Jane Eyre: past, present and future

Jane Eyre seems to be the perfect material for discussing e-readers. Whether it is in favour of the experience (sort of) as on Engadget:

Reading Jane Eyre on a sunny day was pretty much the typical e-reading experience: the black text looked crisp, and there was the expected second-long refresh when we turned pages. In a side-by-side comparison with the Nook, the Alex took the same amount of time to flip a page -- the Kindle 2 was a hair faster than both. (Joanna Stern)

Or against it, as in The Pitt News:

But books aren’t the same. Books don’t change every minute, and many have stayed the same for centuries. I know that the copy of “Jane Eyre” that I open today will tell the same story that my parents read years ago.
Maybe I won’t win this battle, but I think books are something worth holding on to. There’s so much a book has that e-readers can’t offer. . . (Hay Thuppal)

We personally don't think it's a case of 'either ... or...' Books offer things that e-readers can't offer and e-readers offer things that books can't offer. And Jane Eyre is brilliant on both formats, of course.

Actress Romola Garai, who is currently on stage at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, playing Chekhov's The Three Sisters (which may have been inspired by the Brontës), confesses to loving Jane Eyre as a child to The Scotsman:

"As a kid, I really loved Jane Eyre, I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap. There was something about Chekhov which made me go: 'No, it was always shit.' I really loved that, it made me feel really comforted. (Susan Mansfield)

You have to wonder, though, if she skipped some bits: a miserable childhood, a miserable boarding school, sleeping on the moors under the rain, a house burnt to the ground and nothing anyone could do about it. Also, we recently read about Charlotte's governessing as seen from a modern point of view and it's definitely not something we'd want to relive. Galleycat brings this up and quotes Joyce Carol Oates on Jane Eyre:

In 1997, Joyce Carol Oates reviewed Charlotte Bronte-- a novelist who earned a bit more than $1,800 a year as a governess in 1839. A sample: "Why does Jane Eyre retain its appeal after so many decades, and so many intervening novels of virginal young heroines, Byronic moody mysterious elder men, and melodramatic disclosures? One answer is, simply, the quality of Jane's and Rochester's characters. They are believable. They are intelligent, yet emotional, superior beings who are human, even flawed; as the 19th-century reader would have discerned, they are models for us all." (Jason Boog)

More pining for the past as Joan Collins 'laments the demise of the Hollywood hunk' in the Daily Mail:

Another great example of a totally masculine-looking actor from the 30s and 40s was, believe it or not, Laurence Olivier. As Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, you could almost smell the scent of the stables as he canoodled with Cathy - a somewhat miscast Merle Oberon. I would have thought Vivien Leigh or Hedy Lamarr would have been better, but then I consider them to be two of the most beautiful actresses to have graced the silver screen.

Other mentions today include: a Ted Hughes memorial to join the Brontë sisters' (among others) at Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, as reported by the Guardian. Teacher Susan Miriam Arenson profiled by The Tigers' Print picks Jane Eyre as her 'all-time favourite' while some students doubt that they can ever relate to classics such as Wuthering Heights (The Macon Telegraph). And finally The Northern Echo features Ruth Campbell, a 40-year-old woman who has set herself a few challenges such as

learning the words to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights in order to be filmed, dressed in a white gown and long, black wig, singing it on the moors.

On the blogosphere, Wuthering Heights is internationally reviewed by Vibekebloggen (in Norwegian) and Comedora de Livros (in Portuguese). And Risky Regencies has a post on the e-novella Reader, I Married Him by its own author (Janet Mullany) who closes the post by inviting readers: 'So, let's talk about Jane Eyre. Why is the novel important to YOU?'

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights