Right from its dedication – “For Charlotte, of course” – affection and intimacy pervade this collection of 21 short stories, all by women, inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s most famous line. (All apart from Susan Hill, who contrarily reveals in her contributor’s note that she has not read Jane Eyre.) For the editor, Tracy Chevalier, Jane’s declaration is the defiant cry of the underdog, thrilling because it is so far from the more passive constructions we might expect; it is not “Reader, he married me”, or even “Reader, we married”. In Chevalier’s own story, “Dorset Gap”, Jenn spurns Ed by pointedly summarising Jane Eyre as a novel about “a governess full of inner strength who marries a completely inappropriate man”. Ed proves his inappropriateness by confusing the novel with Wuthering Heights, and loses more ground by admitting that he always thought the Kate Bush song was called “Waterproof Eyes”. But he finally breaks the ice by misquoting the crucial line as “Reader, she married me” – and she laughs so hard that we wonder if one day she will.
For Brontë geeks, the pleasure comes from the resonances. Salley Vickers’s perspective-flip, “Reader, She Married Me”, tells Rochester’s side of the story, while in Helen Dunmore’s “Grace Poole Her Testimony”, the phlegmatic, porter-loving servant makes some startling revelations and warns darkly, “St Paul says that it is better to marry than to burn, but there is marriage and there is marriage. Sometimes it may be better to burn.” In Francine Prose’s absurdist, uneasy sequel to Jane Eyre, “The Mirror”, Rochester tells his new wife that there never was a madwoman in the attic, just a parrot. Jane is baffled and then terrified: “Marry someone, drive her mad, burn the house down, marry someone else. Repeat. An alarming prospect, but what could I do?” And for anyone whose favourite bit of the novel is Jane’s intense friendship with Helen Burns, Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Orphan Exchange” spins that plotline in a way that made me cry with joy.
The questions Brontë asks about marriage inspire some more oblique takes on Jane Eyre. Linda Grant’s “The Mash-Up” is a pitch-perfect black comedy about a disastrous wedding between a Jewish woman and a Persian man. In Tessa Hadley’s dazzling “My Mother’s Wedding” another marriage goes wrong (or right, depending on your sympathies). Hadley’s heroine favours knowledge over experience which, she says, “was etched into the leathery tanned faces of all the other adults in my life; experience was like a calculating light in their eyes”. The two widows in “Double Men” by Namwali Serpell have this kind of experience. They watch a village wedding in Zambia implode and then they pick up the pieces, “sucking their teeth at the good that begets evil, shaking their heads at the evil that begets good”. In Elif Shafak’s “A Migrating Bird”, a Muslim student convinces herself that a man is going to move countries, convert to Islam and marry her. His rejection leaves her, like Jane, chafing at the stasis of her life. “Like a shutter in a rainstorm, banging against a window, I venture forth, retreat back, try afresh, retreat again. Nothing changes in my life, and yet nothing is the same.” Brontë would have understood her desire, her desperation and her disappointment; Matthew Arnold said her mind contained “nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage”, and that judgment, as much as Jane’s line, seems to inform Lionel Shriver’s vicious, sexy story “The Self-Seeding Sycamore”.
These stories will enrich and complicate future readings of Jane Eyre, as the best fan fiction should. It’s a testament to Brontë’s novel that we still can’t stop talking about it, fighting about it and writing around it; that so many writers want to imagine their way into it. If Brontë was going to drop in on any of the celebrations for her bicentenary, I can’t help but think she would get a kick out of this collection. After all, Jane Eyre arose from just such a liberated way of thinking about storytelling, from long nights at the parsonage with the three sisters walking round and round the table, writing and rewriting each other’s stories, in the best writers’ workshop that ever was.
• Samantha Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine is published by Vintage. To order Reader, I Married Him for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
