Jane Eyre Retold

One of my favorite books of all time is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I fell in love with this book on a long car trip to Yellowstone when I was sixteen years old. The book surprised me in a delicious way. I had picked Jane Eyre up because I knew it was a ‘classic,’ and I wanted to expand my reading horizons, but I expected to have to plow my way through it. I was wrong. The book held my attention through the Bighorn Mountains, the Beartooths, and all the way to Yellowstone.

A few months ago, I picked up a retelling of Jane Eyre called simply Jane, by April Lindner. In Jane, Jane Moore is forced to drop out of the college she was attending when her parents die suddenly. She takes the job of nanny for a world-famous rock star named Nico Rathburn. I was a little skeptical when I started the book. (Rock star? Really?) 

Jane had some big shoes to fill. I mean, listen to this quote from Jane Eyre:

"We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is the unclouded night sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence." 

I wouldn't have the guts to compete with that.

After having finished Jane months ago, I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. The author took a lot of the same phrasing from the original Jane Eyre, which I didn’t think always flowed well with the more modern story, but she did not include any of the lyrical imagery like that quoted above. In general, I found the story to be a little far-fetched and unbelievable. In some places the ridiculousness of the story got in the way of my enjoyment of it. Fantasy is one thing, in my humble opinion, but a sloppily crafted and implausible story is something different. Maybe I would have thought the same thing if I had read Jane Eyre back when it was a contemporary novel. Realizing that made me feel a little disappointed with the original Jane Eyre. Or at least suspicious. Was it a believable story? Was it well-crafted? I still don’t know, but I think I finally decided that I still love Jane Eyre and in this case, maybe ignorance is bliss.

I think teenage girls would really enjoy this book, but I’m not sure that it would inspire them to pick up the original Jane Eyre. And frankly, I’m not sure I would want my teenage daughter reading this (if I had a teenage daughter). The original Jane Eyre doesn’t have premarital sex in it, or at least I’ve never picked up on it, and I was a little disappointed with the casual attitude taken toward sex in this book.

Regardless of being a little disappointed with Jane, I still found it gripping and lost a little sleep over it. (Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who can’t stay awake reading when they’re tired. Their bodies kick in and make sure they get enough sleep. Mine doesn’t.) I would recommend this book to anyone who has read and enjoyed Jane Eyre and who can maintain an open mind when reading retellings of classics.