In their “casual uniform of polo shirts and khakis, have a sort of softness to them. The women are awful, but Jane is just as scornful of the men. The lady figures she must have lost one somewhere-at a fancy restaurant or the country club. I thought it clever that she takes ONE diamond hoop earring, not both. Jane is in and out of these big houses several times a week and often takes a moment to steal something to pay the rent on her hovel in Center Point. But having a dog walker looks stylish and, Jane tells us, in Mountain Brook, appearance is everything-expensive hair coloring, nails, shopping for their pastel or floral clothes. They go to expensive spas to get exercise. The wives of Thornfield Estates, essentially female drones with no domestic chores, should walk their own dogs. Our heroine, Jane, nobody from Phoenix, Arizona, raised we learn in foster homes, is not educated enough or polished enough to be a governess. She is a dog walker in Thornfield Estates, a new, perfectly groomed section of Mountain Brook. Now Rachel Hawkins, best-selling author of eleven books for children, has produced her first “adult” novel, a revisioning of “Jane Eyre” set in Mountain Brook.Īnd it really is an adult novel. Not so much because of the sexuality and some scenes of violence, although there is lots of that, but because of the darkness, the cynicism, the depiction of life in Mountain Brook as shallow, pretentious, hypocritical, ostentatious, and Hobbesian in its genteel, country club, tooth-and-claw, struggle of all against all. Lewis.Ĭassandra King Conroy, who had written several successful domestic novels for women of a certain age, often going through a divorce and helped out by a small group of faithful friends, published “Moonrise,” an inspired rewrite of Daphne DuMaurier’s “Rebecca,” setting it in Highlands, North Carolina. Lewis,” the story of the American poet who fell in love with and married the English writer C.

Patti Callahan Henry, famous for women’s novels often set at the beach, took a chance and produced the very fine “Becoming Mrs. In the last few years three Alabama novelists have struck out in new directions with really astonishing results. Classic British Novel Re-envisioned in Mountain Brook Is Full of Surprises

The wife upstairs a novel