The flight of Gemma Hardy

With guidance from Charlotte Brontë, the heroine of Margot Livesey's novel goes in search of herself. WHEN Margot Livesey was 9 years old, growing up motherless and lonely in Scotland, a book on her father's shelf caught her eye: "Jane Eyre." Livesey's discovery of Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece was transformative. The promised friend between the covers, a character whose indomitable spirit has consoled and inspired readers for over a century and a half, allowed Livesey to understand that "life is change." "Like Jane's, my life had changed for the worse," Livesey wrote in an essay a few years ago, "and like hers, it could also change for the better. Time would, irrevocably, carry me to a new place." And back again. "The Flight of Gemma Hardy," Livesey's appealing new novel, is, as she has explained, a kind of continued conversation, a "recasting" of both "Jane Eyre" and Livesey's own childhood. Set mostly in Scotland in the late 1950s and '60s, the narrative follows the fortunes of a young girl, Gemma Hardy, who is beset by bad luck. Born to a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father, she was orphaned by the age of 3, when she was taken from Iceland to Scotland by her mother's brother. There her original Icelandic name was discarded. As the novel opens, 10-year-old Gemma's beloved uncle has also died, and her cold, snobbish aunt is sending her off to be a "working girl" at a harsh boarding school. Standing on a train platform en route to the school, Gemma realizes that "no one within 50 miles knew my name, or my whereabouts. I too could disappear, blown away iike the dry leaves I saw skimming down the tracks." Locating the people who will know her true name, her true self, becomes Gemma's quest. Although she does make one school friend, it isn't until she is almost 18 and accepts a position as an au pair (governesses, she is told, "are out of fashion") at a manor house in remote, windswept Orkney that such a person materializes: who else but thundery Hugh Sinclair, master of Blackbird Hall. As evidenced by novels like "Eva Moves the Furniture," which featured a pair of ghostly female characters, Livesey is drawn to literary gambles, and there's no question that modeling her new book on a classic is a risky move. For the most part, she succeeds. It's a delight to follow the careful dovetailing of the two novels - starting on the rainy day when both stories begin, with each heroine in a window seat, finding solace in the pages of an encyclopedia of birds. Livesey is a lovely, fluid writer. There's much pleasure to be had in her descriptions of neolithic sites in Orkney and, most of all, her abiding affinity for the natural world: "the limpet's frill of muscle" found while the young Gemma pulls shells off the rocks in a windswept cove, the "gleaming scar" on a beech tree that has lost the branch where a rope swing once hung, the experience of "retrieving two warm eggs from a drowsy red hen." It isn't, however, until the final third of the novel, when Gemma, risking her own life, is forced to leave what she loves and act independently, that "The Flight of Gemma Hardy" becomes its most satisfying self. Here Livesey's reach is extended - she too must leave what she loves - and we stop ticking off her clever updatings of "Jane Eyre," lulled by the sense that we know just what will happen next. Gemma's act is life-altering, and so the geologically complex landscape of Iceland seems a fitting place for her to experience that change. "I saw the twisted black rocks, the pointed shapes of old volcanoes," Gemma tells us, adding that "the countryside was wilder and emptier than any I had ever seen." For Gemma, this is strange terrain indeed, and yet some part of her knows it well: it's where she was conceived, where she was first named and first loved. Only by returning to such archaic places and taking conscious flight from them, Livesey seems to imply, can we hope to marry what we were to what we are, and to find ourselves truly air- (or is it Eyre-?) borne. Sarah Towers teaches creative writing at the Bard Prison Initiative.