Book review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

The Flight of Gemma Hardy is meant to be a modern retelling of Jane Eyre. Gemma is an Icelandic orphan, brought to Scotland by her uncle after her parents' deaths. She is mistreated by his family after he also dies. She is sent away to boarding school. Upon leaving the school, she accepts a position as a governess in the bleak Orkney Islands, where she falls in love with Mr. Sinclair, the mysterious guardian of her charge.

Margot Livesey recalls that she first read Jane Eyre as a lonely 9-year-old and was struck by the similarities between her life and the famous orphan's. Both were poor. Both were bullied cruelly by the girls at school. Gemma's story is set in the 1950s and '60s, around the time of Livesey's own adolescence; there are supposed to be at least some details of Livesey's childhood in Gemma's, but they are hard to find, as the story so closely mirrors that of the original novel. Indeed, if you took every plot point of Jane Eyre and plotted it on a graph and then did the same for Gemma Hardy, the two would mirror each other almost exactly. The characters, their motivations, even their physical descriptions, are, most of the time, the same.

Because the stories are so similar, there is almost zero dramatic tension throughout. It's hard to care about the evolution of Jane's schoolgirl friendship with the asthmatic Miriam Goodall; the moment she comes on the scene, you know that she is destined for the same fate as Jane Eyre's pal Helen Burns. (Sucks to your ass-mar, Miriam.) Later in the story, after Gemma has been deceived and betrayed by Mr. Sinclair, it's hard to become invested in her burgeoning relationship with the conscientious Archie. He's the St. John Rivers character, and by this late in the novel, it's become apparent that there will be absolutely no diverging from the original text. And Jane doesn't end up with St. John Rivers. So neither will Gemma. The pages began to slip by, placeholders until Mr. Sinclair can appear on the scene with the resolution to his feeble mystery (a crazy wife in the attic might have been lamely redundant, but it would have at least been interesting).

The thing that kept me turning the pages was Livesey's writing, which I found to be refreshingly clear compared to Bronte's turgid prose. At the very least, the gothic nature of the story allows Livesey to delve into the magical realism that she does so well and that I fell in love with in Eva Moves the Furniture. And then there was the starkly beautiful, isolated landscape of the Orkneys, with the Stone Age relics and hidden causeways, and the mystery of Iceland's volcanoes and Viking sagas. Setting Gemma's story against this backdrop, and against the burgeoning feminist movement, was the one brilliant note in an otherwise flat tale. Because these things highlight how Gemma's story--and Jane's--is really, first and foremost, a saga of self-discovery, something that often swallowed up by the dark and passionate romance of the original text.

But it's not enough to justify a novel like this, so close to the original. So the question remains: Why, exactly, did this "modern retelling" need to be told?