Whatever happened to Baby Jane Eyre?

The most romantic line in film and television has been voted and it is from Emma Thompson's wonderful - and Oscar-winning - adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. However, a line from Wuthering Heights got some votes, too. From The Telegraph and Argus:

The words “My heart is, and always will be, yours” from Sense And Sensibility have been voted the most romantic line from romantic literature, film and TV drama.
They are uttered by Edward Ferrars to Elinor Dashwood in director Ang Lee’s 1995 screen version of Jane Austen’s classic novel.
The line, which is from Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay, was the top choice of 2,000 British women who were polled for the TV channel Drama.
It gained 16% of the vote, placing it ahead of heart-melting moments from Dirty Dancing, Titanic, Wuthering Heights, When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill, Ghost, Far From The Madding Crowd, Love Actually and Pride And Prejudice. [...]
Emily Brontë’s line “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” from Wuthering Heights took fifth place and received 10% of the votes.
The list was created as the Drama channel launches its Leading Man Weekend for Valentine’s Day.

The press release with the release has been published by many other websites.

More romance (and more references to both Austen and Brontë) as Jezebel discusses the craft of their love stories.

This is the way adaptation plays out: Person A comprehends some information about person B’s nature from what B says or does, and that changes how A approaches her afterward. It sounds simple, but I think it’s very difficult to write and nearly impossible to write well. Almost no one tries. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte each did this over and over. [...]
Charlotte Bronte takes us a step deeper. Jane Eyre uses almost every potential complexity of the adaptability technique and uses it to paint characters not only vividly but even luridly. Both Jane and Mr. Rochester are moving targets: neither of them settles into a single set of characteristics. They always have a restless connection. In other words, the attraction Waldman describes as based in character doesn’t always lead to respect or an ideal marriage, it can also lead to big, off-kilter, bizarre and thrilling love—it has no less of the dirty force of love based in other, male-valorized qualities. Where Austen might be making a pattern for all love, the way marriage ought to be, Bronte uses the adaptation technique to make her characters and their connection idiosyncratic. [...]
It’s not everywhere in the canon. It isn’t in the work of George Eliot, Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Dickens; however romantic and psychological they are, those authors use other methods. Where the free indirect discourse of Flaubert, the minimalism of Hemingway and maximalism of Nabokov are often credited with marking the great countries on the map of modern literary fiction, I think the geniuses of the adaptable character are under-praised. Brontë and Austen are often lauded, of course, but for irony, psychology and free indirect discourse: rarely for the scale of this achievement. (Catherine Nichols) (Read the full article)

Norra Skåne (Sweden) features the Malmö stage production of Jane Eyre and interviews cowriter Anna Azcárate.

Anna har vänt och vridit på verket och tycker det finns många saker hon skulle kunna säga om det. Som att det är det perfekta verket att spegla sig i ur ett feministiskt perspektiv för att se den blinda fläcken i vår samtid. Eller att behovet av klassiker inte är svårare än att ett barn vill höra favoritsagan om och om och när barnet blir större får sagan olika prismor.
– Men jag ska inte sticka under stol med att det också är en förbaskat spännande berättelse, tung och maffig, med sagans alla stora element. Och jag är mycket en berättare.
Och den som älskar sin Jane Eyre kommer att känna igen sig.
– Absolut. Jag ser ingen mening med att återskapa Jane Eyre som en ny berättelse.
Några av kvinnorollerna spelas av män. Finns det någon speciell mening i det?
– Inte mer än att skådespelarna är väldigt duktiga och bra på att vara gränsöverskridande. Och det handlar om resurser när många karaktärer ska bakas ner till sju skådespelare, säger Anna Azácarate. (Yvonne Erlandsson) (Translation)

Sveriges Radio (Sweden) has interviewed actress Natalie Sundelin, who plays Jane.

Jane Eyre befinner sig i en värld full av konventioner och oskrivna uppförandekoder. Men hon är befriande fri från koketteri, sarkasm och självutplånande humor, menar regissören Anna Ascarate.
Hon är på något vis en tidig feminist, innan begreppet riktigt fanns. Hennes starka röst, självaktning och självrespekt gör henne angelägen idag.
- Det finns ett ögonblick när Jane säger "men är det inte märkligt att vi kvinnor skulle förväntas vara mer stillsamma än män?". Det där embryot, den lilla spröda starten till en feministisk teoribildning, just ögonblicket när den unga Jane reflekterar över att vi förväntas vara olika, det är så vackert - ett av de ögonblicken under repetitionerna när jag fått kontakt med ett riktigt feministiskt tilltal. (David Richter) (Translation)

More articles on the play The Moors mentioning the Brontës:

[Playwright Jen] Silverman first read Gothic classics Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when she was young, and she revisited the titles while studying comparative literature at Brown University. While those novels—with their trappings of mystery, melodrama, murder, and longing—may have influenced The Moors, Silverman did not want her play to seem like a literary or historical adaptation. “That’s the reason we have the actors speaking in an American accent,” she explains. “This is a very contemporary and American play, and to those ends the moors represent something more than what they are.”
Silverman was inspired by the letters Charlotte Brontë wrote about daily household life on the Yorkshire moors. “The sense of location permeated the letters [and] emerged as a character,” says Silverman. “It mesmerized me and it made me think about how people condition themselves against such a bleak and unworldly landscape, and how that relative inhospitality offers a kind of permission—particularly for women—to let them dream in a way they might not otherwise." (Frank Rizzo on American Theatre)

La región de Inglaterra, conocida como Moors o Mooreland  [sic]está ubicada en North York y compuesta por vegetación mas bien de altas hierbas y pequeños arbustos, en la que hay frío y mucho viento. Esta área del país ha inspirado numerosas obras novelísticas famosas que se desarrollan en esta región, entre ellas están Wuthering Heights de Emily Bronte, y Arthur Conan Doyle, el famoso creador de Sherlock Holmes, en su popular obra The Hound of the Baskervilles, ambas llevadas al cine. (Bessy Reyna on Identidad latina) (Translation)

SBS (Australia) reviews the film The Choice.

