In my new book Concerto, music therapist Catriona comes to Lake Como to work with a new client. Umberto Monteverdi was once a famous pianist composer with the world at his feet, but then he was terribly injured in a car accident and lost his sight – and his way. Ever since he learned that his sight would never return, he has plunged into a deep depression. He is bitter, wilful and destructive, and Catriona is his family’s last hope that Umberto will find a way to live with his disability and complete the concerto he was writing.

Umberto’s struggles were inspired in part by experiences in my own life. I have stood by people who have lost their sight; who were once independent and then found themselves having to rely on others for everything. I saw their anger, their despair and their depression – and finally, I witnessed their courage as they came to accept their situation and find a new way to live, with dignity and great strength.

When I first started to think about writing of blindness, a book on my shelf called to me. Jane Eyre is my favourite work of English literature, and as soon as I thought of Mr Rochester and Jane, inspiration sparked: I wanted to write a story about a blind hero and the heroine who guides him.

In Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester fall in love, but their marriage is thwarted by the revelation that Rochester is already married – to a madwoman he keeps locked up in the attic of his home, Thornfield Hall. Devastated, Jane flees. Then Rochester’s wife starts a fire at Thornfield, and in trying to rescue his wife (who jumps to her death from the roof), Rochester is injured.

Jane hears Rochester calling to her in a dream, and she returns to Thornfield, and to Rochester, whom, she discovers, is now blind. ‘Am I hideous, Jane?’ Rochester asks. He expects that his condition will repulse her. But Jane has only ever cared about inner beauty. All she wants is to help Rochester, to be at his side. She tells him:

I will be your neighbor, your nurse, your housekeeper. I find you lonely: I will be your companion – to read to you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to you. Cease to look so melancholy, my dear master; you shall not be left desolate, so long as I live.

Jane and Rochester marry (Reader, I married him) and a beautiful intimacy grows between them as Jane cares for Rochester. Brontë writes:

He saw nature – he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of the field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam – of the landscape before us; of the weather around us – and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done.

I was so struck by this passage while I was dreaming up Concerto, struck by the idea that Jane is a kind of therapist to Rochester; she calls what she does for Rochester ‘my services’. And Rochester accepts this help from her for the simple reason that he loves her:

And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad – because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.

Could my heroine care for my blind hero as Jane did for Rochester, I wondered? I dreamed of the beautiful intimacy that would grow between the two – and of their love washing away the ‘painful shame or damping humiliation’ for the hero. I dreamed of a strong heroine like Jane and a brooding Romantic hero like Mr Rochester. I dreamed of a journey out of the darkness, into the light. And the culmination of all this dreaming was Concerto.