(no subject)

[skygiants]

I'd been saving up Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic for a long trip out of a feeling that it would be a perfect plane read, as indeed it very much was.

The pitch for The Wife in the Attic is 'lesbian Gothic Jane Eyre'. I did not know, but probably should have expected given Lerner's narrative interests, that it would be, specifically, Jewish lesbian Gothic Jane Eyre; when the impoverished, middle-aged heroine accepts a classic Gothic position as a governess in an isolated manor to instruct young Tabby Palethorpe in various respectable subjects and good Christian values, one of the secrets she's very careful to keep from her charming new employer is her half-Jewish heritage.

The main tension in the plot is the shifting balance of power and trust between the heroine, the aforementioned charming new employer, and his near-invisible and ambiguously foreign wife, who suffers from a mysterious 'illness' and seems to play no part in her own child's life. Both Palethorpes have a very particular version of reality that they'd like their new governess to believe -- and though our heroine, very unaccustomed to being of importance to anyone, initially finds all the attention a little seductive, it all very soon begins to take on an increasingly sinister element.

The first-person heroine has a name, by the way, but I kept forgetting that fact and wanting to refer to her by 'I' or 'B-ko' like the heroine of Rebecca -- actually I think the structural problem of the book for me sort of comes down to the fact that the book as written feels more like it wants to be wading through the murkier waters of Rebecca than Jane Eyre, and end with more messy third-act ambiguity to match the really successful tension and unease that's building through the rest of the book.

Truly the book felt to me like it wanted at least two more twists -- all the narrative foreshadowing seems like it's building to a Fingersmith-like mutual betrayal and then it simply doesn't deliver it.

But though the book is a Gothic it is of course also a romance novel, and clearly started from the concept of 'what if Bertha was right all along and then she and Jane made out,' which is so clear-sighted as a pitch that I can't really blame Rose Lerner for doing her level best to keep wrestling it into shape even when all the characters got much messier than that under her pen. And I'm not saying I don't want them to make out! I just think one needs a second book that functions more or less as the back half of Fingersmith to unravel the full fallout from 'we planned a murder together based on your unreliable narrative of events and then I executed it alone based on mine' before bringing the protagonists back together.

Anyway, I can imagine a book that would land better but all that said I'm glad it's the book that it is and that all the weirdness and tension and discomfort was allowed to stay in there rather than sanding off the edges off either the protagonist or Lady Palethorpe -- it's not a perfect book but it is a tremendously interesting book. (Also shout-outs to Rose Lerner for both writing a kid whom the protagonist cares about deeply while also finding her annoying and difficult most of the time, and for remembering always that lower servants in the house have a viewpoint and that viewpoint is very likely to be judgmental for good reasons.)

Comments

[sovay]

'we planned a murder together based on your unreliable narrative of events and then I executed it alone based on mine'

That does sound like it might take more than one good conversation to unravel.

[skygiants]

They don't even ever have a great conversation about it tbh! But they do make out on a cliff??

[sovay]

But they do make out on a cliff??

But nobody gets pushed over it?

(Hannibal visibly altered my expectations for murder husbands/wives.)

[skygiants]

No but someone does come real close to jumping off it and then the moment gets smoothed over real fast ...

[evewithanapple]

Jael threatens to kill her and then five pages later they're planning their life together! To say nothing of the unexploded bomb of "what happens if Tabby ever finds out what we did."

[oracne]

I have this one from the library at the moment.

[skygiants]

I hope you enjoy it when you read!

[sophia_sol]

I've been saving The Wife in the Attic for the right time too, and haven't yet gotten to it, so it's great to hear what you thought of it! Sounds like it will be a very interesting read, and I'm looking forward to when I get round to it.

[skygiants]

I will be very curious about your take as someone who also quite recently went on the Rebecca Journey!

