How could anyone not love Jane Eyre?

A few days ago it was The Guardian who featured a story about the double Brontë bill this year: Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights. Now it's The Telegraph which asks several personalities about their preferences. Again, these are just brief extracts, check the real thing:

Blake Morrison:
Jane Eyre is the safe option, but that undersells it. It’s a beautifully constructed novel, and I think there’s nothing quite as powerful as those early scenes set in school, clearly written out of personal experience but brilliantly fictionalised.
In comparison, I find Wuthering Heights very creaky and very flawed. (...) It’s a much darker and more disturbing tale than Jane Eyre.
Cornelia Parker:
Wuthering Heights is a daring book. When I first read both novels as a teenager, I loved Jane Eyre more, but, on rereading them as an adult, I realised how brilliant Wuthering Heights is. As a teenager, it’s harder to follow but as an adult you really appreciate its courage.
Richard Eyre:
I saw films of both before I read the novels and found Wuthering Heights gripping but preposterous. It’s all too gothic for me: Heathcliff is a thundering bore, and Cathy is like Miss Piggy. I’m more interested – and touched – by Jane Eyre because I find her a much more sympathetic character than Cathy, and the relationship with Mr Rochester is plausible and well charted. However, the novel that really interests me is The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Philip Hensher:
I prefer Jane Eyre by a country mile.(...) For me, Wuthering Heights is a wonderful gesture, but it’s a gesture of someone running out on the moors and giving a great big yell, which we all feel like sometimes. But Charlotte Brontë absolutely knew what she was doing. Jane Eyre is an extraordinary book. People remember it as a single-strand love story, but all sorts of things happen in it. I don’t think Charlotte Brontë is like any other novelist in the century. How could anyone not love Jane Eyre?
Julian Lloyd Webber:
The complex relationships between the brilliantly drawn characters and the passion surrounding the doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights are the very essence of music: the novel has inspired at least three operas and that famous eponymous song by Kate Bush.
John Mullan:
Secretly, many English-literature academics regret their students’ enthusiasm for Wuthering Heights. Structurally, it is a ramshackle affair, with Nelly Dean’s narrative awkwardly folded into Lockwood’s. The dialogue is hyperbolical and pumped up with dark talk of devils and damnation, while the generational sweep is confused (try giving a plot summary). It is the clumsy first novel of a genius.
Jane Eyre is a finished masterpiece. (...)
Jane Eyre is the “better” novel, and I prefer it – yet Wuthering Heights contains sentences that no other writer could have written and an extraordinary vision of love’s corrosive fury.
Penelope Lively:
I’ve always liked Jane Eyre’s voice. The plot and characters in Wuthering Heights can be so bewildering.   (...)That said, Wuthering Heights is a marvellous novel , but I warm to Jane Eyre. (Daisy Bowie-Sell)

Rose Gleadell lists for the same newspaper some of the Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre previous versions.

The Torontoist is thrilled to see Andrea Arnold's film on the upcoming TIFF:

Though still a relative newcomer—her first feature, Red Road was released in 2006—both that film and her follow-up, Fish Tank, are very, very good. Considering their adherence to a kind of gritty, Dogme-ish social realism, it may seem odd for Arnold to adapt the Brontë classic. (Yes, it’s an adaption of the novel, not the Kate Bush song.) But anyways. Do we even need any more adaptations of stuffy Victorian classics? Well, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre was impressive, so maybe we do. And with Arnold at the helm, this Wuthering Heights promises to be, well, interesting.  (John Semley)

io9 has an article about crossovers and quotes an early crossover which is usually forgotten, Walter de la Mare's Henry Brocken:

Another author to use traveling as the vehicle for a crossover was Walter de la Mare, who in Henry Brocken (1904) had the titular character meet Shakespeare's Titania and Bottom, Brontë's Jane Eyre and Rochester, Cervantes' Rosinante (sic) and Don Quixote, Poe's Annabel Lee, and Swift's Houyhnhnms.  (Jess Nevins)

The Independent reviews Lone Scherfig's One Day:

It seems to be a certain type of book that inspires this reaction. When a film presents an adaptation of a classic novel, yet another Dickens, Austen or Brontë, no-one seems to get too worked up. It is modern British hits that produce this hysterical response.  (Gillian Orr)

And our daily dose of Jane Eyre 2011 reviews:
The Vancouver Courier:

Director Cary Fukunaga gets it right. (...) . A bright combination of reverence to the original text and extra tweaking of the gothic elements makes Fukunaga’s film a winner.
Relatively brief special features on the standard disc include director commentary, deleted scenes, a short piece on Dario Marianelli’s score, and The Mysterious Light of Jane Eyre: getting that candlelit creepiness just right. (Julie Crawford)

HollywoodChicago:

With remarkable restraint in the melodrama department, “Jane Eyre” is a film that I would call “lovely” and not mean it in the slightest bit derogatory. Sure, there are dark elements of this story, but it is the fortitude of its title character (Mia Wasikowska) and the happiness she attempts to find with her wealthy employer (Michael Fassbender) that drives the piece.(...)
But the best performances wouldn’t elevate “Jane Eyre” enough if not for the stellar adaptation by Moira Buffini, subtle direction by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and all-around above-average production values. “Jane Eyre” is riveting drama, the kind of piece that even those who have avoided period pieces for fear that they may be too stuffy or distant should seek out. There’s a reason that “Jane Eyre” has been adapted repeatedly. It’s a fascinating story that was decades ahead of its time. And this version certainly does its canonical source justice. (Brian Tallerico)

The Times interviews Jamie Bell (St John):

In the new film adaptation of Jane Eyre, released next month, Bell stands out in his small role as the well-meaning but ultimately slightly objectionable curate St John Rivers, who takes in the desperate Jane (Mia Wasikowska) after she runs away from Michael Fassbender’s Rochester, but whose Christian kindness cannot extend to an understanding of her independent spirit. (...)
It’s a far cry from Jane Eyre, about which he speaks with typical — and very un-Hollywood — candour. “I hate period dramas,” he says. “Oh God, I hate them. I just can’t stand them. And now I’m in one.” The Charlotte Brontë, part Gothic horror, part precursor to the Mills & Boon bodice ripper, is “a really great book”, Bell says. But he chose to do it because of the Jane Eyre director, 34-year-old Cary Fukunaga, whose debut feature, Sin Nombre, was a darling of the 2009 festival circuit. (Rhys Blakely)

The Gurus O'Gold picks for possible Oscar nominations have not been very favourable for Jane Eyre 2011. Only Thompson on Hollywood seems to give his vote both for film and actress:

But I was the only Guru to pick Cary Fukunaga’s exquisite Jane Eyre.  While most of my fellow forecasters may reflect a male bias (as does the Academy), the women did not vote for this either. (Anne Thompson)

The Daily News (Egypt) mourns the death of the film actor Kamal El-Shenawy and points out to an Egiptian version of Wuthering Heights which we were not aware of:

In the mid-50s, El-Shenawy gradually broke away from his romantic roles, beginning with a supporting role in “El-Ghareeb” ( الغريب )(The Stranger, 1956), Kamal El-Shiekh and Fateen Abdel Wahab’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” starring Yehia Shahin and Magda. (Joseph Fahim)

Now for some geeky news. Goodreads has released an iPad app:

Goodreads, the social network for book lovers, has released their first iPad app. The app utilizes the iPad’s larger screen to show more updates, discussion topics and your books. (....) You can even access some books — like the classic Jane Eyre — completely free of charge. (Mariel Loveland on Scribbal)

eBooks with soundtrack incorporated, aka Booktrack:

Booktrack™, the creator of a new and engaging way to read by matching synchronized music, sound effects and ambient sound to the text of your favorite ebooks, launched today with its technology fully integrated in the new novel[.] (...) In the coming weeks and months, Booktrack will publish a specially-curated compendium of short stories from some of the top authors in the world—every month consecutively for an entire year—starting in September with In the South by Salman Rushdie followed in October with the short story Solace by Jay McInerney. Booktrack will also release editions of many beloved classics, including titles such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet and more. (PR Newswire / San Francisco Chronicle / New York Times)

Anne V. Coates, one of the best film editors in the history of cinema, is interviewed on Flickering Myth. It turns out that her entering edition is Brontë-related:

“Once I reached about 16 and became interested in movies, I thought I would like to be a movie director.” The shift in thinking occurred while the teenager was at boarding school; she and her classmates were taken by their teachers to see classical films. “When I saw Wuthering Heights [1939] I was in another world; I was swept away by it and Laurence Olivier. It suddenly made me realize that would be quite an interesting job to be able to take a book like Wuthering Heights and make it something magical on the screen. It had a profound influence on my life.” (Trevor Hogg)

MTV's Clutch Blog think they are quite funny making short summaries of novels. As a matter of fact they sound quite repetitive. Been there, done that .. the rank smell of déjà vu:

Jane Eyre. Cinderella, if she were ugly and didn't have a fairy godmother.
Wuthering Heights. Bitches need to get laid.

On the blogosphere, Yalsa's The Hub recommends Jane Eyre as a 'secretly YA classic'. Groucho Reviews discusses the 2011 adaptation of the novel, Los calcetines no tienen glamour (in Spanish) posts about the 2006 BBC miniseries and Via Margutta 51 takes a look at the portrayal of the proposal scene in different adaptations. Finally, The Sheila Variations reviews Juliet Barker's biography The Brontës.

Categories: Biography, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights