Q&A with Marian Yee

  

Photo by Kristin Palkoner Photography

 

 

Marian Yee is the author of the new novel 4 Janes. She is a professor at the Berklee College of Music, and she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

 

Q: What inspired you to write 4 Janes, and how would you describe the relationship between your novel and Charlotte Brontë's classic novel Jane Eyre?

 

A: When I was travelling in Vietnam in the ‘90s, I ended up in Hue, where I met a bookseller who was reading an abridged copy of Jane Eyre in order to improve her English.

 

She was very friendly, and actually ended up rescuing me when I had a minor fainting incident (due to dehydration) in front of her little shop, which was actually just a roadside shack. (I wrote this into the book).

 

Anyhow, aside from her being a lovely person, I was just struck by the anomaly of seeing this Western classic being read in this context of an Eastern setting and I immediately wanted to write something where I could bring these two different worlds together.

 

Q: The author Michelle Min Sterling said of the book, “4 Janes is an inventive and heartbreaking epic that reimagines the iconic character of Jane Eyre, exploring how one enduring figure transcends space and time.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love that description—it captures both the idea of Jane breaking out of the boundaries of her literary origins and the notion of Jane as a literary character that continues to be important to readers in different places and different times.

 

Q: What do you think still intrigues readers about Jane Eyre, 180 years after the book's publication?

 

A: Jane Eyre is a Cinderella story, but without the beauty and the fairy godmother. She is plain and poor, and really only has her own intelligence, moral courage, and tenacity to rely on. That’s why we all applaud when she gets the broody prince in the end, but on her own terms.

 

She’s passionate, she’s a dreamer, she’s a survivor. But maybe most of all, she’s someone who dreams of a bigger life, and that’s something we can all relate to.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I want readers to maybe see a bit of Jane Eyre in each of us. By showing Jane in different story lines, different times, even in a different gender, I hope readers will recognize that Jane Eyre embodies a timeless figure of inspiration.

 

I also want readers to get a sense of the power of reading to change one’s life. One person reading Jane Eyre in Vietnam may start dreaming of a bigger life for herself as well; one person seeing another person reading Jane Eyre in an unexpected context may be inspired to write a story.

 

But finally, I just want readers to have fun following Jane in her geographically and culturally diverse, time-jumping, gender-morphing journey.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a reimagining of The Tempest. It’s going to be a story about the relationship between humans and nature, climate change, obsession, and control. It’s also a story about love, creativity, and redemption.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: As I was writing 4 Janes I thought a lot about how stories go and why they end that way. What would happen to the story if characters made different choices?

 

And it seems to me that we can turn those questions to our own lives. What happens if we start thinking of the narratives that we make up in our heads about our own lives, and what might it mean to break free from them to go in a different direction, make new endings, own our own stories? 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb