexity of Thornfield’s grounds, its multiple gardens for food and herbology, its charming Gothic ruins. She implies the existence of bacchanalian Bonfire Night celebrations, and a world of passions kept secret under decorous Regency-era public morality. Yet all this never quite goes anywhere. Jane introduces evocative themes, but carries few of them forward.

Please don’t misunderstand: this isn’t a bad book. Fisher retells Brontë’s story without the stiff outdated language, the lengthy digressions, or the sometimes moralistic tone. Her addition of witchcraft makes explicit several themes beneath the surface of Brontë’s original. And not everyone shares my belief that characters should face difficulties in achieving their intended ends. Again, this book isn’t bad; it just wasn’t written for me.

Perhaps I set my expectations too high. In combining classic literature with fantasy, I expected Fisher to create something closer to the Lord of the Rings, something dense with adventure and the complexity of human experience. Fisher instead offers something classic literature fans can snuggle under, comforted by the familiarity, and read without having to parse the historical context. It isn’t for me, but some people like that.