When it’s charting Gabby and Travis’s steadily growing attraction, The Choice is light and lovely. A laid-back vet with a lake house and a grill isn’t exactly Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but Walker brings a slight, pursed edge to Travis’s languid drawl – not so much as to make him brood, but just enough to draw us in. (Bilge Ebiri)

And it's back to Brontë mentions connected to Crimson Peak now that it's coming out on DVD. From Slant Magazine:

So precisely defined is every aspect of Allerdale Hall's physical decay that even the people who dwell within it feel more like conduits for the manse's soul than independent agents. If Wasikowska's surprisingly fortitudinous naïf is meant to recall Jane Eyre, Hiddleston's version of Rochester comes not from Charlotte Brontë's classic tome, but the revisionist version found in Wide Sargasso Sea, a feckless brute who maintains a veneer of respectability just long enough to nab a wife he can exploit to boost his own faded status. Hiddleston's best performances always hint at a bit of sleaze beneath a show of welcoming charm, and the hunger that fills Thomas's eyes whenever talk of money arises lays bare the sham of his romance from the start. (Jake Cole)

Inspired by the release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Independent thinks of more literary mash-ups 'we need to see' (do we really?).

Whatever happened to Baby Jane Eyre?
Charlotte Brontë’s novel is one of our favourites, but this dark masterpiece comes unstuck with its ersatz happy ending “Reader, I Married Him” business. But reader, what if, it were to make good on its gothic potential by taking a leaf out of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s 1962 camp classic?
To wit: Jane didn’t marry that lying bully Rochester but instead she and the attic-bound Mrs Rochester together started a fire to dispose of him.
However when we catch up with the pair a few decades later, their relationship has soured; with Jane having locked Bertha in the attic once more for thwarting her marriage hopes all those years ago, this increasingly deranged recluse stalks the house in her ragged governess’s uniform. But what’s Bertha plotting? Cue a battle of divas like nothing the 19th century has ever seen. (Hugh Montgomery)

The News section of the Illinois State University brings back an article from 2012 wondering whether you can actually die of a broken heart.

A broken heart: The very idea has graced the arts for centuries – from Romeo and Juliet to Wuthering Heights and Downton Abbey. Yet can someone actually perish from the sadness of a lost love? Can a heart break? [...]
“There is a famous scene in Wuthering Heights where Catherine tells Nelly, ‘I am Heathcliff,’” quotes Professor of English Cynthia Huff, who is the Department of English expert on Victorian literature. “There is this idea that Catherine and Heathcliff are conjoined, and they literally cannot exist without each other.”
According to Huff, the idea of oneness is celebrated in the Victorian “Cult of Sensibility,” that uplifts emotions (or sensibility) over sense. “The original notion was to keep sense and sensibility in balance,” said Huff, “but with the ‘Cult of Sensibility,’ strong emotions held sway.”
Though Catherine dies wasting away after giving birth to a child, Huff said her students are rarely forgiving of the Heights’ heroine. “They usually call her a drama queen,” said Huff with a laugh. “She refuses to eat. She refuses to sleep. When she dies, is it a broken heart? Is it Catherine making herself ill? Is she an early anorexic? Clearly, Brönte [sic] wants us to know she is suffering.”
Huff noted another character in Wuthering Heights, Hindley, could be said to die of a broken heart. “Hindley becomes increasingly self-destructive. He is an alcoholic, who drives himself further into his vices of drinking and gambling.” (Rachel Hatch)

The Week lists '10 endearingly weird snow words', one of which is by Charlotte Brontë.

5. onding
"It was a very grey day; a most opaque sky, 'onding on snaw,' canopied all; thence flakes fell at intervals, which settled on the hard path and on the hoary lea without melting."
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, 1869 [sic]
The Scots gifted us with onding, a heavy and continuous rain or snow. Onding also refers to breathing or smelling as well as a figurative onslaught or noisy outburst. (Angela Tung)

An alert from Garden City, NY:

 I will say that everyone in town is reading these days and the ladies who belong to the American Association of University Women's reading group will tackle Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” on Tuesday, February 9th 1 p.m. The book ws published in 1847 and probably read by most people as I know I read it in High School. You just might want to read it again as we look at things in a different light as we progress through the years. Its really amazing how we remember or do not remember things from years ago. (Garden City News)

Plymouth Herald has selected the five best love stories in fiction, including Wuthering Heights. According to Librópatas (Spain), Catherine Lowell's The Madwoman upstairs is the perfect novel to read in the 'Brontë year' (we wonder why not an actual Brontë novel though). Abby King discusses love in Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations. Medusa Was Framed posts about the Red Room scene in Jane Eyre.