The Eyre Affair

Infobox Book |
name = The Eyre Affair


image_caption = UK Paperback Cover of The Eyre Affair.
author = Jasper Fforde
cover_artist =
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series = A Thursday Next Novel
genre = Alternate history, Fantasy novel
publisher = Viking Press
release_date = 2001
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-340-82576-6
preceded_by =
followed_by = Lost in a Good Book

"The Eyre Affair", published in 2001, is the first novel published by Jasper Fforde. It is the story of literary detective Thursday Next's pursuit of a master criminal through an alternate 1985 and through the pages of Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre".

Plot summary

In this parallel world, England and Imperial Russia have fought the Crimean War for more than a century. England itself is a police state run by the Goliath Corporation (a powerful weapon-producing company with questionable morals). Wales is a separate, socialist nation. The book's fictional version of Jane Eyre ends with Jane accompanying her cousin, St. John Rivers, to India in order to help him with his missionary work. Literary questions (especially the question of Shakespearean authorship) are debated so hotly that they inspire gang wars and murder.

Single, thirty-something, Crimean War veteran and literary detective Thursday Next lives in London with her pet dodo, Pickwick. As the story begins, Thursday is called upon to investigate the theft of the original manuscript of "Martin Chuzzlewit" by Charles Dickens.

As part of the investigation, Thursday is temporarily promoted to SpecOps-5 to help them apprehend their suspect, Acheron Hades, the third most wanted criminal in the world. Thursday is one of the few people able to identify Hades as he was one of her professors at university. She comes close to capturing him during the SpecOps stakeout, but is badly injured, saved only because the copy of "Jane Eyre" in her pocket stops Hades' bullet. A mysterious stranger administers first aid and comforts her until the paramedics arrive, leaving only a monogrammed handkerchief and jacket behind. These items are familiar to Thursday; as a child, she entered the book Jane Eyre shortly before Rochester met Jane Eyre for the first time, and became acquainted with Rochester himself and she recognizes the items as his.

While recovering in the hospital, Thursday encounters her future self who tells her to "Take the LiteraTec job in Swindon!" She therefore requests a transfer to the office in her old home town. Back at home, she catches up with her mother Wednesday, her Uncle Mycroft and his wife Polly. Mycroft invents literary technology, ranging from translating carbon paper (write something in English on the top sheet and the carbons translate your writing into other languages) to a Prose Portal which allows people to enter works of fiction. Next also renews an acquaintance with her former fiancé Landen Parke-Laine (a reference to the British version of the board game Monopoly).

Hades kidnaps Mycroft, Polly, and the Prose Portal in order to blackmail the literary world. In this alternate universe, any change to a novel's original manuscript changes all copies of that novel. Hades removes Mr. Quaverley, a minor character from the original manuscript of Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit" into the real world; when Hades' demands are not met, he kills Quaverly. (There was never any such character in the real version of Martin Chuzzlewit.)

Next and a Goliath Corporation operative named Jack Schitt trace Hades to the Socialist Republic of Wales. They rescue Mycroft and the Prose Portal, but find that Polly is stuck in the poems of Wordsworth, and Hades has gone into the original text of "Jane Eyre". Next pursues Hades into the text, and after much trouble, she succeeds in catching and killing him. In the process, Thornfield Hall is burned, Rochester's mad wife Bertha falls to her death, and Rochester himself is grievously injured...in other words, Thursday has altered the ending of the book to match what readers of "The Eyre Affair" would consider the 'real' ending to "Jane Eyre".

Returning to her own world, Next uses the Prose Portal to release her Aunt Polly from a Wordsworth poem and to imprison Jack Schitt in the text of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". She shows up at the church where Landen is about to be married to one Daisy Mutlar, only to find the ceremony interrupted by the lawyer from Jane Eyre who intervened when Rochester was about to marry Jane; in a reflection of the scene in "Jane Eyre", he informs the people attending the marriage of Landen and Mutlar that it cannot take place as she is currently married to someone else. Next and Parke-Laine are reconciled and get married.

Thursday's father turns up at her wedding. He is a renegade agent from SpecOps-12, the ChronoGuard (see Chronology protection conjecture). He temporarily stops time in order to dispense some fatherly advice to his daughter. The novel ends with Next facing an uncertain future at work: public reaction to the new ending for Jane Eyre is positive, but there are other repercussions.

The series continues with "Lost in a Good Book".

References

*Hateley, Erica, "The End of The Eyre Affair: Jane Eyre, Parody, and Popular Culture", "Journal of Popular Culture", 38:6 (2005 Nov), pp. 1022-36, ISSN 0022-3840
*Horstkotte, Martin, "The Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary British Fiction", Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004, ISBN 3-88476-679-1
*Horstkotte, Martin, "The Worlds of the Fantastic Other in Postmodern English Fiction", "Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts", 14:3 (2003 Fall), pp. 318-32, ISSN 0897-0521
*Lusty, Heather, "Struggling to Remember: War, Trauma, and the Adventures of Thursday Next", "Popular Culture Review", 16:2 (2005 Summer), pp. 117-29, ISSN 1060-8125

External links

* [http://www.jasperfforde.com/ Fforde Grand Central]