[sophia_sol]

Yeah!! when Lerner first announced this book I was like, oh no I do not have enough experience with gothics to be able to read this book with appropriate contextual genre knowledge, but now I am a little more Prepared

[soosifroosh]

I'm interested to read other takes as this one Wasn't For Me for the simple, maybe-don't-read-Eyre-versions reason that I forgot I don't like housefires. I really LIKED how the charming new employer was written, but I honestly found myself falling for his bullshit, which was a chewy thing to think over. I know it was Judith and Holofernes, which is an interesting story for an author to try to occupy mentally while writing this book.

[skygiants]

oh yeah housefires really an essential ingredient in this particular variant of the Gothic cocktail, huh ....

ohhh I should have picked up on the Judith and Holofernes thing and I absolutely didn't! You're right that he was written very charmingly, though, which I think is one of the most interesting things about the book but also one of the things that sort of makes it a tightrope-walk to land ...

[whimsyful]

I read lesbian Gothic Jane Eyre and instantly went off to find it at my library. It's a pity that the back half isn't as twisty or filled out as Fingersmith (that and The Handmaiden are basically the pinnacle of twisty Gothic romantic thrillers for me).

[skygiants]

It's really hard to top the Fingersmith/Handmaiden vibes! This book is doing something quite different and I really like what it's doing but I do think it needed to go harder ... anyway, hope you enjoy it!

[coffeeandink]

I have ultimately decided this is a Gothic but not a Gothic romance, because that ending is much too uneasy to be happy (and I say this as a lover of profoundly uneasy endings like Megan Chance's Fallen from Grace and Laura Kinsale's Seize the Fire). The ending is very weirdly anticlimatic for something that involves, uh, very active spoilery things.

I also did not quite find Deborah's passion for Mrs. Palethorpe as convincing as her seduction by Mr. Palethorpe, who was so very attentive to her in that overbearing way in the beginning.

[skygiants]

It felt to me like the Deborah/Jael Palethorpe relationship needed, like, another half a book at least to really come fully into balance with the force of Mr. Palethorpe's seduction -- both of them were so clearly using each other for their own ends and to fill in a missing space, and, like, that's compelling and it's possible to go a really interesting place from there, but the book does not get us there!

[evewithanapple]

I found this book immensely frustrating for all the reasons you list - there's Gothic, there's romance, and there's Gothic Romance, and I feel like Rose Lerner eschewed the very obvious third option and opted to try and blend the first two instead, and it . . . doesn't work. It doesn't work as a romance, because I never really bought that Deborah and Jael were fulfilled by each other - they were partners of lust and convenience, but it didn't stretch much further - and it didn't work as a Gothic because it had the requisite romance HEA which didn't map onto the existing setup at all. Just a very strange read overall. (Also, perhaps this is a relatively minor nitpick, but: this book is set in the mid-1810s, would Deborah's grandmother really have been of an age to be tortured in the Inquisition? I know they were around into the early 1700s, but that's still a jump, and I don't think they were nearly as active at that point.)

[skygiants]

I really and truly thought the book was building to a reveal of Jael as unreliable narrator on the same scope as her husband, with the actual truth somewhere in between -- which wouldn't rule her out as the endgame love interest, I think! You'd just have to do a lot more work to get there after that, but it would be fun and interesting work! And without that, the book does feel out-of-balance, though I enjoyed it a whole lot regardless. (I also blinked a little at the Inquisition backstory, but I do trust Rose Lerner on her research stats, so I checked out of curiosity and there were over 100 executions by auto-da-fe in the first half of the eighteenth century, which is still quite a lot! It's working on the tail end of the timeline but I do think the timeline still works, and I'll forgive her for it because forging a thematic link between the Gothic wife house fire and the public witch/Jew/heretic fire is SO galaxy brain conceptually.)

[chestnut_pod]

Rose Lerner seems to have a line in Jewish protags who decide to hide their Jewishness for one reason or another, huh? It's an interesting reoccurring motif.

I look forward to reading this one and seeing how I find the battle between the Gothic and the romance!

[skygiants]

It is! It plays out really differently here than in her other ones, to me -- in part because two of the characters come from different perspectives and backgrounds within Judaism, and though that's not the most significant part of their dynamic it does lend a different kind of push-pull than in her previous works.

I also look forward to your thoughts!