Interview with Marian Yee

Jane Austen spinoffs are everywhere—many of them delightful, like Samantha Silva’s Sometime This Century, which I covered earlier this month. Jane Eyre spinoffs are harder to pull off. The Brontës’ distinctly darker view of life—in part a result of their family life, in part a response to the bleak Yorkshire moors that surrounded them—doesn’t readily lend itself to frothy romances or cozy mysteries. Still, Marian Yee, the author of 4 Janes, can’t be the first person to wonder whether Jane Eyre might have done better to marry her cousin or at least to speculate on how things would have turned out between Jane and Rochester once the first blaze of passion cooled. She may be the first person to link Charlotte Brontë’s novel to the Vietnam War, however. Read more from this written interview with the author to find out how that works.

This is your debut novel. How did the idea for it come to you?

The inspiration for this book came from a visit to Vietnam years ago, where I met a Vietnamese bookseller in Hue who was reading an abridged copy of Jane Eyre in order to learn English. That unexpected juxtaposition lit a creative fire: I wondered how I could make these two different worlds come together.

The novel goes back and forth between Jane Eyre’s imagined life in the nineteenth century and Vietnam during the war with the United States and later, after the Communist victory. Was that always the plan? What connected these two very different settings in your mind?

The plan, as I said, was to try to bring these two very different worlds together. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I understood that these worlds were already connected; that historically, eastern and western countries have always had a long history and relationship with each other, although for the most part, that relationship had not always been peaceful or equal. So, bringing these two worlds closer together became more a matter of finding pathways that were already in place as a result of historical events, and moving characters toward each other using those routes.

Having the Victorian-era Jane move eastward required, in the first place, an act of geographical dislocation that began with disrupting the original outcome of Brontë’s narrative. In short, instead of marrying Edward Rochester, the wealthy landowner and Jane’s first love, she marries her clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, and becomes a missionary’s wife. However, since the eastern route for English missionaries lay in the direction of India rather than Vietnam (which was then a part of French Indochina), India is where her journey begins.

For the modern Vietnamese bookseller, the journey west is also indirect. It begins with an imaginative excursion inspired through reading a book about a young English orphan, poor and plain, who dreams of a bigger life. Following the Vietnam War, the bookseller, like Jane Eyre, lives a life of scarce resources but rich dreams. When she connects with an American priest, it seems that her world might expand, but it doesn’t do so in the way she expects. Instead, Trang’s westward journey moves onward through the story of her son’s arrival in America and his own search for love and re-connection.

Introduce us to your Jane Eyre, as we meet her in 1851 on a boat heading for India. How does she approach this challenge, and what does she encounter that she doesn’t expect?

In my book, when Jane sets out for India with St. John Rivers, she is embarking upon an entirely different journey from the one that Brontë has her heading to at the end of Jane Eyre. Instead of re-uniting with and taking up a domestic life with an old love, Edward Rochester, she is going on a new adventure to a faraway land, meeting new people, undertaking new challenges in a strange new environment, and needing to rethink her role and purpose in life in her new identity as a missionary’s wife. She does not love the man she marries and inwardly grieves for her lost soulmate. On the ship transporting them to India, Jane meets another woman who has her own secrets and struggles; they form an unlikely friendship that helps Jane feel seen again and helps give her the strength to move forward.

It becomes clear early on that her marriage to St. John Rivers is passionless. Why, in your mind, did she agree to wed him, and what can you tell us about him more generally?

Marrying St. John Rivers was never about love or passion. Jane agrees to marry him because she believes that Edward Rochester died in a fire, and though heartbroken, she needs to have some purpose in her life, which she thinks that being a missionary’s wife will provide for her. SJR has always been a cold and rigid figure in Brontë’s story, and in my version, he is still that character. But we gradually come to see that there’s more to him than we see at first. He is actually thoughtful about what it means to be a missionary. He believes that for conversion to be sustainable, it has to be internal, local, and supported by structures and institutions led by the native community. As a result, he works hard to learn the native tongue and to preach in the local vernacular. These views put him at odds with fellow European proselytizers, but Jane comes to admire his openness of mind, steadfastness, and determination. SJR also comes to know Jane; he observes her struggles, her patience, and her resilience in their new environment and roles. Both Jane and SJR are lonely people; neither has married the person they truly loved, but in the course of their journey, they come to better understand each other, and not to give too much away, they also, at the end, do find passion together.

