In her author’s note, Margot Livesey states quite plainly that the source of inspiration for this book “should be obvious.” It’s been long enough since I’ve read Jane Eyre that I didn’t get to play the details pedant, but The Flight of Gemma Hardy so closely matches the main events of its classic predecessor that my foggy memory had no trouble recalling parallel characters, locations, and plot points once re-imagined through Gemma’s steps.
The set-up is familiar: Gemma is orphaned and raised by family members who treat her like an unwelcome nuisance, so she eagerly applies for a scholarship position at a boarding school for girls. Upon her acceptance, however, she learns that the scholarship girls are really nothing more than unpaid servants who may occasionally attend classes, if only they fall behind neither on their cleaning responsibilities nor their schoolwork. Once that institution closes, she somehow lucks into a position as a governess in the way, way north of Scotland, where she develops an affection for the charming but mercurial master of the estate. On their wedding day, she learns his *dark secret* and, feeling betrayed, runs away… and so on, and so forth, mirroring Jane Eyre’s convoluted path, until her eventual reconciliation with Mr. Rochester Sinclair.
This re-telling, on the whole, worked for me, though there were some elements that were much more successful than others. For instance, I thought the character of Gemma herself was a modern (well, modernish, as it’s set in the 1950’s-1960’s) improvement on Jane. While not reading as a carbon copy, she is a good interpretation of what Jane may have been like if she had been allowed the slightly improved personal freedoms of the era despite a similarly impoverished upbringing. Similarly, I appreciated that this version paid due tribute to the extreme hardship of poverty and, in doing so, evoked much of the Gothic character of the original text.
However, if one takes this novel on its own, and does not allow knowledge of Jane Eyre to fill in contextual gaps, the love story in Gemma Hardy does not work nearly as well. This is partly due to the very slight characterization of Mr. Sinclair, who, rather than a brooding Victorian introvert who feels out-of-step with society and his peers, is treated here as a mostly well-adjusted financial type whose “secret”, though moderately embarrassing, is hardly the unconscionable offense of the original model. Considering this in concert with the vast age difference, which Livesey retained, the affection between the two seems much less organic. Sinclair is not the loner Rochester was, so to find his only solace in his coincidentally much-younger governess seems much less likely. For Rochester, Jane was a breath of air to a suffocating man, and even if his obsession wasn’t healthy (which it arguably wasn’t,) it at least made sense for his character. Sinclair and Gemma seem to both like birds, and then suddenly they’re in love.
This is why using previous work as inspiration can get tricky. Some readers can and do willingly conflate the representative character with the original, and through the combined force of that characterization, the “new” character seems rich and well-defined. If you nitpick and wonder, who is Mr. Sinclair? or try to compare him to Mr. Rochester on their own merits, the former inevitably falls short. So a remaining question is, how does someone evaluate this book? If I try to treat it as its own story, which is nigh impossible, the front half is exceedingly better than the back, where the improbable love story resides. But if I do allow some artistic “crossing of streams”, I can’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy reading this. I appreciated Livesey’s specific modernization choices, as well as the detail that Gemma is originally Icelandic by birth, so she gets to enjoy a little excursion there to meet her family. But the fact remains that for a fairly significant part of the story, the source material does some heavy lifting to fill in the gaps. Overall, I am leaning toward being less pretentious and calling it a 4-star effort on the grounds that it’s a good, entertaining story. Just don’t let the little fact of the story only being partly Livesey’s get in the way of that entertainment.
