Everything about The Eyre Affair totally explained
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 alternative
1984 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.
Jane Eyre ends when Jane leaves for India with her cousin St. John rivers to become a missionary. 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 an embroidered 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, "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—altering the text of every copy of the novel such that Quaverly is no longer in it. (In reality, there was never any such character to begin with.)
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 him and finishing him off. 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 can't take place as she's already married. 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.
Further Information
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