Jane Eyre. From Comics to Marxism

Today on the net:

Mick Trimble posts on his Secret Identity blog about a new graphical adaptation of Jane Eyre project (both the Penguin edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by Dame Darcy and a graphical adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Siku & Strickson have been published recently).

I've just had an email to tell me that I'll be pencilling a 144 page comics adaptation/ graphic novel version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Going to the Birmingham Comics Show was worth it, after all, then, as my own mysterious benefactor met me at the con. This means I am now a proper, professional artist. This also means I can give up my crappy day job. This also means I'll be spending my Christmas researching mid-19th century clothes and practising drawing horses, oh, and reading the source material. (...) The picture is my prelim of Thornfield Hall.

On the same post we have discovered this sketch/parody extracted from the BBC program Shooting Stars: Jane Hairs.

From comics to marxism. It has been some time since we read something that associated marxism and the Brontës. Associated Content publishes a lengthy article by Jeremy Zentner: The Jane Eyre Manifesto: A Marxist Hero for the British Empire.

The peak of socialist ideology dawned during the industrial revolution when class divisions were constructed to rule the labor force. Charlotte Bronte places the protagonist, Jane Eyre, in the position between lower and upper class to critique social injustices. This world Bronte has created for her is polluted with tyranny, disease, deception, and a false sense of the afterlife. (...) The novel Jane Eyre exposes the tyranny of a capitalist society as the young woman meets with a variety of characters from a number of backgrounds and classes. These characters are doomed by their environments established by class division. (Read more)

What we found puzzling in the article is that being a Marxist reading of Jane Eyre, Terry Eagleton's fundational work: Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës is not quoted or mentioned anywhere.

Categories: Comics, Jane Eyre, Scholar