The Eyre Affair

British novelist Jasper Fforde wrote his debut novel The Eyre Affair (2001), an alternate history novel, after spending nearly fifteen years working in the film industry. According to Fforde, the novel was rejected seventy-six times before being accepted by a publisher. However, upon publication, it generally received positive reviews praising it for its originality and command of multiple genres.

The novel takes place in an alternate universe where the United Kingdom and Imperial Russia have been fighting the Crimean War for more than one hundred years. The British government is under the sway of the powerful Goliath Corporation, a weapons manufacturer with a vested interest in keeping the nation at war. In addition, literature plays a much larger role in society, with the general public regularly debating issues of literary scholarship, sometimes even to the point of violence and murder.

Thursday Next is a LitTech spy with the organization SpecOps27, which specializes in crimes related to works of literature. As a veteran of the Crimean War who lost her brother to the conflict, Thursday is a proponent for peace, though she cannot speak out about it openly because of her job with the government. Due to her familiarity with the master thief and wanted criminal Acheron Hades, Thursday receives an offer to work with a division of her intelligence agency called SpecOps05, a group cloaked in so much secrecy that most agents do not even know what it does.

Hades is suspected of stealing the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. Thursday and her fellow agents are given the task of staking out Hades’s residence, but Hades, who possesses supernatural abilities, discovers them and kills the other agents. Thursday is shot in the confrontation, but a copy of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre that she keeps in her pocket stops the bullet. She is rescued from death by a mysterious stranger who bears a striking resemblance to Edward Rochester, a character from Jane Eyre. While she waits for the paramedics, Thursday remembers an incident from her childhood where she was seemingly able to enter the world of the novel and speak with Rochester.

Soon afterward, Thursday encounters a version of herself from the future who warns her that Hades was not killed during his escape as she had been led to believe. Her future self also tells her to take a LitTech job offer in her old hometown of Swindon. Heeding the advice of her avatar from the future, Thursday accepts the job and is soon reunited with her Uncle Mycroft and Aunt Polly, who have just finished an invention called the Prose Portal that allows the user to enter works of fiction.

While in Swindon, Thursday also reunites with her ex-fiancé, Landen Parke-Laine, and meets Jack Schitt, an operative from the Goliath Corporation who is also searching for Hades. Shortly afterward, Acheron Hades resurfaces to steal the Prose Portal. He has discovered that entering the original manuscript of any work of fiction and making a change to the story changes all subsequent copies of the work. He plans to use this power to hold the literary world hostage; to demonstrate his seriousness, he enters Martin Chuzzlewit and kills the minor character of Mr. Quaverly. Hades then steals the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and kidnaps Jane, causing all copies of the book to end abruptly halfway through.

Thursday and Jack track Hades to Wales and follow him into the original text of Jane Eyre. In the world of The Eyre Affair, the novel has a much different ending from the one that is known in the real world. The end of the alternate Jane Eyre is a downbeat one, with Jane leaving Rochester to become a missionary in India with her cousin.

During the course of the weeks she spends in the novel, Thursday learns that literary characters relive the events of their works an infinite number of times, always fully aware of how the story will end but powerless to change it. She feels sympathy for Rochester, who must lose Jane time and time again, and vows to change the end of the novel to a happy one.

Within the pages of Jane Eyre, Thursday tracks down and defeats Hades. She then arranges for Jane to stay with Rochester, changing the alternate ending of the novel into the real one.

Upon returning to the real world, Jack reveals his true interest in the Prose Portal: he wants to use the device to retrieve fictional weapons for use in the war with Russia. Thursday at first agrees to help him, but at the last moment, she switches the text for a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” trapping Jack inside the poem. Afterward, she destroys the Prose Portal so it can never be misused again.

The Eyre Affair is a genre-bending novel with an irreverent sense of humor. Fforde has gone on to expand the Thursday Next universe with a series of seven novels in two connected series.