The Wife Upstairs

The Wife Upstairs (2021) is Rachel Hawkins's Southern Gothic reimagining of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, relocated to a gated community outside modern-day Birmingham, Alabama. Jane, a twenty-three-year-old former foster kid getting by on dog-walking and a fake name, collides — almost literally — with Eddie Rochester, the handsome, recently widowed owner of the neighborhood's grandest house. As their romance pulls Jane into a life of wealth she's never known, she becomes increasingly haunted by the legend of Eddie's first wife, Bea: a rags-to-riches beauty who built a successful lifestyle brand before she vanished.

The novel alternates mainly between Jane's present-day chapters and diary entries from Bea, with a late, brief shift into a third perspective that upends what the reader thought they knew. Both women narrate unreliably, and Jane's own talent for lying and reinvention makes her nearly as hard to trust as the secrets she's trying to uncover about the house's previous mistress.

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 5, 2021, it became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next Pick, and a #1 LibraryReads pick.