Free the Swindon One!
Posted by: Anonymous User (---.cache.pol.co.uk)
Date: March 16, 2007 10:15PM
I don't know whether anyone else has noticed this, but in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are not the Only Fruit, the following passage appears. Jeanette's mother is speaking to her:
'... Remember Jane Eyre and St. John Rivers.' A farway look came into her eye.
I did remember, but what my mother didn't know was that I now knew she had rewritten the ending. Jane Eyre was her favourite non-bible book, and she read it to me over and over again, when I was very small. I couldn't read it, but I knew where the pages turned. A sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the library, that Jane doesn't marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr Rochester...'
There has clearly been a miscarriage of justice. Jeanette's mother was carrying out her nefarous deeds some time in the late sixties or early seventies. Thursday Next is therefore is NOT guilty of a fiction infraction - she has restored Charlotte Bronte's original ending. She must be freed from the gingham and The Faerie Queene immediately, and punishment meted out to the truly guilty....