Book Review

The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner

TW/CW

Trigger warning: anti-semitism, disassociating during sex

The Wife in the Attic is a retelling of Jane Eyre where a lonely governess falls for her employer’s mysterious wife, and contemplates whether murdering him is the easiest way out of their predicament. For many of you, that’s all you need to know to one-click. Go forth and enjoy this audiobook which is available on Audible now, and as an ebook in Fall 2021.

This book is a gothic delight. It’s unsettling but not scary, with slowly building tension that was totally absorbing. I loved how smart and sexy the story was, but I’m still trying to decide if it’s a romance.

Miss Deborah Oliver is a struggling guitar teacher with the thinnest of genteel pretensions: she’s an orphan whose gentleman father was disowned after he married her Portuguese Jewish working class mother. When she hears of an opening for a governess in an isolated manor by the sea, Miss Oliver barely hesitates.

The catch: her “small-minded” employer, Sir Kit Palethorp, requires an extremely proper Church of England education for his daughter, Tabby. Between her mother’s background, her father’s Methodism, and her lesbian adventures at boarding school, Deborah know’s she’ll need to lie by omission to keep this job. She’s tired of the meager meals at her boarding house, and fantasizes about luxurious breakfasts, ocean walks, and bonding with a little girl potentially just as lonely and odd as she is.

Like me, you may not be surprised that Goldengrove is not the seaside retreat of Deborah’s dreams, but a glittering gargoyle right out of Rebecca. She encounters dour servants who won’t let her leave the house, a flirtatious but controlling employer who might be stealing her letters, a sick Lady of the manor that no one ever sees, and a pupil who lies and breaks things. As a new governess, Deborah is never sure how much of the weirdness is typical.

It’s easy to root for Deborah. She’s my favorite kind of heroine: an outsider who’s skeptical of society but a keen observer of its foibles. She’s proud of her heritage, but practical about navigating other people’s blindspots. She’s also non-religious, which is rare in historicals. Deborah doesn’t trust anyone, which leaves her anxious and lonely. Her life is interwoven with characters from Lerner’s Lively St Lemeston series, and one of my favorite parts of the book was watching her slowly realize how many people have loved and cared for her all along. Much healing from generational trauma ensues.

Because she feels alone, Deborah is an easy mark for Sir Kit. From their first meeting, he tries to disarm her with compliments, gifts, and confidences about his difficult foreign wife. It’s always a good sign when the guy blames his “crazy ex-girlfriend,” right? Deborah’s initially skeptical of Kit, but somewhere along the way begins to crave his approval, even when he prevents her contacting her acquaintances, or contrives excuses for ignoring her boundaries. She isn’t sure if she’s attracted to Kit, and thinks he might be manipulative, but she enjoys imagining what it would be like to be his wife and a mother. Despite herself, she loves being liked. But clues keep piling up that Kit is not as nice as he claims. And whenever Tabby asks her if Jews are going to hell, Deborah is reminded that this dude is bad news.

At the same time that she’s becoming wary friends with Sir Kit, Deborah is trying to dig up dirt on his absent wife, starting with asking leading questions of the Palethorp’s provincial neighbors:

“She despised our food, too,” chimed in the square-jawed blonde wife of a justice of the peace. “She would be syrupy sweet when she dined with you and compliment your cook, but then you’d see her dousing everything in pepper sauce and cayenne at home. I heard she once shouted at her cook for stinting on garlic.”

“I suppose everybody finds foreign ways peculiar. Only to her, we’re the foreigners.”

Everyone laughed again, at the startling notion that Englishness was not the natural state of humanity.

“Nothing is more ruinous to a weak constitution than an excess of cayenne and spices,” the magistrate’s wife said sagely. “It heats the blood and irritates the whole system.”

Your inglês self-righteousness heats the blood and irritates the whole system, I thought. But here was my first clue to Lady Palethorp’s origins! Not France after all, then. Where were spicy foods eaten? Perhaps Italy. India. Probably I only thought of Spain and Portugal because of mãe.

It’s very hard to talk about this book without spoiling it. Deborah is enthralled by the Palethorps, first by Kit’s pursuit of her despite her plainness, and later, by the unexpected similarities between herself and wealthy, lush Lady Jael Palethorp. The two women finally meet while sneaking around the house at night, and they are both competitive over Kit and his daughter, and fascinated by one another. But Miss Oliver doesn’t trust either of the Palethorps, or herself when she’s around them.

