Jane Eyre 'speaks as much to men as women'

Urban Milwaukee features the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's production of Jane Eyre, which opens tonight.

Sanchez jumped at the chance to direct the dramatic adaptation of the novel. “I said yes before reading the script. It was my favorite book when I was a kid.” [...]
“It’s a play about a young woman who suppresses her passionate nature in order to survive in an oppressive society,” Sanchez says. “She learns that to truly live requires equal parts passion and reason.”
Sanchez says the story speaks as much to men as women. “Jane and Mr. Rochester share similar character traits–they don’t fit into their time and place. Both are incredibly honest and neither have a filter regarding what they say. Neither know how to be political, charming, or sugarcoat anything. Everything is couched in absolute honesty.”[...]
Both Rochester and Jane are beaten up emotionally and neither feels they deserve to be loved.
“They’re on opposite sides of the spectrum,” Sanchez says. “One faces wealth and one faces poverty, but both are suffering. At the heart of a lot of questions today is how we judge women. How do we treat a woman that is anything less than perfect? Is she held by different standards? I don’t really see Jane as a feminist as much as a survivor.” [...]
While Jane Eyre is being played by an African American woman, Sanchez says it was not a conscious effort to do so.
“It’s really a commitment I have to casting in general,” Sanchez says. “I wanted this role to be universal. I wanted to audition Japanese women, Latino women, African American women. I requested a diverse acting pool. It didn’t matter to me. I’m dedicating my career to help remind us they’re actors, not people. When I watch Tartuffe, I realize it’s a character, and I don’t get muddled in not believing it’s an 18th century French guy. Jane Eyre isn’t a certain physical type or race. ‘Jane’ doesn’t exist. It’s not like you’re doing a play about Albert Einstein where you’d cast an actor that resembles Albert Einstein. I’m more interested in what’s behind the character.” (Jim Cryns)

Journal Sentinel recommends it too.

Beware of spoilers in this article on the series finale of Bates Motel on A.V. Club. The title of the episode was The Cord.

“There’s a cord between our hearts,” Norman said in the first episode, a sentiment played back to him repeatedly over the seasons. It’s a fitting title for the finale, too, as it works both as commentary and emotional bond. As Norma pointed out when Norman first said it to her, it’s a line stolen from Jane Eyre, and repurposed for the Bates family dynamic. Which is exactly what defined Bates Motel—it’s a show borrowed from a famous movie, a prequel story that takes the previous narrative’s basic contours and enriches them, turning fleeting tics in whole lives, and briefly referenced souls into living, breathing people. And like that Brontë-derived saying, it gives new meaning and depth to something that was the domain of another world entirely. Not only that, but it made this world its own, a world where Emma Decody could finally breathe, and everyone who watched could see events play out just as they should. (Alex McLevy)

A couple of reviews of the film Lady Macbeth mention the Brontës. According to Empire,

 the clearest influence on theatre director William Oldroyd’s feature debut is Andrea Arnold’s sombre 2011 take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which explored the historical British attitudes to gender, class and race that persist today. (David Parkinson)

El Periódico (Spain) focuses on the moors shown in the film:

La cámara, sin embargo, sí viaja por los bastos exteriores, rodados entre New Castle y Durham, cerca de los páramos ingleses que inspiraron novelas como "Jane Eyre" o "Cumbres borrascosas" -de las hermanas Emily y Charlotte Brönte [sic]- en esta "Lady Macbeth" que difiere bastante del relato primigenio. (Pepi Cardenete) (Translation)

SciFiNow interviews Aliette De Bodard about her book The House Of Binding Thorns.

Were there any specific inspirations for this? For The House Of Binding Thorns specifically? I wanted to take some of the staples of Gothic fiction and give them a different slant: you have the arranged marriage, the perilous pregnancy, the grand and decaying mansion with a terrible history, the isolated households (or in this case, House and kingdom) who don’t understand each other… A lot of Gothic fiction doesn’t really have “foreign” elements though, or if they do it’s very often used with negative connotations (think of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, who has Roma blood and is described as looking like a Lascar). I wanted to break that particular problematic stereotype by having a diverse Paris, and a strong Vietnamese presence in the book. (Jonathan Hatfull)

Glamour (France) claims that the Brontës are not the grandmothers of chicklit as many (arguably) claim, but of chick noir.

De la même manière qu’on s’accorde à dire que Jane Austen est la pionnière de la chick lit, sans qui Bridget Jones ou Sarah Jessica Parker n’existeraient pas, des écrivaines comme les sœurs Brontë (de Jane Eyre aux Hauts de Hurlevent) ou Daphné du Maurier (Rebecca, premier grand bestseller du genre ?) ont, elles aussi, cultivé le jardin de la chick noir bien avant le XXIe siècle. (Translation)

Self-Publishing Review has an article on the Brontës as 'self-publishing pioneers'.