Told in a series of diary entries, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho, is a novella very loosely inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In Cho’s telling of the story, the year is 1920 and Guak Huay—known to English speakers as Jade—has just published a scathing review in the Oriental Literary Review, a journal edited by her dear friend Ravi. She is stunned when Sebastian Hardie (the author of the book she reviewed), is not offended, but instead invites her to a party—and into his bed.
One of Jade’s criticisms of Hardie’s book is that it lacks a sense of humor. The same cannot be said for Zen Cho’s writing, which is full of dry observations and quips. When Jade is flattered and overwhelmed by Hardie’s attention, she confides in her diary: “It is dreadful when people are good-looking and pay attention to you. It rarely happens to me, so I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
Hardie plays the Rochester role in this story, though Jade herself notes that he is “too silly” to really embody the part. As in Mimi Matthews’ John Eyre, Rochester is not the romantic hero. Unlike in that retelling, neither is Hardie fully a villain. (In my opinion, one of his most villainous acts is when he says of Virginia Woolf: “There is nothing there. It is all surface.”) Rather, he is an extremely self-absorbed, privileged man, who doesn’t have a secret wife in the attic but does have an open marriage and expects Jade to take his lifestyle in stride.
Jade is at first appalled by Hardie’s desire to have her as an extramarital lover, but her curiosity, attraction, and desire for adventure eventually lead her into his arms. Jade’s description of her first sexual encounter includes some of the funniest lines in the novella: While she enjoys french kissing, she also says that at times “one feels as if one is being eaten by an excessively friendly lion” and when she first sees male anatomy, she describes it as “absurd and vulnerable.”
And what makes Jade Yeo’s life perilous? Well, she is smart and bold and intent on independence, all while being a Malaysian woman living on her own in 1920s London. In contrast to Brontë’s Jane, who Rochester sees as a paragon of Englishness (unlike his wife from the West Indies), Jade is a keen observer of the hypocrisies of the English upper crust in their interactions with her, someone who has grown up in one of their colonies.
“The British are a peculiar race,” she says. “My grandfather was transported to Malaya because they needed tin, and yet I’ve never once met a Briton to whom the thought had occurred that perhaps I spoke English because I am from one of their colonies. It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never looked down at their fingers.”
To complicate matters further, Jade soon finds herself in trouble in the specific manner of a young, unmarried woman who has just had a vigorous, week-long affair without taking precautions.
Brontë’s Jane initially declares, when Rochester proposes, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” In dealing with her predicament, Jade, too, exerts her independent will, and while Hardie attempts to do right by her in his own selfish way, she refuses his overtures. And unlike Jane Eyre, she does not make her way back to him.
Instead, she strikes out on her own, and in doing so, finds the love of a much better man. The scene in which their affections for one another are revealed is perfect—it is a type of scene the Zen Cho excels at writing, as readers of her novel Sorcerer to the Crown will know. Although Jade spends much of the novella focused on Hardie, the seeds of her romance are planted early on. Most importantly, Jade’s ultimate lover shows a deep understanding of her true self—making their happy ending together an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Cho’s tale.
A few more of Jade Yeo’s observations:
On Dukes in novels: “Dukes are always in terrible danger of lapsing into a malaise; it must be all that fox-hunting and quail.”
On attractive gentlemen: “I am not used to good-looking gentlemen leaning very close and speaking in low tender tones. Girls ought to be given training in their youth, to be prepared for such an eventuality.”
More Romantic Novellas:
Once More Upon a Time by Roshani Chokshi
Beauty and the Blacksmith by Tessa Dare
Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan