Have you read this Jane Eyre retelling and need some details on who did what to whom and why? Check out my spoilers and plot summary for The Wife Upstairs!

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins. Published on January 5, 2021 by St. Martin’s Press.

The Wife Upstairs is a modernization and retelling of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Jane falls in love with Eddie Rochester, a handsome man whose wife disappeared. But where is Bea Rochester? Can Jane trust Eddie?

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First, let’s do a quick (or not so quick) plot summary which will contain spoilers for the ending. Then let’s discuss!

Plot Summary for The Wife Upstairs

Jane: Jane walks dogs in Thornhill Estates, an affluent neighborhood in  Birmingham, Alabama. She struggles to make ends meet and resents her wealthy clients, so she regularly steals small items from them to sell for cash.

One rainy day, she’s almost hit by a car driven by Eddie Rochester, who lives in the neighborhood. She learns that Eddie’s wife, Bea, went missing six months ago in a boating accident that killed Blanche, Bea’s close friend. Blanche and her husband Tripp are neighbors of the Rochesters, and Jane also walks their dog.

Eddie also gets a dog (hmmm…) and hires Jane as his dog walker. Eddie and Jane start dating. Jane tells Eddie about her terrible living situation (she rents a room from a creepy guy named John) and he invites her to move in. Jane learns more about Bea, a successful business owner who met Eddie on vacation in Hawaii and married him after a whirlwind courtship.

Bea: We get Bea’s narrative in the form of a journal. Eddie is keeping her prisoner in a panic room in their house. She claims Eddie drugged both her and Blanche at the lake house after she accused them of having an affair, then killed Blanche.

Jane: Eddie and Jane get engaged. The police come and inform Eddie that they consider Blanche’s death a homicide and are assuming Bea was murdered too.

Jane is being blackmailed by John, her former roommate, who knows secrets about her past. The neighbors are gossiping that Tripp, Blanche’s husband, was arrested for Blanche’s murder. Jane has been hearing mysterious thumping upstairs at the house. 

Jane reveals that, yes, she has a past. Her name isn’t really Jane, but Helen. She destroyed her foster father’s heart medication, which caused his death. This was in revenge for his not taking her sick foster sister to the doctor in time to save her life.

Bea: In Bea’s journal, she reveals that she discovered that Eddie was having an affair with Blanche. Bea tries to get closer to Eddie when he delivers food to her prison room. She asks him questions about Jane and even gets him to sleep with her several times. Then she slips her journal into Eddie’s jacket pocket and Jane finds it. Jane lets Bea out and then she hits Eddie in the head with a pineapple figurine, knocking him unconscious.

Eddie: He met Bea in Hawaii. He was there with a friend who knew who — and how rich —Bea was. After Bea and Eddie started dating, he met Blanche, who had known Bea for years. Blanche told Eddie about how Bea’s mom, an alcoholic, fell down stairs to her death. Blanche insinuates that Bea pushed her mom. Eddie think that is why Bea really killed Blanche: to shut her up about the fact that she caused her mom’s death. 

Eddie says that when he got to the lake house, Tripp was passed out and Bea and Blanche were missing. When Eddie realized Bea killed Blanche, he locked her in their panic room. He didn’t want her in jail and wanted to keep her successful business running. He doesn’t really love Jane, but grew fond of her.

Bea and Jane: The two sit down and drink wine. Bea says that Eddie told her that she and Jane were nothing alike, but that he was wrong. Bea claims Eddie was cheating with Blanche and that he invited her to the lake house to kill her. But Jane doesn’t believe the story.

Spoilers for The Wife Upstairs

Bea: After meeting Jane, Bea decides that Eddie still loves her and that Jane is an opportunist who doesn’t really love Eddie. Bea recalls what actually happened on the lake – she drugged both Tripp and Blanche. She took Blanche out in the boat, hit her in the head with a hammer, and dumped her in the water. She had planned to swim to shore and pretend that she tried to save Blanche. But then Eddie showed up and ruined her plan.

Jane is in the process of calling the police when the smoke alarm goes off.  Bea realizes that Eddie must have started a fire in the panic room, hoping that the smoke alarm would unlock the door. Bea goes to the panic room to let Eddie out, which spreads the fire to the rest of the house.

Jane: She wakes up in the hospital, remembering that the house burned to the ground. She got out, but both Bea and Eddie died in the fire. The police come to the hospital and tell Jane that their theory is that Eddie killed Blanche, then, as the police realized he’d been at Blanche’s murder scene, burned the house down to kill himself and Jane. Tripp has been exonerated based on video evidence that showed Eddie at the lake house on the night Blanche died. But the police tell her no bodies were found: the fire must have burned everything but a few teeth.

Jane moves in with Emily. One day while walking Emily’s dogs she is approached by Eddie’s lawyer. He tells her that Eddie left her everything in his will. Jane starts over in a new state. One day she think she sees Bea and Eddie, but convinces herself she was only imagining it.

Discussion of The Wife Upstairs

Whoa, there’s a lot here to unpack.

First off, I think The Wife Upstairs would make a perfect book club book. It has the Jane Eyre retelling angle for the English major types, and it’s a thriller for those who are like: just entertain me.

Have you read Jane Eyre? I have, and I found The Wife Upstairs a really clever Jane Eyre retelling that kept many elements of the original while also turning things on their head. In the original, Rochester is blinded in the fire and Jane ends up with him. In The Wife Upstairs, Eddie and Bea are actually the love story (?) and they escape the fire and fake their own deaths. Or do they?

What did you think of the characters? Is Jane a petty thief and opportunist, or just a woman making the best of her rough situation? Did she really love Eddie, or just love the idea of having an easy life?

