Adele : Jane Eyre's Hidden Story

Rating:
Summary: A Disappointing, If Sometimes Beautiful, Might-Have-Been
Review: Adele has several things going for it: vivid, if occasionally wavering, characters, a strongly imagined altered history for Adele, and a good sense of self. It is not just a weak offspring of Jane Eyre, but unquestionably a novel in its own right.

The characterization of Adele is generally believable, and her childhood world of Paris, living with her trapeze-artist mother, is perhaps the highlight of the book. Tennant starts out with a clear, new viewpoint on the famous novel. Occasional slips, like niggling inconsistancies of viewpoint, and Adele's nearly transitionless shifts of emotion towards both her father and her governess, are forgivable in the course of the graceful, engaging story.

Sadly, the end of the novel is a complete betrayal of Tennant's careful build-up. The conclusion is melodramatic in the extreme, and seems carelessly tacked-on to the rest of the novel. The subtleties, contradictions, and tenuous connections of the rest of the novel are crudely and unsatisfyingly resloved in a way more reminiscent of the worst Hollywood thrillers than of good literature.

This is a truly tragic, because Adele, beyond being a clever and readable re-working of a great novel, has the potential to be a great novel itself. Tennant explores the ideas of identity through Adele's search for her mother, and the scene where Adele confronts her past and future while swinging on the trapeze and walking the highwire is insightful and, simply, beautiful. The guilt both Adele and Mr. Rochester share towards, and even the confusing contradictions of Adele's young character in relation to Antoinette/Bertha, Rochester's first wife, raises interesting questions about the nature of guilt and responsibility. Even Adele's alternating hatred and love for her father, if executed more carefully, could have been illuminating.

By hastily resolving her novel with an unbelievable and abrupt happy ending, Tennant not only alienates readers, but also sacrifices the insightful subtlety that could have made her novel truly exceptional.

High above the Parisian crowds on her trapeze, Adele thinks she is about to fall. Luckily, she completes her act unharmed. The novel starts, as she does, in graceful arcs through the air, but it ends by plummeting gracelessly to the ground.

Rating:
Summary: adele's story
Review: As an editor of the letters of the late Jean Rhys, i felt the same sense of discovery and excitement on reading Emma Tennant's Adele as i did when i first read Wide Sargasso Sea. Again, a character no one had thought or known about had been rescued and brought to the fore. In the case of Sargasso Sea it was of course the first Mrs Rochester, in Tennant's book, the little french girl, Mr Rochester's daughter is the heroine of a novel that goes hand in hand with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

Adele moved me deeply;this is a story with which so many will identify. for adele wants one thing more than anything in the world, and that is the reconciliation of her mother and father. That Celine Varens, actress and trapeze dancer, Parisian to her fingertips, has abandoned her daughter cannot at first be accepted by the child; and in this beautifully written account of her life in France and in the grim confines of Thornfield Hall in Yorkshire, Adele brings us both grief, a sense of a rebellion and finally, happiness.
A wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: huh?
Review: While I liked following the new perspectives of an old favorite, it seemed like Tennant was trying too hard to write as a classic. I was often confused by what she was writing. The wording/descriptions were awkward, difficult to follow, and not completely confident (or competent).