What inspired you to write this book?
Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite novels! Jane has been a role model to me since I “met” her in 5th grade, so I wanted to retell the story for the women of the 21st-century—there’s still a lot we can learn from a person like her.
Why do you follow the original so closely, even keeping similar lines?
The above answer applies very much! Also, my adaptation is like the novel form of Response Poetry (here's one I wrote if you're curious!). Jane Eyre is one of the most well-known heroines in the western canon, and I wanted to explore how our position as women has advanced as well as how it remains the same. Hence, “heir” as her last name! I wrote the modern version I want to read: the one I think Charlotte Brontë would have written—with her sensibilities, her heart, her concerns—if she lived in our day and age.
Why does it take 11 chapters for the romance to start?!
Like the original, my adaptation is also a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story. And our past can impact relationships, romantic and otherwise. Charlotte Brontë wrote a rich, thoughtful romance and that was important to me, too, so I faithfully re-imagined the story chapter by beloved chapter! If you think that’s dung 💩 (Ha! Get it?!), by all means skip to chapter 12, lol!
What gave you the idea to make Rochester a rap star?
Because I wanted this story to be relatively realistic, I had to figure out what the modern equivalent of Bertha is—in the same situation nowadays (spoiler alert!), Rochester could simply divorce her, so there goes that essential conflict! So I thought about what Bertha symbolizes: financial and social capital and went from there. (Don’t want to spoil anything more!)
Because I wanted this story to be relatively realistic, I had to figure out what the modern equivalent of Bertha is—in the same situation nowadays (spoiler alert!), Rochester could simply divorce her, so there goes that essential conflict! So I thought about what Bertha symbolizes: financial and social capital and went from there. (Don’t want to spoil anything more!)
Why did you change his name?
Rochester sounded too antiquated, and Richmond was perfect with “rich” and “monde” (French for “world”, although it comes from “hill,” I later learned) and retains some of the most dominant sounds!
The Gothic was integral to the original—why not in yours? Yeah, I sacrificed it to realism. We have so much darkness to deal with in our lives—and that’s what haunts Richmond and Jane in my version.
If you’re a Christian writer, why do you include profanity and somewhat explicit content? It’s important to me to portray our society and culture realistically—people curse and behave questionably or in ways they shouldn’t, and literature allows us to “safely“ consider these issues. I carefully reflect on each instance where potentially offensive/upsetting content is included; it’s not gratuitous but thought-provoking. Like Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic writer whose work was also considered very dark, said, “The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.”
If Richmond is a rap star, why doesn’t he talk like one? Rap artists are wordsmiths, so I’m sure most speak in a variety of registers, code switching based on the audience/context/etc. and probably have more expansive vocabularies than most people, so Mr. Richmond speaks in pretty “standard” English, sometimes throwing in some more “elevated” verbage, when he’s talking to Jane since she’s nerdy. Not sure how rap artists are expected to speak when not rapping, but I avoid stereotyping—that’s also why I don’t caricaturize like Bronte (which she did to critique religious hypocrisy as well as classism and a very effective tool to do so; our society and culture is much more diverse, and we stereotype others too much as it is, so I made all characters as 3 dimensional as possible, like real people are!).
