Deborah Mason

NonfictionBiography

Down the rabbit hole

Review by Deborah Mason

How do you tell the truth about a liar? You might discount everything the liar says, hoping that the truth is the exact opposite, but what if you are dealing with a skilled liar, one who knows that the most enduring lies have a dash of truth? How do you know if you are following a clue or falling down a rabbit hole?

This is the problem Javier Cercas set for himself in writing The Impostor. Cercas’ biography recounts his efforts to find the truth about the life of a man named Enric Marco. At one point, Marco was, in Cercas’ words, a “rock star” on the political stage of Spain. An anti-Franco freedom fighter during the Spanish Civil War and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Marco rose to prominence as a union organizer, an education leader and a spokesman on behalf of the Spaniards sent to concentration camps by Franco.

All this crumbled, however, when a diligent historian discovered that Marco had never been deported and had never been in a concentration camp. But even after the disclosure of his deceptions, crucial questions remained: Was any part of his story true? And more critically, why ? Was Marco simply a narcissist whose entire sense of self demanded a more grandiose, heroic past than his actual biography could provide? Or, as Marco would have it, was he telling a “noble lie” in order to force Spaniards to face their history?

Cercas, an author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed novel The Soldiers of Salamis, struggles to disentangle the strands of truth from Marco’s web of lies. But Marco is such an artful spinner of tales that Cercas can never be sure if he is being used by Marco, somehow rescuing Marco or exploiting Marco for his own gain. Trying to understand Marco is like looking for a phantom in a house of mirrors, but Cercas’ attempt is an important investigation of the role of the writer, the nature of truth and the battle between memory and history.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How do you tell the truth about a liar? You might discount everything the liar says, hoping that the truth is the exact opposite, but what if you are dealing with a skilled liar, one who knows that the most enduring lies have a dash of truth? How do you know if you are following a clue or falling down a rabbit hole?

NonfictionPolitics

Dairy land takes a turn

Review by Deborah Mason

On Election Day in 2016, pundits were confident that Wisconsin would be a “blue wall” that would lead Hillary Clinton to victory. The next day, however, revealed a different story. Instead of showing Clinton the same support they had given Obama in the previous two presidential elections, Wisconsin went for Trump by 22,748 votes.

Political commentators were flummoxed. How could Wisconsin, historically the most progressive state in the Union, have turned overnight to the right? After all, Wisconsin had served as the legislative laboratory for the rest of the country, passing reform laws that later inspired the New Deal. Furthermore, Wisconsin’s unions could be reliably counted on to turn out the vote for Democrats. What had caused such a sudden shift?

According to journalist Dan Kaufman, the answer is that the shift did not occur overnight. A native Wisconsinite now based in New York, Kaufman argues that Wisconsin’s swing to Trump is the product of a decades-long effort by conservative think tanks, PACs and donors to dismantle Wisconsin’s progressive ethos and replace it with a right-to-work, anti-regulatory government. The result, according to Kaufman, is a gerrymandered state with weakened environmental laws, poor educational results and increased poverty.

Democrats do not get off lightly, either. Kaufman claims that the Democratic Party’s neglect of the industrial workers who made up the bulk of their union support had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 election. He also observes that job losses from NAFTA and the recession made union workers particularly susceptible to Governor Scott Walker’s divide-and-conquer tactics. Democrats, he argues, took Wisconsin for granted, and gave the unions little or no support in devastating political battles. Weakened, they had neither the ability nor the desire to turn out the vote for Clinton.

Kaufman weaves recent political events, Wisconsin history and the stories of real people caught in the political whirlpool—union leaders, Native Americans, grassroots organizers—into a meticulous and compelling exploration of a consequential political metamorphosis. It is essential reading to understand how we arrived where we are today.

On Election Day in 2016, pundits were confident that Wisconsin would be a “blue wall” that would lead Hillary Clinton to victory. The next day, however, revealed a different story. Instead of showing Clinton the same support they had given Obama in the previous two presidential elections, Wisconsin went for Trump by 22,748 votes.
NonfictionBiography

The mother of monsters

Review by Deborah Mason

The cultural impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It’s difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron’s challenge to “write a ghost story” during literary history’s most consequential slumber party.

