Bron’s life has always been steeped into classics and especially 19th-century English literature. Reading helped him through boarding school and now he’s ready to embrace his Jane Eyre fantasies and take on a job as a tutor for a child in a Cambridge manor house. As a genderfluid person using masculine pronouns, Bron has always felt a closer connection to the female heroines of these books, hence the title of “governess” he takes on. What he wasn’t expecting was for the web of secrets underlying his favourite Gothic novels to follow him at Greenwood Manor.

Here is a very earnest debut novel. The author’s love for literature, and especially English classics, permeates each page of this book. And yet it’s not a pastiche or a pale comparison, first of all because of Bron, our main character, whom I felt very attached to. It was a privilege to be privy to his innermost thoughts, and I often felt like it was extremely important and personal for the author to be writing this particular story. Admittedly, some passages felt a bit lengthy to me, as if I was drowning in Bron’s thoughts just as he was drowning in his. At other times I felt like the author had a list of items to put into his narrative and worked hard to make them appear in as fluid a manner as possible, but it worked.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this queer spin on beloved stories. The way it included many tropes of Gothic novels made me think of the way romance novels mostly follow the same plot but have thousands of readers enjoy them anyway. The Manor House Governess felt both familiar because of the classics it drew from, and new because of the unique perspective of its endearing protagonist.

Rep: genderfluid MC, LGBTQIA+ secondary characters.