As a teenager I read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. All the events in the story are seen from Jane’s point of view. Like most young female readers I fell in love with Mr Rochester. Then I grew up. Jane is scrupulously honest, but inexperienced. She does not question the servants below stairs or realise how unkind Mr Rochester was to his wife, a woman with limited mental capacity but a healthy bank balance. Marriage gave him control of her fortune, and the power to drag her from the sunny country of her birth to imprison her in an attic on a bleak moor in Yorkshire. I suspected there was more to the story than Jane told us.
The housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax provided me with an alternative way of looking at the events. The result is Thornfield Hall published by Corvus an imprint of Atlantic Books 2014
To get into the skin of Mrs Fairfax I made the clothes she wore. These uncomfortable and inconvenient garments brought home to me, the ferocious restrictions imposed on women’s lives at the time of Charlotte Bronte. I became interested in studying how the law and society changed in the following years to bring about improvements in women’s lives.
The landscape of industrial Lancashire is imprinted in my memory. The smoking chimneys, the heaps of slag and the grimy miners on their way home from the pit have all disappeared into history. They form the background to my next two novels. I am working on a third to complete the set.
Reviews of Thornfield Hall
‘A rare re-working of a classic which is a brilliant read in itself AND
makes you think more about the original.’ -The Book Bag
“brilliant premise…the perfect read to curl up with” -Good Housekeeping
“A lively and exciting read that will keep you turning the pages” -Heat
“Thoroughly enjoyable” -The Independent
“Drama and humour cleverly constructed” -Reader’s Digest