In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson’s attempt to pin down this elusive woman. It’s not a conventional biography; instead of trying to reconstruct every stage of Shelley’s life, Sampson focuses on key episodes that provide essential clues to understanding the author. Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley’s complex portrait. Or, given Sampson’s status as one of England’s pre-eminent living poets, perhaps it is more apt to say that each chapter is like a stanza, resulting in a poetic exploration of one of the most influential novelists in English literature.

Wracked with guilt for causing her mother’s death, who died shortly after giving birth to her, rejected by her adored father upon his second marriage and passionately in love with the feckless and narcissistic Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley was practically doomed to sacrifice her happiness, reputation and talent in service to others. She suffered the deaths of all but one of her children, the humiliation inflicted by her faithless husband and many betrayals by supposed friends. Yet she somehow managed to write Frankenstein, a novel that continues to engage and challenge readers.

Sampson’s biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The cultural impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It’s difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron’s challenge to “write a ghost story” during literary history’s most consequential slumber party.

NonfictionEssays

Essays on math, genius and reality itself

Review by Deborah Mason

Let’s be clear: Jim Holt is not afraid of tackling the big questions. His 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, made that fact certain. His latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, is a collection of essays previously published in several distinguished periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. A noted American philosopher and TED talk speaker, Holt is at home whether he is discussing the history of science, the state of play in modern philosophy or the impact of quantum mechanics.

Consequently, it is no surprise that the essays in this book explore a complex array of subjects: string theory, the nature of the infinite and the infinitesimal and the impact of computers upon human intelligence, to name a few. But there are lighter moments as well, such as Holt’s essay on the overabundance of overconfidence, or the lowdown on Ava Lovelace’s self-proclaimed mathematical genius (Holt’s verdict on whether Lord Byron’s daughter was a mathematical prodigy: not so much). There are many poignant moments, too, and several of his biographical essays serve as cautionary tales—apparently, mathematical obsession can be dangerous to sanity and health.

This book does not dawdle. Holt is a complex and rigorous writer examining complex and rigorous subjects. Readers whose mathematical and analytical logic skills are a tad rusty might need to google Gödel’s incompleteness theorem or the Riemann zeta conjecture. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. As his subtitle suggests, Holt is pushing us to explore the ideas that have revolutionized how we see the world, the universe and truth itself. They are messy, complicated affairs, but Holt’s intellectual clarity and lucid writing illuminate them. These concepts are mind-boggling, literally. Like the fractals Holt writes about in “Geometrical Creatures,” these ideas are as wild and jagged as a rocky coastline, but therein lies their beauty—and their fun.

Let’s be clear: Jim Holt is not afraid of tackling the big questions. His 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, made that fact certain. His latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, is a collection of essays previously published in several distinguished periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. A noted American philosopher and TED talk speaker, Holt is at home whether he is discussing the history of science, the state of play in modern philosophy or the impact of quantum mechanics.

NonfictionMemoir

Defining life on death row

Review by Deborah Mason

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, April 2018

In 1985, Jefferson County, Alabama, suffered a string of armed robberies. The robber would attack restaurant managers, take their cash, force them into the cooler and then shoot them in cold blood. Two managers died; the third survived and gave a description of the attacker to the police. Based on this identification, the sheriff’s department arrested Anthony Ray Hinton, an African-American man out on parole for auto theft.

But Hinton had an ironclad alibi: At the time of the third robbery, he was at work 15 miles away, with a security guard who noted Hinton’s whereabouts throughout his shift. Furthermore, Hinton took and passed a polygraph test. He was innocent. Yet the district attorney pursued Hinton’s conviction with the grim determination of the furies, aided in his dogged efforts by an incompetent defense attorney, a racist jury and a judge who ruled in the State’s favor at every turn. Hinton was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the two murders. He spent 30 years on death row before being released in 2015. Hinton tells his story in his harrowing, powerful memoir, The Sun Does Shine.

This book is filled with questions that infuriate. Why did the DA ignore the evidence of Hinton’s innocence? Why would the State ignore prosecutorial misconduct and refuse to consider new exonerating evidence? Why spend so much time, effort and money to execute a man for a murder he demonstrably did not commit?

Yet The Sun Does Shine is also filled with grace. Through his faith in God, the love of his friends and mother, his commitment to the other inmates on death row and the unstinting support of his appellate attorney (Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative), Hinton maintained his soul in a soulless world. His experience gives him a peerless moral authority on the death penalty, and he raises powerful questions about the practice. Hinton’s voice demands to be heard.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1985, Jefferson County, Alabama, suffered a string of armed robberies. The robber would attack restaurant managers, take their cash, force them into the cooler and then shoot them in cold blood. Two managers died; the third survived and gave a description of the attacker to the police. Based on this identification, the sheriff’s department arrested Anthony Ray Hinton, an African-American man out on parole for auto theft.

NonfictionTrue Crime

An astonishing miscarriage of justice

Review by Deborah Mason

In 1992, Levon Brooks received a life sentence for the 1990 sexual assault and murder of a 3-year-old girl in rural Noxubee County, Mississippi. In 1995, Kennedy Brewer was sentenced to death for committing a similar crime in the same county—so similar, in fact, that it should have raised questions about the validity of Brooks’ conviction. Both men were innocent, yet they spent years of their lives in prison, until finally, in 2008, they were exonerated by DNA evidence. The murders were actually committed by Justin Albert Johnson, a convicted sex offender who lived near both victims. Oddly, Johnson had been a suspect in both of these cases, but each time, Johnson was excluded as a suspect because of the forensic evidence of Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West.

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko, a Washington Post reporter, and Tucker Carrington, the director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law, meticulously detail the absurd lengths to which Hayne and West would go to clinch guilty verdicts in hundreds of cases. If the stakes were not so high, Hayne’s and West’s shenanigans would seem nearly comical. But as Balko and Carrington make clear, Hayne and West were both the symptom and the product of a criminal justice system tainted by racism, cronyism and corruption.

This is a true crime story, but it is more than a report of the tragic murders of two young girls. The crime at the center of this book is the one committed by a justice system that is more concerned with conviction rates than unearthing the truth, by a state with a history of using incarceration to subjugate black men, and by two men whose greed and hubris blinded them to the lives they ruined. Compellingly written, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a chilling reminder of what happens to the rule of law when the law forgets the rules.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1992, Levon Brooks received a life sentence for the 1990 sexual assault and murder of a 3-year-old girl in rural Noxubee County, Mississippi. In 1995, Kennedy Brewer was sentenced to death for committing a similar crime in the same county—so similar, in fact, that it should have raised questions about the validity of Brooks’ conviction.

NonfictionHistory

Back to basics

Review by Deborah Mason

To be clear, the title of this book by Alexander Langlands is Cræft, not “craft.” When we think of craft, we tend to think of expensive handmade objects, often considered anachronisms in a world of mass production and mass consumption. Cræft (pronounced “creft”) is the Anglo-Saxon root for the modern word “craft,” and it includes both the product and the process of crafting. But cræft has a more profound meaning: It is the wisdom, handed down from previous generations, that enables the crafter to create a perfectly useful object.

Langlands is an experimental archaeologist; he replicates ancient artifacts and processes to gain greater insights into the cultures that produced them. In Cræft, he explains how ancient craftsmen used their skill, available natural resources and especially cræft to solve the problems that life threw at them. Need temporary sheep pens? Use your weaving skills to create portable wicker fencing. Want a permanent solution for keeping sheep out of your grain fields? Forge tools that help you prune and manipulate trees to form hedgerows. No trees around? Use rocks to create dry stone walls of such cunning manufacture that they last for generations—without mortar.

