The true star is Derbyshire landscape

A lukewarm review of Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre in The Observer:

The end is somewhat perfunctory, with the "Reader I married him" dropped as well as the review of the following decade of marriage and her final reflections on St John Rivers and his holy mission. The Christian themes are not ignored but neither are they properly dramatised.
This Jane Eyre is a good-looking film, serious, thought through and well acted. Yet it ends up rather shallow, lacking the cinematic intensity of the Orson Welles version, though that was widely patronised and sneered at in its day. Some would argue that only a five-hour TV mini-series could do justice to the tone, detail and character development of Brontë's triple-decker Victorian novel, and I think they're probably right. (Philip French)

The Independent:

Wasikowska isn't quite as "small and plain" as Jane is supposed to be, but she submerges herself into the character without any attempt to be ingratiating or glamorous, and she holds in her emotions so tightly that before long you're willing her to crack a smile. When she eventually does, you can't help smiling along with her.

The film as a whole is just as uncompromising. Its director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, keeps the atmosphere subdued enough to ensure that what could be a lurid melodrama is always dignified, and ultimately more powerful than most period romances, for all their wet shirts and festive weddings. But it could probably have done with just a flicker more fire. Jane is so reserved that she could be accused of standing back and watching her life from a distance. And when a nocturnal attack by a mysterious cannibal flits by with almost no comment, you might wonder if Fukunaga is being too subtle for his own good. (Nicholas Barber)

Mansfield Chad:  

Director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s camera sweeps over the foreboding Derbyshire locations, lashing his lead actress with enough wind and rain to match the emotional battering meted out by Mrs Reed and Mr Brocklehurst. (Ian Soutar)

Sight and Sound (October 2011 issue):

A director with an ‘outsider’s eye’ is unleashed on a British literary classic: it’s a familiar strategy, but it pays dividends with Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre. (Claire Monk)

More reviews: The World Forgetting, By the World Forgot; RealViews; Prospect Magazine; 

The Sunday Express visited Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage on the day of the Jane Eyre screening:

Library and collections officer Sarah Laycock has raided the archives for a selection of treasured artefacts off limits to the public, displayed in plastic folders on tissue-covered lecterns and handled by Sarah wearing surgical gloves. Only about two per cent of the collection is on display at any one time. (...)

We are also shown two of the miniscule books, about 1.5ins long, that Charlotte and Branwell made out of sugar bags or wallpaper fragments and hand-bound themselves. Unless you were among the collection of toy soldiers for whom the stories were intended, you would need a magnifying glass to decipher the minute script. Their size serves a dual purpose. “Sometimes the content was a little bit inappropriate, quite gruesome, like children being hanged. They didn’t want their father to be able to read it!”

Charlotte’s talent for drawing and painting is also relatively unknown but evident on a pencil drawing of Bolton Abbey, which was even exhibited in a Leeds art gallery, and a watercolour, Wild Roses From Nature.

A letter written to her best friend Ellen Nussey in 1843 shows a small caricature of them both in which Charlotte portrays herself as an ugly dwarf character.

“She hated people looking at her and she thought she was very ugly,” says Susan Newby, telling the story of how Charlotte was eager to look as smart as possible on a trip to London. “She didn’t know what to do with her hair so she got a friend to buy her a hairpiece but apparently it wasn’t the right colour. In London, she was asked: ‘Where did you get your funny hat?'”

Our tour finished, it’s over to Haworth’s Baptist Church where we squeeze on to the bottom-numbing pews for the film’s local premiere.

The Sunday Times talks with Cary Fukunaga and gives information of routes and places to visit in Derbyshire:

You need specific ingredients for a good Jane Eyre. First take a superficially plain but ultimately rather beautiful actress to play Jane and combine with one slightly dusty Judi Dench. Then pour on the brooding — brooding men, brooding skies and brooding old houses — and simmer in tears for 90 minutes. The director Cory Fukunaga has just released a Jane Eyre he made earlier, and we met last week for lunch met last week for lunch at London’s St John hotel, where the imaginative English cuisine, if not the trashy Soho location, brought memories of the four-month shoot back to Fukunaga. “Food was a big deal when we were filming,” he says. “We had  a fabulous cook who actually made original 19th-century recipes. (...) [Mia Wasikowska] is Brontë’s Angel of the North — a green-eyed stoic with a cast-iron spine who soaks up suffering like the hill sheep absorb the rain. Michael Fassbender’s Edward Rochester fades to relentless grey compared with Wasikowska — you simply don’t see him at all when she walks in the room. The true star of the film, though, is the relentlessly melancholic Derbyshire landscape where, I suggest, the solitude, obduracy and openness of the high moors and gritstone crags reflect Jane as clearly as the still black pools of Bleaklow. Fukunaga disagrees “I don’t think the moors represent her character in that way,” he says. “What I tried to show was that she’s a child of the wilderness, the moors can be her refuge. Basically she’s a trapped bird, desperate for freedom.” Charlotte Brontë never said why she set her masterpiece in the Peak, but she arrived in the pretty village of Hathersage in 1845, stayed three weeks and gathered enough material for a bestseller that has inspired nine TV series, one prequel, five sequels and 16 films.  Fukunaga’s darkly gothic contribution to this collection could be the best yet, and you’ll leave the cinema certain of three things: first, life is too short to be spent nursing animosity or registering wrongs; second , that you are a free human being with an independent will; and third, it’s about time you spent a weekend in Derbyshire. The opening scene, in which a half-starved and hypothermic Jane stumbles across a storm-blasted moor, will send shivers down the spine of those who know the ominously named Dark Peak.  (Chris Haslam)

The Asheville Citizen-Times talks about Sharyn McCrumb's The Ballad of Tom Dooley:

“Once I began to study it in depth,” McCrumb writes about the historical record, she began to realize “its close parallel to Emily Brontë’s classic English novel, ‘Wuthering Heights.’” She had at hand an eternal triangle: sociopath, narcissist, and ne’er-do-well. (Rob Neufeld)

Organiser (India) reviews Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon and forgets Anne completely:

Women writers of the 19th century who were reclusive and little published in their lifetime had secret sorrows and found it hard to leave their father’s houses, as had been the case with the Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, who all have appeared as vulnerable and wounded geniuses through their writings.  (Manju Gupta) 

The Times mentions the paperback edition of Michèle Roberts's Mud: Stories of Sex and Love:

She frequently reimagines literary figures: Colette rolling in the hay with her first love; Jane Eyre through the eyes of a nursemaid; George Sand’s servant. (Olivia Marks)

An antiques auction in Bedford, NY with Brontë books; Reading with my Twin has just finished Villette.

Categories: Books,Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References