The Wife Upstairs Book Review

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins: Book Review 

*Warning: This review contains spoilers* 

Introduction 

When I first found out about this book, I really wanted to love it. I mean, a modern Jane Eyre retelling? It’s every literature nerd’s dream come true! My biggest problem with Jane Eyre, like most people, was that there wasn’t enough focus of that huge plot revelation that Rochester literally had his wife locked upstairs and faked her death. 

I went into this book hoping that it would be more of a focus on that aspect of the story, which, to be fair, it was. But the execution just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It was… a lot less feminist than I was hoping for. 

Summary & Review 

If you’re looking for a story that actually has a character worth rooting for, you won’t find it here! Unfortunately, The Wife Upstairs follows the recent tradition of mystery-thriller books not having any likable characters. I get that when writing a murder mystery, you’re obviously going to need some dislikable characters, some characters willing to do bad things. Obviously that’s how you end up with a murder and a mystery. But making everyone, even the protagonist, unlikable just makes the book hard to get through, because I genuinely don’t care what happens to any of them. 

The novel is full of filthy rich, Stepford-esque wives who are shallow, vain, and just overall poorly executed depictions of women in general. I mean, they find out two of their friends were murdered and they seem to only care more about gossiping about it than being emotionally impacted by their deaths. They only accept Jane once she’s engaged to Eddie Rochester and “one of them.” It’s cliche and uninteresting.

Jane herself if also extremely toxic, wishy washy, and not likable either. She’s down on her luck and struggling for money, with a gross male roommate who keeps trying to creep on her. This should make her a worthy underdog to root for in this story, but all her behavior later in the story just makes that impossible. She’s just infuriating. 

Jane is actually just a grifter. She despises the other women in the story for being petty, vain, and obscenely rich (understandable), but also wants to be one of them, and then once she is one of them, she finds it all boring and deplorable. Ugh. Also, not to mention her toxic behavior. She expects Eddie to propose after a few weeks of dating, and when he doesn’t, she lies about pretending she’s going off to college and leaving town to manipulate him into proposing before he’s ready to convince her to stay. Jane literally makes it explicitly clear to the reader that this was never true, she was just trying to get a proposal. I’m not saying Eddie is a treat. Obviously, he’s horrific, he locked his wife up in their attic as a hostage and covered up a murder she committed. But what Jane did is manipulative and a serious red flag, and I get the distinct vibe that Hawkins wanted us to root for her (????) She also frequently stages social interactions in a way to get people to spread gossip about her and is jealous when she learns Eddie’s wife may have been murdered because his grief and shock might get in the way of their relationship (they’ve known each other only a few weeks). 

It’s a shame because Bronte’s original Jane Eyre, though not unflawed, was meant to be a feminist figure of her time period, and this version of Jane is just toxic. 

There’s also a minor subplot about how Jane isn’t really Jane. She faked her identity and went on the run after letting an abusive foster parent die. This is of little importance to the story. Her creepy roommate using it to blackmail her briefly, but it all gets resolved and becomes inconsequential pretty quickly. 

One of the other things I despised about the book is also the handling of Eddie’s wife Bea. Obviously if you’ve read Jane Eyre, then you already know the twist that Rochester’s wife was being held upstairs in the attic as a captive, so I don’t fault Hawkins for not keeping this twist a secret and revealing it right away. But I think she falters in the decision to actually have Bea be a (very stereotypical) “psycho-killer” who murdered her mother for embarrassing her and murdered her best friend and felt no remorse. She hates that Blanche flirted with her husband, but then Bea sleeps with Blanche’s husband and feels no remorse. There’s absolutely nothing sympathetic or redeemable about Bea, and it’s unfortunate. As I said before, my issue with the original Jane Eyre is that it doesn’t focus enough on the actual horror of a man keeping his mentally ill wife hostage in an attic and faking her death. This book really could have turned this around—show the true horror of what Eddie was doing to Bea. But instead, no, Eddie is actually just the poor husband who didn’t know what to do because he loves his wife but she’s just too crazy to let her in society, but he just can’t turn her into the police. BLECHHHHH. It’s so un-feminist, deciding to make Bea the villain and try to sympathize with Eddie, and it's also a really poor and harmful depiction of mental health. 

There’s also a really gross scene where Bea, who is already Eddie’s captive in the attic, has sex with him (her captor) to try and get him to release her. (It unironically uses the line, “reader, I f*cked him, and I have never cringed so hard). There’s also the implication that the two still loved one another and may have ended up together in the end, which is gross considering all the circumstances. 

I also don’t think the “tension” between Bea and Blanche leading up to Bea murdering her was properly developed either. There’s the stereotypical aspect of Blanche flirting with Bea’s husband and nothing becoming of it because they never actually have an affair. And there’s also some small buildup to Bea’s company for home decor being a rip-off of Blanche’s personal taste. It’s not really developed that strongly to be believable that Bea would commit murder over it (and her psychosis isn’t developed enough to believe she would snap that much either), and also just weird in general. No one’s taste is so unique that no one else shares it, so it’s kind of hard to definitively say that Bea is just ripping off Blanche’s style rather than, the more realistic explanation, which is that given that the two have been best friend’s since childhood and live a very similar lifestyle, they have similar taste. It’s not… that hard to believe. We also get some weird flashback scenes to Bea and Blanche’s teen years involving some adolescent drama that doesn’t really do much. 

The ending is also pretty ridiculous. Eddie burns down his own house just so that Bea would come and save him. Their bodies are never recovered so maybe they lived and escaped together! Because of course! But there’s no actual buildup to the fire feeling like a logical conclusion to set the ending up, like I never would have thought Eddie would burn down his own home. Maybe Bea, but not Eddie. But the worst part is the revelation at the end that Eddie left all the money and Bea’s entire company to Jane. Not only does the legal believability of Jane being able to walk away with this fortune when she’s literally using a fake identity feel shaky, but there’s also some inconsistency. Eddie’s lawyer claims that Eddie changed the his will when he got engaged to Jane (before she knew Bea was alive), but Jane sees this inheritance as Bea and Eddie’s way of buying her silence about what they did and that they might be alive, which would imply he changed his will after Jane discovered Bea was alive in the attic. But that’s impossible because he burned down his house and was presumed dead that same day, and he definitely didn’t come back and reveal himself alive to his lawyer afterwards to change his will because his lawyer and the police all think he’s dead! It doesn’t make sense!

I’m top of all my issues with the plot, I also can’t really find any little details that I enjoyed. The prose is not good (an over abundance of inserting curse words into the prose for no reason other than just using curse words, but it really just makes the writing feel cheap), the romance is awful, and honestly the mystery isn’t intriguing or thrilling at all. 

Reader, unfortunately, it’s a 1 star from me.