Langlands is not merely describing the past; cræft has shaped our present and can enhance our future. Anyone who has walked in the English countryside can see how cræft molded the natural environment: Ancient burial mounds, weirs and dikes, even the barren moorlands that inspired the Brontë sisters testify to the human knack for devising ingenious solutions to difficult problems. The importance of cræft is demonstrated by the devastating effects its absence can have: The modern tendency to favor mechanization over cræft, Langlands posits, has resulted in flooding, soil degradation and global warming. In a world with diminishing resources, it might be wise to tap into cræft to ensure a sustainable future. Langlands has written an excellent introduction to guide us.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

To be clear, the title of this book by Alexander Langlands is Cræft, not “craft.” When we think of craft, we tend to think of expensive handmade objects, often considered anachronisms in a world of mass production and mass consumption. Cræft (pronounced “creft”) is the Anglo-Saxon root for the modern word “craft,” and it includes both the product and the process of crafting. But cræft has a more profound meaning: It is the wisdom, handed down from previous generations, that enables the crafter to create a perfectly useful object.

NonfictionBiography

An aristocrat turned war hero

Review by Deborah Mason

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, December 2017

Step aside, James Bond. There’s a new sexy spy hero in town, and this one has the advantage of being real. His name is La Rochefoucauld, Robert de La Rochefoucauld, and his career as a résistant in Nazi-occupied France is the subject of Paul Kix’s The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando.

La Rochefoucauld, the carefree second son of one of France’s most distinguished families, was an unlikely hero. A bit of a ne’er-do-well, La Rochefoucauld was in no way the exemplary son that his beloved elder brother was. But La Rochefoucauld inherited the same sense of duty that had marked generations of his family, and at the age of 19, when France capitulated to Germany, he was determined to continue the fight against the Nazis.

After rigorous—and downright dangerous—training in England, La Rochefoucauld parachuted into France and began his spectacular career as a saboteur of Nazi operations. Captured, tortured and condemned to death by the Germans, La Rochefoucauld managed to escape from certain doom time and time again. If this were fiction, the plot would be fantastical; as a work of nonfiction, it is a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit.

Kix’s sharp, well-paced writing is perfect for telling La Rochefoucauld’s story. But this is more than a gripping yarn of daring-do. La Rochefoucauld was a complex character, and Kix’s portrait is nuanced and moving. We are introduced to La Rochefoucauld when he is about to testify in the trial of an accused war criminal and collaborator—for the defense. Obviously, this is not your stereotypical resistance fighter, and Kix’s book poses the big questions: What is duty? What is courage? What is loyalty?

Like many veterans of his generation, La Rochefoucauld rarely spoke about his experiences to his family. We are fortunate to have Kix’s richly detailed book so we can remember the remarkable courage of an extraordinary man.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Step aside, James Bond. There’s a new sexy spy hero in town, and this one has the advantage of being real. His name is La Rochefoucauld, Robert de La Rochefoucauld, and his career as a résistant in Nazi-occupied France is the subject of Paul Kix’s The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando.

NonfictionMemoir

Citizen Khan

Review by Deborah Mason

Few would disagree that the climax of the 2016 Democratic National Convention was when Khizr Khan, a Gold Star Father, held up his copy of the U.S. Constitution and challenged Donald Trump to read it. It was an audacious gesture that was grounded in firmly held conviction. Regardless of one’s politics, there was something profoundly admirable about this man.

In his eloquent memoir, An American Family, Khan retraces the steps that brought him from his grandfather’s house in Pakistan to the stage of the Democratic National Convention. His grandfather instilled in Khan a compassionate morality that is firmly rooted in Islam. Throughout his life, his grandfather’s wisdom guided Khan. It sustained him through his struggle for an education; his lyrical romance with his wife, Ghazala; his single-minded determination to succeed in America; and, ultimately, his grief at the death of his beloved son, Captain Humayun Khan, who sacrificed his life while protecting others from a suicide bomber.

Khan opens his book by describing his first encounter with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while he was a law student in Lahore, Pakistan. The documents’ assertion of inalienable rights and equality resonated with Khan, who lived in a society that promised neither. He never doubted the promise of the words he read in Lahore.

Khan’s story is both unique and archetypal. Like generations of immigrants before them, the Khans sacrificed in order to achieve the American Dream. They became citizens and raised their three sons to be good men. When Humayun joined the Army, the Khans, although fearful, respected his commitment to his country.

Sometimes it takes a newcomer to point out the beauty that old-timers take for granted. America, more than any other country, was founded upon ideals: individual freedoms, equal protection and due process of law. Khan reminds us that these ideals are worth fighting—and even dying—for. The Khans truly are the most American of families.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his eloquent memoir, An American Family, Khizr Khan retraces the steps that brought him from his grandfather’s house in Pakistan to the stage of the Democratic National Convention.

NonfictionBiography

Midcentury Renaissance man

Review by Deborah Mason

Jennet Conant’s latest book, Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, is a magisterial biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential men: her own grandfather. James B. Conant, a brilliant scientist, had a career that was so varied and vital to our country that this book could easily have been called “Man of Many Hours.”

To say that James realized an impressive array of achievements is to damn him with faint praise. An outstanding research chemist at Harvard, he was crucial to understanding the structure of chlorophyll. In recognition of his vision and talent, he was selected as the president of Harvard soon after turning 40. What would have been the capstone achievement for most people turned out to be a steppingstone for James.

Appointed by Eisenhower as the high commissioner to Germany, he ushered West Germany into NATO. Later, after sputnik, he became a powerful voice for strengthening the public school system. But James is perhaps most famous for his work on the Manhattan Project. It is likely that the Project would have failed without his steady and wise presence, but his most famous achievement haunted him. Postwar, James was horrified by the threat of nuclear proliferation, and he argued strongly against developing the hydrogen bomb. The politics of the time—McCarthyism, Stalin’s aggression, Truman’s inexperience—doomed his ideas, but one wonders what the world would be like now if James had been heeded.

Jennet Conant has written about her grandfather before, in her earlier books 109 East Palace and Tuxedo Park. But while there is genuine pride in her grandfather, she never allows it to cloud her judgment. Jennet can be quite critical of her subject, especially when detailing the devastating impact his prolonged absences had upon his wife and sons. In other words, she brings to her task the same objectivity, thoroughness and interest that her grandfather brought to his. Insightful and rich in detail, this book is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jennet Conant’s latest book, Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, is a magisterial biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential men: her own grandfather. James B. Conant, a brilliant scientist, had a career that was so varied and vital to our country that this book could easily have been called “Man of Many Hours.”

NonfictionMemoir

Resilience and hope

Review by Deborah Mason

The Choice is more than an eloquent memoir by Holocaust survivor and psychologist Edith Eva Eger. It is an exploration of the healing potential of choice. When someone chooses to harm us, our sense of self can later be overwhelmed by the memory of that pain. But Eger, who has helped countless trauma patients, believes that we can regain our autonomy by choosing to confront the past—a lesson she learned from her own experience.

When Eger was 16, Josef Mengele, the abhorrent Auschwitz physician, made horrific choices for her. He chose for Eger to live and sent her parents to die. That same day, he chose Eger to dance “The Blue Danube” for his entertainment. Although a prisoner, Eger infused that dance with all the joy that dancing always brought her. Mengele gave her a loaf of bread as a reward for her bravura performance. Eger shared the loaf with the other prisoners, and later, a girl who had eaten that bread chose to help Eger, saving her life as a result. The ability to choose, even though those choices were circumscribed by an electrified fence, gave Eger the strength to survive.

After the war, she repressed these memories to spare others the pain of her experience. Wracked with guilt for having survived when so many perished, Eger watched her marriage crumble. Another choice confronted her: Stay mired in the past, or face it and learn to live in the present. Her journey took her back to Auschwitz, where she unlocked the last and darkest memory of that first day, and forgave not only her tormentors but also, and most importantly, herself.

