Reading Jane Eyre

There are a few more things worth mentioning today apart from the impressive auction results.

It looks as if two more Brontëites join our ranks today. Jacket Copy - a Los Angeles Times Blog - interviews Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation.

Jacket Copy: What was the most interesting book that you were assigned in school?
Daisy Hay: It wasn’t assigned, precisely, but when I was 13, a wonderful English teacher suggested I might like to read Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre."[...]
JC: Did you read the book?
DH: You bet. I went home, found it on my parents’ shelves and devoured it in a single weekend. I had a nightmare about Grace Poole on the Saturday night and felt privately furious when some cousins turned up on the Sunday afternoon to show off their new baby. I was right in the middle of Jane’s reunion with Rochester and couldn’t believe my parents were actually making me put the book down to be sociable.
JC: What did you learn from it? Why did it stand out?
DH: It stands out because it was the first time I’d read a "proper" literary novel, and I’d expected to find it a bit of a slog. But instead I was completely gripped, as I’d never been by a book before. Or at least, I’d been gripped by books before, but once read they were easily forgotten. I’d re-read them happily, but the experience didn’t stay with me, or change me, like reading "Jane Eyre" did. I can honestly say that it was that weekend which switched me on to English literature and that it was then that I decided English was my thing. I can date a whole set of subsequent decisions -- to study English at advanced level at school, to read English at university -- from that moment. It showed me the huge possibility of literature, that there was a world out there waiting to be discovered. I learned I loved literature because of it. (Carolyn Kellogg)

And The New Yorker's Book Bench says,

[Republican candidate] Christine O’Donnell: This Delaware sensation’s MySpace page lists “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Theology of the Body Explained, and Jane Eyre,” as her favorite books. (Ian Crouch)

And let's end with two classic films. From Alt Film Guide:

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Dragonwyck is a sort of Jane Eyre-like melodrama (I haven't seen it, yet), starring Gene Tierney, then at the height of her popularity, and Vincent Price. (Andre Soares)

From the New York Times:

Romance is not forbidden in zombie circles of course. Long before the fad of Jane Austen mash-ups like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the 1943 classic “I Walked With a Zombie” drew its story line from Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” (Alessandra Stanley)

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