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Like Deborah, Jael is Jewish, Portuguese, and a guitarist. This familiarity is part of what draws them together. They’ve both been isolated since their families died, and seeing Deborah fall in love with another Jewish woman was beautiful and healing. I really loved the cultural aspects of the story (music, language, food) and that neither woman internalized any of Kit’s bullshit about their identity.

I typically hate love triangles, but this is more of a lopsided amoeba than a triangle. Both of the Palethorps see Miss Oliver as their best chance of escaping a toxic marriage, but Kit’s got no chance once his wife appears. Jael might be a spoiled rich girl, and a tad unstable after years in the attic, but Deborah is still captivated.

This book is very sexy, even though it’s not particularly explicit. The heroines’ first sex scene is electric, surprising, and a little melancholy. I devoured it, rereading sentences, and I fell in love with the book because they were gorgeous together. Their chemistry is fantastic, so it doesn’t surprise me that after a few kisses, murdering Kit “the obstacle” Palethorp pops into their minds.

Unfortunately, it takes AGES for Deborah and Jael to meet. They don’t have a conversation until a third into the book, and since we only get Deborah’s POV, Jael’s motivations remain a mystery. In the meantime, we get to watch Kit gaslighting Deborah while she wonders if she’s being unreasonable for thinking he might be a wife beater.

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He is.

I was annoyed at having to read about Deborah waffling about her doomed situationship with Kit. It’s realistic, but hard to watch a smart woman become uncertain around him. Honestly, both the master and mistress of the house seemed dangerous, selfish and untrustworthy, and I wasn’t sure it was a good idea for Debroah to fall for either one of them. Jael spends so much time locked away that we rarely see her and Deborah together, which made it hard for me to invest in them working in the long-term.

And then there’s Tabby. This story is about a governess, but the book opened questions about Deborah and her charge that never felt resolved. The Palethorp’s five-year old daughter is petulant, vain, and loves two things, pretty dresses and monitoring barometric pressure. She had so much underutilized potential!

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Tabby worships her father, but she also hides Jael’s secret nighttime visits to the nursery from Sir Kit. It wasn’t clear to me how much Tabby knew about her mother’s imprisonment, and whose side she’d choose.

More importantly, Deborah’s HEA depends on Tabby’s willingness to lie, yet they never have a conversation about her parents’ marriage, Jael and Deborah’s relationship, or most of the fucked up dynamics in the house. That precariousness made the resolution of the story difficult to accept.

Deborah has very strong feelings for Tabby, and despite several opportunities to escape Sir Kit, she chooses not to leave Goldengrove because she doesn’t want to abandon Tabby. But Tabby fades into the background in the second half of the book, and as a result I didn’t completely believe in the connection between Deborah and Tabby.

Finally, by following so closely to the plot of the original story, the book’s logic didn’t always make sense to me. For example, when she first hears noises in the night, Deborah never considers that it might be Lady Palethorp, even though unlike Jane Eyre, she knows very well that the lady of the house is alive.

No one in this book trusts one another, which was stressful, but addictive. The Wife in the Attic is almost too creepy to read before bed, but I kept doing it anyway because I wanted to see what would happen next. Even though the book occasionally struggled with incorporating the plot as Jane Eyre, I was still sucked in.

I can always count on Rose Lerner to write sympathetic working and middle class heroines, and Deborah is one of the most complex historical romance heroines I’ve read in ages. Her love affair with Jael is scorching and surprising, but their relationship is slow to start, and I wasn’t satisfied by the limited time we see them together. Sir Kit looms over the book, and is such a malevolent force that I anxiously begun to imagine him everywhere, listening at doors, ready to strike.

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But in the end, he’s just a man. And he’s no match for these women.

I’m looking forward to checking back in with these characters in the second book in this spinoff series.

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The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner

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  1. Kareni says:

    Thank you, Shana, for your thoughtful and entertaining (amoeba!) review.

  2. Carrie G says:

    I really dislike the original Jane Eyre and had no interest in this “reimagining” until reading this review. This might have fixed a few things about the story.

  3. Annie Kate says:

    As another Jane Eyre disliker, I was initially wary when I heard about this but now I’m dying for the ebook to come out. I should have had more faith that a Rose Lerner version would have me making grabby hands.

  4. J E says:

    Ooh I love Rose Lerner. Can’t wait to read this

  5. Susan says:

    And it’s a free listen for Audible members.

  6. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Susan:

    That’s true if you have a membership to Audible Escape or either of the Audible plus memberships.

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