Ritorno a Thornfield. La "storia segreta" di Adèle Varens in Thornfield Hall di Emma Tennant

In the line of the Neo-Victorian movement within postmodern literature, in 2002 British author Emma Tennant (1937-2017) re-wrote Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre as Thornfield Hall. Even though its subtitle, The Hidden Story of Jane Eyre, anticipates a new appendix to Jane’s widely known adventures, the novel is in fact centred on Adèle Varens, “the French dancer’s bastard”. In particular, Tennant’s narrative looks back at the Brontean novel by exploring the Parisian milieu in which the young Adèle breathes the air of the Révolution and learns how to resist the patriarchal and political established order; and yet, later on, she seems to forget the teachings she drew from Céline Varens, her mother, and her world in a problematic intertextual twist that questions the presence of the Other – once again represented by Bertha Antoinette Mason, echoing Jean Rhys’s 1966 masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea – but ultimately/inevitably pays homage to Brontë’s classic.