From Jane in Amritsar, we move to the second and longest section of the book, which features a young woman named Tran Thi Trang in twentieth-century Hue, Vietnam. What links her to Jane Eyre in terms of her personality or her experience in this quite different time and space?

Outwardly, the Trang in twentieth-century Hue, Vietnam, and the Jane in Brontë’s early nineteenth-century England occupy two very different times, places, and cultures. But what the two have in common is that, like Jane Eyre, Trang is plain and poor. Along with her sister, she operates a roadside bookstall where the two of them scrape out a meagre living. Unlike her pretty and outgoing sister, Trang is bookish, quiet, and shy. She is reading an abridged copy of Jane Eyre because she wants to improve her English, but also because she is curious about the world beyond her own small, cramped one. She identifies with the character of Jane Eyre and feels a connection with Jane as someone who also struggles and dreams. Also, like Jane, Trang loves a man who seems unattainable, a man with secrets, who also seems to return her love but then ends up betraying her. And, like Jane, Trang comes to find that she has more strength, courage, resilience, and independence than she ever knew she possessed.

The story doesn’t end with Trang, though. It’s in Part 3 that you reveal a deeper connection between the Jane Eyre thread and the Vietnamese one. I’m not asking you to give away spoilers, but could you say something about what Jane encounters once she returns to England?

Part 3 can be read in a number of ways. One is that Jane returns to England and is reunited with Edward Rochester. Two is that she never left England: a life in India with St. John Rivers is all a fever dream. Three is that there are two Janes: one went to India; the other returned to Rochester. Instead of having to choose when she comes to a fork in the road, she travels down both paths along simultaneous, parallel journeys. Time, space, and bodily presence is malleable and shifting in this section.

When the Jane in England starts time-jumping through history, she is in a heightened state of grief following the death of their young son, and she experiences these episodes as being caught up in a backward- and forward-looking whirlwind. Readers can take this as following Jane’s mental breakdown if they prefer an unmagical explanation, or they can view it as the literal power of a mother’s determination to tear through time and space to find her lost child. Most importantly, and most convenient for me as a writer, Jane’s time-jumping allowed me to directly connect her to Vietnam after only being able to move her there halfway in Part 1. She doesn’t make the time jumps to modern Vietnam right away; instead, she witnesses a nation evolving through oppression, violence, and conflict, as she progresses in stages that follow the country’s history from French colonization through the war with America as she searches for her lost son.

Finally, threading throughout 4 Janes is an exploration of Jane as a mother. Readers of Brontë’s Jane Eyre mostly know it as a story of a young woman who overcomes great odds to unite with a soulmate. But they may also remember that at the end of the book, Jane becomes a new parent. This dimension of Jane as a mother was one that I wanted to explore more fully in my re-imagining of Jane’s story. I was particularly drawn to this because I imagined that growing up as an orphan who had to parent herself, Jane would be a fierce and protective parent of her own child.

The last section of the book takes place in 2008 and features Vinh Tran Martin. What is his role in the story?

Vinh’s role in the book is to retell the story of Jane Eyre and complete/fulfill all of Jane’s journeys. He is the orphan who survives; he is the dreamer who longs to be seen and known; he is the lover who is betrayed and flees, gains strength and independence, and reconnects with the loved one. And finally, he is the lost child who is found.

This book has just come out. Are you already working on another novel, and if so, what can you tell us about it?

The next one is another work of literary fan fiction, and it’s based on The Tempest. I’m using Shakespeare’s play to explore issues about climate change and how humans relate to nature. The story will center around an heir to a Singaporean conglomerate who becomes stranded on an isolated Mediterranean island after a shipwreck. There, he falls under the spell of a girl who is part human, part plant, part ocean, and her father, an evolutionary biologist who’s trying to breed a new form of life that’s capable of surviving a global environmental collapse. It’s a dark fairy tale, a survival story, a romance—all unfolding on a remote island where magic, nature, dreams, and madness collide.

As a professor in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Department at Berklee College of Music, Marian Yee teaches writing, literature, and visual studies to performing arts students. Her published writings include poems, reviews, and scholarly articles. 4 Janes is her debut novel. Find out more about her and her writing at https://marianyee.com.