Ghost Wife: A Chilling Romantic Suspense

Ghost Wife is my contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre and it’s free for five days from today! on Amazon KDP. In this post I’ll tell you why and how I came to write it. But first here’s part of the blurb:

The first Mrs Rochester

If Mr Rochester had lived in the present century, he would be in prison, or exiled in one of the many countries the United Kingdom does not have formal bilateral extradition treaties or agreements.

Mrs Rochester, née Bertha Antoinetta Mason, on the other hand, would have received the medical and psychological treatment she would no doubt have required, not due to the ‘madness’ her husband claimed she suffered: “Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family”, he told Jane Eyre, but due to the ten years she had spent locked in the windowless, dark and damp attic at Thornfield Hall, where she was held prisoner by her husband.

The Second Mrs Rochester: The Eyre Hall Series

When I published, All Hallows at Eyre Hall, the first novel in The Eyre Hall Series, (since then I’ve written a prequel to the series, Blood Moon at Eyre Hall), I was, perhaps naively, surprised that some readers thought my portrayal of Mr Rochester in the novel, set twenty-two years after his marriage to Jane, was cruel, unjust, and even downright spurious. I continued with my series, regardless.

I once fell in love with Mr. Rochester, and maybe you did, too. I read Jane Eyre as an impressionable and romantic teenager, and although I felt sorry for Bertha Antoinetta Mason, I forgave her captor, ‘for the sake of true love‘, as Jane did. In fact I might have even agreed with my critics, until I read, Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, many years later.

How I fell out of love…

Wide Sargasso Sea, tells the story of how Antoinetta and Edward met and married in Jamaica and, later returned to Thornfield Hall, where she was held prisoner, and ten years later died. Part one is told by Antoinetta Cosway, part two is narrated by Edward Rochester, and Part three is narrated by Grace Poole, the employee at Thornfield who ‘looked after’ Antoinetta, in the attic.

I was a married, almost forty-year-old mother of three young children, with a full time teaching job, when I first read Wide Sargasso Sea, and it broke the remnants of my romantic teenage heart. As a result, I reread Jane Eyre, but it wasn’t the same novel I had read over twenty years earlier. It was like reading another novel with the same name, characters and events.

Jane Eyre is still my favourite novel of all time, but I now love it for completely different reasons to my first reading. Thanks to meeting the real silenced and abused Mrs Rochester, in Wide Sargasso Sea, in my mind, Jane Eyre became an even more powerful disclosure and criticism of social injustice.

The Eyre Hall Series: The Spaces Between the Lines

About ten years later I started lecturing at the University of Cordoba, in Spain, teaching among other courses, on Postcolonial English Literature. The syllabus included a comparison of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, so I read them both all over again. But this time with an even more critical eye and a fine tooth comb, dissecting every sentence, and I found plenty of hidden, implicit, meaning in the text, as well as spaces between the lines, which over the next few years, I filled with my own imagination as I wrote The Eyre Hall Series.

The Contemporary Retelling of Jane Eyre

And so, in 2020, in the middle of writing The Eyre Hall Series, and while I was still getting some backlash, I decided that the characters that had been growing in my mind for some time, needed to come to life and be given the chance to speak up, and help me write my contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre.

I did a lot of pantsing here too! I knew who my main characters were, how the novel would begin and progress, and I knew the kind of ending I wanted, after all I was inspired by Jane Eyre’s story, but I didn’t know exactly how it would all happen. I put the characters into the situations and let them navigate through the storms! It was fun, but there was also a lot of rewriting involved, leading to plenty of twists and turns, but it all worked out, and I’m really proud of my first, and so far only, contemporary novel.

I hope to have the chance to read Ghost Wife, and if so, I’d love to know which similarities with Jane Eyre you enjoyed most. By the way, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Ghost Wife, even if you haven’t read Jane Eyre!

Happy reading,

Lucy xx