I found myself driving to work saying things like, “But what about….”, or “Ah, so that’s it….,” out loud. The twists and turns of the plot were natural, and yet always unexpected. It’s hard to believe how well she captured the feel of Jane Eyre while telling a completely new story. Setterfield has done a masterful job of maintaining the voices of these two women who are reliving their pasts while the present is crashing down around them. “All children mythologize their birth…” is how the story begins and through the pages we encounter a string of characters who not only mythologize their births, but grip the story of their births to point where they are almost unable to see anything else. In the process, Lea uncovers the truth about Winters’ past, and at the same time acknowledges her own tragic story. The story is told from the point of view of a biographer, Margaret Lea, who has been commanded to listen to and record the story of a famous and reclusive writer, Vida Winter, who is dying. Setterfield manages to create a landscape for her book that is on the one hand bleak and on the other splashed with colours of passion and madness. Jane Eyre, a recurring theme in the book, is referenced often and I have the urge to listen to it again so the mood this book has put me in doesn’t escape me. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart. Rather, it tells of the internal ghosts that haunt us all. In true Brontë style, The Thirteenth Tale is not a story of the external ghosts that haunt buildings or graveyards.
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