The setting of Mountain Brook is a lush one, and Hawkins’ descriptions of rolling green lawns, well-dressed couples at backyard barbecues and chic French bistros and precious coffeeshops work well. Tensions mount and mistrust grows as other characters weigh-in through Hawkins’ use of the multi-narrator technique.
(It might be Helen Burns, another nod to the Bronte classic.) As these unsettling facts come to light, the reader becomes more guarded about Jane’s version of things. Diamond earrings and gold bracelets have a way of ending up in her pockets.Īs much as the reader would like to sympathize with Jane, Hawkins makes sure there are a few things about her that we should know: She’s hiding something from her past and “Jane” isn’t her real name. Starting with a barista job, she soon finds herself walking the dogs of the wealthy, gaining enough of their trust to be able to pilfer small, valuable trinkets.
Wanting more from life, she quickly latches onto Mountain Brook’s affluent lifestyle, where Old Money meets new. Jane is a fish-out-of-water, an averagely attractive young woman from out West with a mysterious past, a beat up car and a dubious living situation in a skanky apartment near strip malls. John River becoming John Rivers, a church employee from her past who tries blackmailing our heroine. Reed switching from Jane’s aunt to her employer and St.
Despite the playfulness of the reworked names (Jane Eyre’s charge Adèle surfaces as Eddie’s Irish setter puppy), some of the more sinister characters from the classic bring their shadows with them to “The Wife Upstairs”: cold and aloof Mrs. In Hawkins’ version, admirers of “Jane Eyre” may smile as they encounter “Eddie” Rochester, zipping his sports car through the neighborhood called Thornfield Estates, the storied English names somehow fitting in quite well in this modern-day South.
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