The Jane Eyre story, post-WWII
In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey recasts Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a riveting story of self-actualization for contemporary readers.
By Margot Livesey
HarperCollins. 464 pp. $26.99
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Reviewed by Maribel Molyneaux
In
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
, Margot Livesey recasts Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
as a riveting story of self-actualization for contemporary readers.
Livesey's narrative, set in post-World War II Scotland, replaces carriages and candlelight with automobiles and electric lights, but modern comforts do not diminish a quest that, like Jane Eyre's, takes Gemma Hardy on a sometimes harrowing journey to uncover the secrets of her own identity.
Jane Eyre remains popular because she is a real hero for young women. Her "Anybody may blame me who likes" manifesto at Thornfield is a call for action for women, who "need exercise for their faculties" as much as their brothers do and who, when they do find love, accept it only as it honors their integrity.
In Gemma Hardy, Livesey invents a worthy inheritor of Jane Eyre's resolve. Like Jane, Gemma is orphaned young. Adopted by her mother's brother, she is removed to Scotland, where she is despised by her aunt and abused by her cousins, two girls and a boy. When she is sent off to a boarding school only to discover that she is there not as a student but as a "working girl," Gemma scrubs floors and toilets and is able to take lessons only when her chores permit. When the school goes bankrupt, Gemma applies for a job in the Orkney Islands caring for another orphan, Nell, whose guardian is Mr. Hugh Sinclair.
Readers can take considerable delight in following Livesey's re-creation of Brontë's plot turns, and Livesey often succeeds in improving on the original. Gemma as a "working girl" is even less powerful than Jane; she is subjected to abuse not only from the school's headmistress and teachers, but also from other "working girls," whose torment is the real test of her independent nature.
At times, Livesey's adherence to Brontë threatens to become mimicry, as if she were ticking events off on a checklist. For example, the aborted wedding scene that is such a dramatic and crucial event in Brontë's novel is disappointing. I read this episode twice, thinking I must have missed something. There is no madwoman in Mr. Sinclair's attic, and the actions Gemma sees as "betrayal" seem hardly to warrant calling off her impending marriage.
Yet this episode points less to what Gemma learns about Mr. Sinclair than it does to how much she still has to learn about herself. Gemma's motives for flight are not entirely clear to her, and it's no wonder. Her world has been repeatedly turned upside down, and her search for home and identity consistently frustrated by her inferior social and economic position.
Barely out of her teens and with nothing but the clothes on her back, Gemma realizes it's time to grow up and come to terms with the all-or-nothing nature of the judgments that drove her away from Hugh Sinclair. Most satisfying is her discovery that love is not about "happily ever after" but about compassion and understanding. There is a scene in which a stroke-damaged man who takes a walk every day in response to his wife's love for him alerts Gemma to what love sometimes costs. Small moments like these, cast in Livesey's spare, lucid prose, make the novel a pleasure on many levels.
Livesey wisely abandons Brontë's romanticized ending in Ferndean, and modern readers will be as glad as I am to see it go. Instead, she sends Gemma on the final leg of her journey of self-discovery to the more appropriate "Grey sea, black rocks," and black volcanic ash of Iceland, a landscape "wilder and emptier than any I had ever seen." Livesey's talent for exploring the human psyche includes a belief that the landscape is an integral part of that psyche, and the landscape where she was born and from which she was wrenched as a child mirrors Gemma's lonely search for self.
But this is also "home" for her, the source of the self-confidence that has carried her thus far. She is no longer in flight from, but in flight to a life of self-assurance and opportunities she could hardly have imagined. Jane Eyre would be giving her a high-five.