When I was 10, I walked into Duncraig Library as I’d done every week of my life thus far. I’d already worked my way through all the Enid Blytons, all the horse books, all the Chalet School series and all the Nancy Drews. The librarian wouldn’t let me into the adult section of the library until I was 12. So I had to find something else in the children’s section to occupy me. I decided to start reading the classics. Yes, I was a nerdy, bookish 10-year-old.
I started with the “A” section, but some other nerdy, bookish 10-year-old must have visited the library that day because there were no Jane Austens left. I continued onto “B”, and found a book called Jane Eyre. More than half the front cover featured a large image of Rochester on his rearing horse. In the bottom left-hand corner, taking up only about one-eighth of the cover space, was a woman. Yes, the woman whose name was on the front cover of the book was the smallest thing on that cover. That didn’t strike me as particularly odd at the time — feminism hadn’t quite found its way to Warwick, where I lived. I took the book home and started to read. Within a couple of chapters, I was lost forever to the magic of Charlotte Bronte’s story.
In an interview with Emerald Fennell about her Wuthering Heights adaptation, she said that her movie reflected the impression the book made on her when she first read it as a 14-year-old. That resonated with me. Back when I read Jane Eyre, what stayed with me was the so-called madwoman in the attic and Jane’s best friend dying of consumption. Mysterious fires in bedrooms, men stabbed and bitten, an entire house burned down by the madwoman. It was only much later that I realised the main character of Jane had left hardly a mark on my consciousness. But when I reread the book as an adult, I couldn’t believe that I’d been so seduced by the darkness and that I’d entirely overlooked the best part of the book — its heroine.
At the end of 2023 it was time for me to start thinking about my next book. I’d just finished writing The Mademoiselle Alliance, the story of the only woman to lead a French resistance network in WWII, a woman who commanded 3000 agents, many of whom were senior military men decades older than her. A woman who folded her body into a mail bag for 10 hours in order to smuggle herself across the border into Spain. A woman who escaped prison by squeezing her body through the bars of her jail cell. She was so extraordinary that I worried it would be difficult to find another woman from World War II France whose story was as epic in scope. I was also emotionally exhausted from the research — reading firsthand accounts of Resistance operatives’ experiences in Nazi prisons leaves its mark on you. It was time to find a different era and setting for my next book, meaning I’d have to brainstorm an idea from nothing for the first time in years. I decided to wait for a moment when I couldn’t help but be inspired: a train journey from Venice to Florence in November 2023. If you can’t be inspired by the Tuscan countryside, then you can’t really call yourself a writer, can you?
There I sat, glorious Italian scenery beside me, my ideas notebook in front of me. One of those scratched notes was three words: the Chateau Marmont. A couple of weeks prior, I’d stumbled across an article about the infamous Hollywood hotel and its storied past. Almost every Golden Age of Hollywood actor had lived there and the article talked about the mischief those stars had got up to at the hotel. My curiosity was piqued, particularly by a quote from 1930s Columbia Pictures studio boss Harry Cohn, who said: “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont.” A line like that is like catnip to a novelist. The Marmont would be a great place to set a book. But I didn’t have the right story for it. Yet.
So I started to think about books that I’d read and loved recently, like Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant reimagining of the Dickens’ classic David Copperfield. What I’d loved about Kingsolver’s book was that even if you were deeply familiar with David Copperfield, Kingsolver’s story and her characters still felt fresh. Or Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, a contemporary revisioning of Little Women. What if, I suddenly thought, I did something similar with my favourite classic novel? What if I reimagined Jane Eyre in some way? Immediately I could see Rochester’s gothic Thornfield Hall transformed into the gothic Chateau Marmont. I had my book idea. I’d write The Chateau On Sunset, a reimagining of Jane Eyre, set at Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont during its 1950s and 1960s heyday. And I would tackle the sense of dissatisfaction I’d had with Jane’s story since rereading it as an adult.
What was I dissatisfied about? Well, there are many occasions in the book when Jane looks out at the hills that form a barricade between her and the rest of the world. She longs to cross those hills. She yearns to see the world, to have adventures. On the very first page of Bronte’s novel, Jane’s reading a book about birds and she imagines what it would be like to travel to the same places those birds do — the Arctic, Siberia. Does she? No. There’s just one occasion in the book when she escapes beyond those hills. She runs across the moors and finds herself in a house with a man who’s probably even more obsessive than Rochester. She promptly escapes back to Thornfield and her true love, Edward Rochester. It’s no spoiler to say that, reader, she marries him. It’s a romantically satisfying ending. As a child, I was completely happy with it. But as an adult I wondered — did Jane ever regret not having seen the wider world that she so longed to experience? Was there a way to give Jane Eyre an ending that was both romantically satisfying and personally satisfying?
That’s what’s so wonderful about literary reimaginings. Jane Eyre is one of the first feminist heroines of literature. Who can forget her declaring to Rochester, in an era when the word feminism was foreign to most, that she was his equal? But Charlotte Bronte was still bound by the conventions of her time, even if she pushed hard against them. How could she have sent her poor orphan Jane out into the wild world? It would have required a leap of imagination too great for readers of the time. But when you reimagine a novel almost 200 years later, you can adapt the story to the circumstances of the time you choose to set it in. You can let your bold, brave, feminist heroine push hard against the boundaries of her new time and live a life impossible for a woman in Victorian England.
Perhaps that’s why adaptations and reimaginings of the Bronte’s stories — and of other classic novels written by women — are populating our screens right now. I’ve already mentioned the Wuthering Heights movie, but an adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Aimee Lou Wood has recently been announced, as has Netflix’s Pride And Prejudice reboot with Emma Corrin as Lizzie, a new version of Sense And Sensibility and a series about Lizzie’s sister Mary Bennet. While many of these retellings keep the story entrenched within its original time period, the directors and the actors bring a more contemporary sensibility to the story. In the case of Emerald Fennell’s movie, we experience the genuine throb of obsession through the confluence of music, costume, landscape and even those crushed raw eggs!
In my book, The Chateau On Sunset, we truly understand that Jane Eyre should not be a woman who takes up only one-eighth of the cover of her own book. And we question the very idea of the madwoman in the attic — who gets to say whether a woman is mad or just rightly enraged by the way she’s been treated? At a time when, around the world, women’s rights are being eroded, retelling and reimagining classic stories that centre women, their desires and their proud, fierce voices reminds us how important it is that we cross over the seemingly unscalable hills we see before us and go after what we want. These heroines, including The Chateau On Sunset’s Aria Jones, remind us to not let the world silence our own proud, fierce voices.
The Chateau On Sunset by Natasha Lester, $34.99, published by Hachette Australia is out now.
