Becoming Jane Eyre

The year is 1846.  In a damp, cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors of northen England, a family seems cursed with diaster:  a mother and two children dead; a father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his wife and two eldest children; a son destroyed by alcohol and opiates; and three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate - nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.

So unfolds the story of the Bronte sisters - Charlotte, Emily and Anne.  From Shelia Kohler's extensive research and wonderful imagination comes the life of these three young writers.  At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre, and the overlapping narratives of author and heroine - including Charlotte's love affair with a married man.  Delicately unraveling the powerful and inextricable connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction.

Shelia Kohler's begins her book with Charlotte taking care of her father after eye surgery. She has so much time on her hands to be quiet, think and begins writing Jane Eyre. As she reflects about her life ideas for her novel begin to take shape. This book was enhanced by my recent reading of The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte.  Without that fuller knowledge, I am not sure I would have enjoyed this novel as much.