In alignment with Jane Eyre, the protagonist, who is named Gemma Hardy in this novel, is forced to live at her uncle and aunt's house after the death of her mother and father. This forces her to move from Iceland to Scotland. Her uncle is kind and loving towards her, but as in the original novel, he dies, forcing her to live solely with her unbearable aunt and cousins. The name of their estate is "Yew House." Livesey writes, "As we drove along streets of grey buildings, it dawned on me that we were leaving the sea behind. I remember little of the drive to Yew house...The mossy stones were not so different from the ones at the back of our house...We drove along a narrow road between fields of black-faced sheep and up a drive lined with rhododendrons, shadowed by beech trees and firs" (Livesey 18). According to the OED, “yew” means, “A long-lived evergreen coniferous tree of Europe and Asia, Taxus baccata (family Taxaceae), having heavy but flexible wood and dense dark green foliage of short needles, often planted in churchyards and regarded as symbolic of sadness. Also: any of various other coniferous trees of the genus Taxus or related genera, widely distributed mainly in north temperate regions” (yew, n.1). This definition parallels with the description given of Yew House, with its “mossy stones” and “beech trees and firs” (Livesey 18).
The Encyclopaedia Britannica provides information that dovetails extensively with the OED’s definition, however it also notes that, “As a seed [of the yew tree] matures, it is enveloped by a fleshy, red, cup-shaped aril. The foliage and seeds, but not the arils, contain a poisonous alkaloid, sometimes fatal to livestock” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). This idea of having poisonous seeds echoes in the purpose of the trees: serving as a tree of the dead, often planted in churchyards, which is an area of the church often used for burials. This is expanded upon in a Paris Review article, stating:
“A churchyard was adjacent to a church; both held the bones of the dead. The three—the building, the ground, the dead—were conjoined by a common history that made them part of what by the eighteenth century was a given; if ever there were an organic landscape, it was the churchyard. The long-lived European yew tree—Taxus baccata, the tree of the dead, the tree of poisonous seeds—bears witness to the antiquity of the churchyard and shades its ‘rugged elms,’ and the mounds and furrows of its graves: The yew of legend is old and lays claim to immemorial presence” (Laqueur).
In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, although Yew House is not a literal graveyard, it does house secrets, metaphorical skeletons, and the eventual death of Gemma’s aunt. Choosing Yew House nods to the eventual death of her aunt, as well as the secret her aunt keeps: that Will is not Charles’s baby (Gemma’s uncle), and that the marriage between her and Charles was out of necessity (Livesey 367-368).
Bibliography: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Yew.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 29 April 2019, https://www.britannica.com/plant/yew. Accessed 31 Oct. 2019.
Laqueur, Thomas W. “Beneath the Yew Tree’s Shade.” Paris Review, 31 Oct. 2015. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/31/beneath-the-yew-trees-sh…. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019.
Livesey, Margot. The Flight of Gemma Hardy. HarperCollins, 2012.
"yew, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, Nov. 2019. https://www-oed-com.login.library.coastal.edu:8443/search?searchType=di…. Accessed 13 Sept. 2019.