We want Lucy Snowe

This article was originally published in September in the middle of the BBC's Jane Eyre fever by The Independent. As it was not published on the online website we were unaware of its appearance. Now it's available from the FindArticles website. The article is very interesting and we highly recommend its reading:

We Want Lucy Snowe
Mark Bostridge

(...) BBC1's new adaptation, which begins its four-week run tonight, opens with the child Jane wandering through a dream landscape of barren desert, a reference presumably to the "forlorn regions of dreary space" that are suggested to the young Jane Eyre by the introductory pages of Bewick's History of British Birds' and an image perhaps also designed to convey the emotional barrenness of Jane's upbringing.

This is sufficiently out of the ordinary to be a bit disconcerting, but adapters of Jane Eyre have taken far greater liberties in the past. In 1916, Aldous Huxley went to the cinema to see DW Griffith's three-reel silent version, in which the setting was unexpectedly sub-tropical (*) . Thornfield, Mr Rochester's country seat, was surrounded by palms and pseudo-Japanese gardens filled with cacti and baobabs. As for the novel's plot, Huxley reported that, though it had been "absolutely destroyed", this didn't seem to matter (a remark that may well have come back to haunt him, 30 years later, when he was one of the screenwriters for Orson Welles's version). (...) (Read the whole article)

This is the BBC's fifth attempt at Jane Eyre: the first was in 1936, the last in 1983, though a planned 1996 adaptation, with a script by the ubiquitous Andrew Davies, had to be shelved, with more than a hint of sour grapes, for fear that it would clash with the rival IT V version that was eventually broadcast with Ciarán Hinds and Samantha Morton (I must state my preference for the 1973 dramatisation, starring Michael Jayston and Sorcha Cusack, with its passionate theme music from Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for Strings, which first turned me to the book).

In a world of public service broadcasting, in which we're constantly being informed that resources are limited, I find it extraordinary that the BBC can't get its act together to produce a TV adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece, Villette. Judging from the identical reaction of other people to whom I've mentioned the subject, I'm very much not alone in this opinion. Villette has been televised only twice, in 1957 and 1970. Based on Charlotte Brontë's painfully unrequited attachment to Constantin Héger, during the two years she spent as a teacher in Brussels, it's a novel that forsakes the "un-pruned fancies" of Jane Eyre in favour of a new sobriety' a sad, strong stoicism drawn from her own chastened experience of love.

No one is going to pretend that adapting Villette for television will be easy. In it, Charlotte Brontë plays a wicked, slippery authorial game in which Lucy Snowe's concealment becomes a metaphor for psychological instability, and for the perils of repression in matters of the heart' the novel, daringly for its time, also has an ambiguous ending. But what defines public service broadcasting if it isn't driven by challenges?

The Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, where Charlotte taught, lies today under a car park, but other locations, like the park, and the cathedral where Lucy, like Charlotte herself, confesses, out of desperation, to a Catholic priest, still survive. And I have the perfect actress for the main role: Eve Best, who made such a stunning Hedda Gabler last year. In choosing Jane Eyre over Villette the BBC is playing safe and running scared.

No one is going to pretend that adapting 'Vilette' for television wil be easy. (September 24, 2006)

(*) We have no idea what Jane Eyre version is the silent picture Aldous Huxley reviewed in 1916. We have been unable to trace any reference to a David Wark Griffith's Jane Eyre. Not as a director or producer. If someone out there can enlighten us, please do it. A Griffith's Jane Eyre should be something to really be taken into account, tropical or not.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Jane Eyre, Villette