Eddie also was drawn to Bea’s money, but it seemed like he really did love her in the end. I’m not sure why Eddie left his money to Jane, though.

Bea was also an interesting character. She also overcame a tough childhood with an alcoholic mother and seemed willing to do anything to uphold the shiny new image she’d made for herself. I kept picturing her business as Draper James!

Do you think Eddie and Bea are alive or dead? Could they have both escaped from the house? I guess they both knew the house well enough that … maybe.

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If you are looking for more spoiler posts, here’s my master list!

Have you read Pretty Little Wife and have questions about the plot? Need to discuss spoilers? Come read my Spoilers and Plot Summary for Pretty Little Wife

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First, I’ll run through a quick plot summary. Pretty Little Wife spoilers will be at the end of the post. If you do NOT want spoilers, check out my spoiler-free review of Pretty Little Wife!

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Plot Summary for Pretty Little Wife

Lila and Aaron each had traumatic childhoods that are affecting their marriage. He’s controlling, while she’s secretive and distant. He’s a high school math teacher, she’s a lawyer turned realtor. Lila finds a secret phone belonging to Aaron. The phone has videos of him having sex with young women she suspects are his students. She confronts him and they fight. He says she’s overreacting and that he has it “handled.”

Six weeks later, Aaron doesn’t show up for work. Lila is puzzled as she left Aaron’s car in the school parking lot … with his body in it.

Ginny, the investigator assigned to the case, questions Lila. So Lila points out that several young college students in the area are also missing.

Jared, Aaron’s brother, also comes to see Lila. The brothers are close after both their parents died tragically. Each brother has a trust fund from a settlement following a hunting accident that killed their mother. Their father was later killed in a hit and run.

Then Ginny and her sidekick Pete discover that Lila didn’t seem to exist before age 21. Lila explains that she changed her name after her father kidnapped, raped and murdered one of her friends. 

Lila starts getting mysterious notes on her car: “This Isn’t Working Out Like You Planned” and “You’ve Been Very Naughty.”

The police zero in on Ryan, a real estate client of Lila’s and also a professor in the sociology of crime. Were they having an affair?

Brent, Aaron’s boss, confronts Lila about not taking part in a search party to find Aaron. He suggests she knows what happened to him. So Lila says she will tell the police Brent asked Aaron to borrow money, causing tension between her and Aaron.

Lila confesses her affair with Ryan to the police and they tell her Ryan was writing a book about her father.

Lila confronts Ryan. The police arrive and Ginny tells Ryan and Lila she found Aaron’s phone in Ryan’s house.

Finally, Aaron’s body is found!

Aaron’s phone leads them to his GPS. The police find Aaron’s body inside his SUV, which was parked outside a remote cabin. The body of one of the missing college students was inside the cabin.

Lila gets another note that says, “Fixed your mess. You’re welcome.”

Lila meets with Samantha, one of Aaron’s victims. She had approached Samantha weeks ago and told her about all the other girls. Samantha accuses Lila of murdering Aaron.

Spoilers for Pretty Little Wife

The police show Lila photos of the cabin. In them, she recognizes a familiar rocking chair. She drives out to the cabin and Jared is there. He and Aaron each had an identical chair. While Aaron liked sleeping with underage blondes, Jared stalked and killed brunettes. Jared abducted and killed the missing college students. He bought the cabin in Aaron’s name to hold his victims after he abducted them.

Jared knew Lila killed Aaron and was the one writing the taunting notes to her. Jared knew Lila had found Aaron’s sex videos and was spying on her using cameras he installed outside her house. He saw her drive off early in the morning with Aaron’s body. He took the body and froze it, along with the body of the missing college student.

Jared explains that his father was also a depraved killer who organized “hunting” parties with human prey. Their father was responsible for their mother’s death. When he got senile and started talking, Jared ran him down.

Jared tries to tell Lila that all three of them (Jared, Lila, Aaron) are the same – psychopaths.

Lila attacks Jared with a hammer. He gets it away from her and the two struggle. Lila then stabs him with a screwdriver she had hidden in the clothes. She tells him she already knew about the cabin. She followed Aaron there weeks ago. Her goal was to kill both brothers and end the cycle of violence.

Police arrive at the cabin and Lila says that Jared killed all the women and framed Aaron for it. They aren’t really sure what the truth is but they decide to take Lila’s word for what happened.

Ginny visits Lila and says she knows that Lila is getting all the brothers’ trust fund money after their death. She knows that Lila found out both brothers’ secrets and plotted to kill them both.

Lila says most of the estate money is going to families of the victims.

Spoiler Discussion for Pretty Little Wife

What did you think of Lila? I found her hard to relate to through most of the story. She was really closed-off and well … a murderer! It’s not until the end that we see that she planned the WHOLE thing.

Who did you suspect moved Aaron’s body? At first I was sure that Ryan was responsible. He was kind of a creeper. But then I started fixating on Jared.

What was Lila’s plan for Jared? She said she knew about the cabin all along, so was she waiting for the police to discover it? What if he killed more women in the meantime? Why was no one at the cabin but Jared if it was a crime scene?

If Lila was on to Jared all along, why didn’t she figure out he was the one leaving the notes?

Did we ever find out how Lila killed Aaron? It sounds like she staged his body as a carbon-monoxide caused suicide in his car, but how did he actually die? (I am curious!)

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What other questions do you have about Pretty Little Wife and what do you want to discuss?? Let’s talk in comments!

If you loved Pretty Little Wife, check out Darby Kane’s new book, What the Wife Knew!