Finding Mr Rochester. Trisha Ashley

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      Due to a flat tyre, I’d had no time to look around the auction before the bidding started, but when the auctioneer’s assistant held up a mixed box of items, including a willow-patterned teapot and large serving dish, I took a gamble, because I simply adore blue and white china.

      I got it so cheaply that I was worried the dealers knew something I didn’t, like it was cracked or chipped, but I had a quick look while loading it into the car and it seemed perfect.

      I can’t say I paid a lot of interest to the other contents of the box until I got it back to my flat, where I discovered I’d become the proud possessor of a random collection of Victoriana, including a blue-tasselled cardboard fan inscribed with biblical quotes of a bracing kind, a pair of small brown leather buttoned boots, a crushed and depressed-looking black velvet hat with crepe streamers, and a large, fat, gilt-edged book bound in maroon leather.

      The latter, once I’d ventured beyond endpapers marbled like cheap salami, proved to be completely filled by clear copperplate handwriting and was inscribed on the flyleaf, The Memoirs of Hephzibah Burd-Jonas.

      Well, being the author of popular historical romantic novels, I immediately hoped Hephzibah might provide a spark of inspiration for the next, but my hopes were dashed after only a short perusal of her turgid, prissy and pious prose.

      A vicar’s daughter, she’d married a missionary and embraced his quest to go out into the world and convert the heathen, whether they liked it or not. Later, on being widowed, she’d thought it her duty to return home and look after her father, busying herself with parish affairs, and from this point, her memoirs plumbed new depths of boring.

      I’d begun skimming through quickly to the end, when the mention of the name Charlotte – Charlotte Brontë – brought me up short. I read on with a faster beating heart and a sense of rising excitement, as Hephzibah said she’d recently learned that her old Roe Head schoolfellow had gone to meet her Maker, but hoped she would have long since repented of her intemperate writings and died in a tolerable state of grace!

      It emerged that on Mrs Burd-Jonas’ return from Africa, a mutual friend, who had stayed in correspondence with Charlotte, had sent her a copy of Jane Eyre.

      ‘I cannot tell you how shockingly full of wild notions, intemperate language and a lack of acceptance of God’s designated path through life I found it,’ she wrote. ‘A feeling compounded by my friend’s further confidence that Charlotte once laughingly told her she had drawn inspiration for the appearance of Mr Rochester from a surly, black-haired moorland farmer at a place fittingly called Godesend. And, what was worse, until wintry weather put a stop to such excursions, she had passed by this remote spot so often in the hope of catching a glimpse of him that she suspected he began to misunderstand her interest – and he a married man!’

      Then she added, cattily, ‘It was a complete surprise to me that Miss Brontë should have expressed herself in this manner, for I remember little of her at Roe Head, except that she was small, retiring in nature and entirely unremarkable.’

      I read this page over and over, hardly able to believe my own eyes. I mean, I’m a huge Brontë fan and my secret passion for Mr Rochester probably explains my poor choice of boyfriends and current single state! Clever, dark, tricky, sarcastic men have not turned out to be the stuff that dreams are made of. Jane Eyre only pulled it off after the author’s pen had softened up Mr Rochester by maiming him while he was nobly engaged in trying to rescue his mad wife from her burning attic.

      Of course, after this discovery I searched the rest of the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, but that brief passage was the only interesting thing in the whole memoirs. But it was enough – more than enough – and what plot ideas it was suddenly sparking in my mind!

      For a few days I hugged the secret to myself, doing a little research on Hephzibah – though there didn’t seem to be much that she hadn’t included in her copious memoirs – and outlining a novel I proposed calling Finding Mr Rochester – a kind of Brief Encounter, but without trains.

      When I finally revealed all to my agent, Senga McWhirter, she immediately grasped the importance of my find and the huge media potential for publicising the new novel. Both she and my editor were adamant that the memoir must be kept under wraps until closer to publication day, for maximum effect.

      So I settled down to write the book, taking some liberties to make it a doomed love affair between Charlotte and the farmer, though I couldn’t immediately think how I could possibly end it on a high note!

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