Eger is not suggesting that she is unscarred by her experience, but that she lives a life filled with grace. The Choice is not a how-to book; it is, however, an invitation to choose to live life fully.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Choice is more than an eloquent memoir by Holocaust survivor and psychologist Edith Eva Eger. It is an exploration of the healing potential of choice. When someone chooses to harm us, our sense of self can later be overwhelmed by the memory of that pain. But Eger, who has helped countless trauma patients, believes that we can regain our autonomy by choosing to confront the past—a lesson she learned from her own experience.

NonfictionBiography

Cracks in the firmament

Review by Deborah Mason

New York Times Magazine correspondent Suzy Hansen begins her book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, with her investigation into a lethal coal-mine fire in Soma, Turkey. She is shocked to learn of America’s role in the creation of an ineffectual union that failed to protect its members. Hansen had always assumed that American policies were essentially benign; we seek to “modernize” less developed countries and to democratize them—certainly not to cause harm.

Hansen argues that Americans are dangerously innocent about American interventions in other countries. When confronted with intractable hostilities abroad, we don’t realize these hostilities are frequently the result of U.S. policies that have caused great harm—a history that is rarely taught in American schools.

Raised in a conservative New Jersey town, Hansen, too, was “an innocent abroad” when she arrived in Turkey in 2007 on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. Despite a Harvard education, Hansen had no understanding of how America’s fear of communism led it to support strongman dictatorships, destroy local economies and even encourage and support fundamentalist Islamist militants. Paradoxically, the foreign country she ends up taking notes on is her own.

Painfully honest, this book can be a difficult read, but Hansen leaves us room to hope that, while our innocence has harmed the world, self-knowledge and empathy can help heal it.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Painfully honest, this book can be a difficult read, but Hansen leaves us room to hope that, while our innocence has harmed the world, self-knowledge and empathy can help heal it.

Nonfiction

The woman behind the words

Review by Deborah Mason

The Brontë sisters were publicity shy. The three writers used masculine pseudonyms both to overcome the bias against female authors and to preserve their privacy as the respectable, unmarried adult daughters of an Anglican clergyman. Charlotte even continued to use her nom de plume well after the death of her sisters and the critical success of her novels. She also vehemently denied that she served as the model for her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre—even publicly scolding William Makepeace Thackeray for introducing her as “Jane Eyre.” And yet, despite these protestations, Charlotte acknowledged that every emotion that Jane experiences in the novel was also experienced by her creator.

Jane Eyre, which is subtitled “An Autobiography,” is, in many ways, also an autobiography of Charlotte Brontë. Rochester is based in part on Charlotte’s great unrequited love, Constantin Héger, and Charlotte’s sister Maria was the model for doomed little Helen Burns. But in The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher explores how Jane Eyre is more than a superficially autobiographical novel; it is a complex emotional self-portrait of the author. Pfordresher, a professor of English at Georgetown University, is obviously a great admirer of Charlotte, and he uses her letters, earlier work and life experiences to explore his topic. But he also uses the novel itself as a kind of treasure map to find where Charlotte has hidden herself in Jane’s story. In an especially interesting section, Pfordresher uses his expertise in Victorian art to show how Jane’s drawings, as described in the novel, express Charlotte’s deep and turbulent emotional life. The moon, used in many key scenes, is symbolic of Charlotte’s yearning for the mother taken from her at a young age.

This is a fascinating and authoritative book, written with intelligence, wit and affection, and full of surprises. Reader, I recommend it.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Brontë sisters were publicity shy. The three writers used masculine pseudonyms both to overcome the bias against female authors and to preserve their privacy as the respectable, unmarried adult daughters of an Anglican clergyman. Charlotte even continued to use her nom de plume well after the death of her sisters and the critical success of her novels. She also vehemently denied that she served as the model for her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre—even publicly scolding William Makepeace Thackeray for introducing her as “Jane Eyre.”

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