“It was for Thornfield itself that my heart longed most.” How important is Thornfield as a character in the novel? What does it signify to Rochester?
“There were depths there that intrigued me. In talking with her I was gripped by a warmth I had not known for a very long time.” What do you think most attracts Rochester to Jane?
“Jane was my only hope for relief, for regeneration.” Rochester falls very quickly for Jane. What do you think of his unorthodox method of pursuing her? Do you agree or disagree with his tactics?
“And there is Jane, my dearest heart…who calls me ‘Edward’ every day of my life.” Discuss the importance of names in the novel.
How do you think Rochester’s perception of love changes throughout the novel?
Q & A with Sarah Shoemaker
Edward Fairfax Rochester is one of the most beloved and controversial characters in literature, but somehow his story has never been told before now. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
We were discussing Jane Eyre in my book discussion group, and the conversation circled around Mr. Rochester. What are we to make of him, we wondered. This man who is sometimes angry and sometimes tender, who keeps his mad wife secretly in an upstairs apartment—who is he, really? What did Charlotte Bront? think of him? Is he a hero or an antihero? Do we not admire Jane for her independence, her moral integrity, her perceptive instincts? So what does she see in him? In the midst of all that, I began to think that someone ought to write Rochester’s story, someone ought to read Jane Eyre closely and figure out who and what this man really is. Before I reached my home that day, I had already decided: I was going to write that book.
Did you do special research to capture the voice, setting, and atmosphere of Bront?’s era?
I read and reread Jane Eyre, of course, looking to understand Rochester, but also trying to get a sense of the period, the rhythm of the language, the expressions that we no longer use, the personalities involved. Then I read more widely from fiction that is of the same time period as Jane Eyre—Bront?’s Shirley, Charles Dickens, Mary Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Mary Russell Mitford—looking for the same things until I had those sounds and rhythms and atmosphere clearly in my mind.
The novel maps perfectly against the original Bront?, in terms of not only action and spoken word but mood and style. What was it like to try to inhabit, and bring to life, such a well-known character by such a classic author? Did it give you more freedom to let your imagination loose within those constraints, do you feel, or less?
One of the things that surprised me most was how little freedom I felt I had. There is much more in Jane Eyre than the casual reader realizes, and one has to read so carefully, so as not to miss anything. It is like playing a role in a play or movie: one has to be that person. Of course that is true in any novel, but perhaps more so when the story and the character and the mood and all is already known to the reader, and the writer has to respect that and work with it.
Jane and Mr. Rochester have one of the most famous, opaque, and complex love stories in English literature. Having spent so much time inside their heads to write this book, what do you think drew them to each other with such intense chemistry? What does he love in her? What does she love in him?
This question is a complicated one! I’m not sure I can do it justice here. In the first place, we have to keep in our twenty-first-century minds the very important issue of class. Even Jane Austen doesn’t deal with people having romantic relationships beyond their class, at least not in her major characters, and that would have always been at the back, if not the front, of their minds. For example, Blanche Ingram talking about how her father always was going after the governesses—and that was not uncommon in those times.
And yet on their first meeting (not including their evening encounter on the pathway) he asks her a very personal and surely inappropriate question: “Do you think I’m handsome?” Why? Perhaps he has already “read” her honesty and forthrightness. And she answers honestly: “No.” What an incredible moment—each of them stepping beyond propriety to be open with the other. Bront? makes little of this moment; I call a little more attention to it, but in my mind, this is the beginning of an unusual relationship, one in which they can engage as equals and experience the pleasure of mind play which neither has ever done before with a member of the opposite sex, to say nothing of someone of such a different standing in society. For both of them, this is a world-changing experience: to be “seen” and respected for who they really are by someone of the opposite sex. How could they not fall in love?
The whole first half of the novel is your own invention, before Edward crosses paths, literally, with Jane halfway through the book. Where did you find inspiration for these characters and events?
I started out with an understanding of where I needed the character of Rochester to go. Since in Jane Eyre Rochester mentions his father and brother but not his mother, I assumed his mother had died early; and since what he tells Jane of his father and brother seems to make them distant and unpleasant in his mind, I began with that—a lonely childhood. There’s only so much one can do with that all by itself, so I imagined him going to school relatively early. I read Nicholas Nickleby to understand what a school at that time might be like, and it was so horrible, so Dickensian, that I decided that the school in my book would be wonderful. So I imagined what young boys might like a school to be and wrote that. From then it was a matter of bringing young Edward up toward what I wanted him to become: a man who longed desperately for a place to belong, for home, for true companionship in the old meaning of the word—someone with whom one can share intimacies. Again, it’s like staging a play: one has to create the characters and the events that will help move the protagonist in the way the writer needs him to go.