"The 13-year-old in me who read and loved Jane Eyre is thrilled that a book came out of it"

CBR interviews Aline Brosh McKenna about her comic Jane.

CBR: Aline, let’s start with the inevitable first question — people know your work from movies and TV, but what made you want to venture out into the wild world of comic books and graphic novels? Aline Brosh McKenna: I adapted a book called Rust for Archaia a bunch of years ago, and in doing so, I really discovered and fell in love with graphic novels. Jane was an idea that I had for a while, and I really wasn’t sure what form it could take, and then it hit me that it could be a wonderful graphic novel.
I had become a big fan of Ramón from Tale of Sand, so I then went into the process of trying to find an open slot in Ramón’s life so he could do the book — and I waited for him, and waited for him, as I have not waited for another man in a very long time. [Laughs] I waited and waited. Finally, he was available to do it. It’s just been really fun, really rewarding. [...]
Jane Eyre is one of the most celebrated pieces of English literature, and no easy thing to take on, I’d imagine. No!
What is it about that original text that you find so inspirational, and perfectly ripe for a modern retelling like this? Every writer has their foundational texts. For me, the Brontë sisters were a huge part of my development as a writer, but I had despaired ever doing anything like that, because I knew at a certain point I probably wasn’t going to be a novelist. What I think has been liberating is taking this Jane story and putting it into a different form. I felt like we had more freedom with the material and the inspiration, and we kind of approached it like you might a modern-day Shakespeare adaptation.
I selected the things that had really resonated with me the most as a kid, when I had first read the book. For me, it was the Rochester relationship and the relationship with a man who is sort of dark and difficult, and all the other things that had become very compelling to me, and in the years after I read it as a child. It was an opportunity to select those most strife-ridden, romantic moments, and bring those to life.
There’s a long history of modern-day reimaginations of classic literature, and examples where it works very well — and a lot where it doesn’t. For you in approaching this, was it pretty easy for you to bring what you wanted from the story into the modern-day setting? I just really kind of chose the things that spoke to me the most, and I went about it that way. Things that really had stuck with me over the years since I had read it. That was really where I started from — the emotional relationship. Jane Eyre’s story has three sections in the novel, but this is really just the middle section.
Finding a way to make it current and relevant, but keeping the heart of Jane and her purity and her moral goodness, and her ability to be sort of a guidepost — a moral compass — for Rochester, and in this case, helping him become a better parent. I loved writing an “Annie” story, I loved writing a fish-out-of-water story, and the corporate intrigue was really fun. I just selected elements I was excited to write about.
In that process, as you alluded to earlier, how much freedom did you feel to, other than the external factors like the setting and time period, stray from the original material as needed to tell this story? We stray it from quite a bit. There’s a lot of invention. But I think the core energy of their relationship, and him discovering somebody who is from a different place and class, but actually has something to teach him; and the ever-present, he’s overlooking her external lack of qualifications to be in that world to see into her heart. It has a Beauty and the Beast element to it, this story — she’s the first person to see past his defenses, as well, and I think that’s what has made it such a staple romantic fantasy.
Definitely want to talk a bit more about Ramón Pérez’s work here — one of the best in the biz, without hyperbole — and getting this big of a story from him is neat to see, as is him doing a grounded story like this after a few years of superhero work at Marvel. When we started talking about it, we had a lot of the same references, visually, in terms of classic illustration art. A bunch of the pictures I showed him, he already had and had seen, which was interesting.
Ramon loves the ladies. [Laughs] I think doing something romantic and, on the face of it, more female-driven, really appealed to him. He really brings that — he brings a little bit of a male gaze to a female gaze story, which I think makes it sexy. [...]
Now that you’ve got your first graphic novel under your belt, do you find yourself bit by the bug? Are you planning on doing more? Definitely. I’m already cooking some stuff up. It’s very satisfying for someone who works in a process where I need 150 artisans to make anything — to make a TV show or a movie, you need 150, 200 collaborators. Working so closely with Ramón and the intimacy and the directness of that really appealed. The 13-year-old in me who read and loved Jane Eyre is thrilled that a book came out of it. Something you can hold in your hand like that really is a very satisfying feeling.
We discussed in the beginning of this interview about how Jane was previously being developed simultaneously as a film — is there any activity on that front? Right now, the rights have lapsed back to us. We’re thinking about what we might do with it, but haven’t made any definite decisions about that yet. (Albert Ching)

The Buffalo News reviews The Glass Town Game by by Catherynne  M. Valente.

This wondrous novel from acclaimed author Catherynne Valente was inspired by the Brontë siblings' childhood writings about an imaginary world they invented called Glass Town and spent endless hours playing in the parsonage at Haworth. As the novel begins, 12-year-old Charlotte and 10-year-old Emily – still mourning the deaths of their two older sisters - are dreading "The Beastliest Day," the return to boarding school. The girls are en route, escorted by 11-year-old Branwell and eight-year-old Anne, when they find themselves whisked off to Glass Town, where  their toy soldiers have come to life. Wellington commands an army of limeskin soldiers; Napoleon commands an army of frogs and rides a fire-breathing ceramic rooster. "Don’t worry, Em," Charlotte tells her sister. "We're only in an insane, upside-down world populated by our toys, our stories and Napoleon riding a giant chicken on fire. Nothing so bad as School." This is a world where words have real power, where the encyclopedia is "the son of the Gods, sent to redeem us from disorder" - and where a magic potion can bring the dead back to life. Valente offers dazzling wordplay, cleverly weaving in amusing references to the Brontës' life and work (there's a Wildfell Ball, the girls go by false names Currer and Ellis Bell, Charlotte muses that Mary Shelley might have named her wicked scientist "Edward or Mason or Rochester or something") that will resonate only with readers already familiar with the Brontës' work. Emily, painted silver to disguise her status as a "breather," gets her first kiss from young Lord Byron. Jane Austen shows up as a killjoy although there is this: "You must try to hear one of Janey's storyables while you're here; they're better than any of the desserts." The young Brontës the author presents seem to hew closely to the persons they were: Charlotte commanding, Emily the smartest, Branwell jealous of his sisters' talents, Anne, the quiet deep one. As the characters argue about what makes a good story, the problems with happy endings, the choices that must be made, the children's struggles to find courage in this imaginary world reflect the hard lessons they have learned in the real world they left behind.  This lovely book will appeal to children 10 and up and to Brontë fans of any age. (Jean Westmoore)

Fosters features the Jane Eyre. The Musical performances currently on stage in Portsmouth, NH.

“She’s an icon both in literature and in women’s history,” said Tess Jonas, a New York-based actress with Boston and New Hampshire roots who plays the lead role. [...]
The Seacoast Rep’s production is directed by Danielle Howard, responsible for several hit musicals at the theater, including last year’s “Little Women” and “Titanic,” and “South Pacific” in 2015. She said audiences for Jane Eyre will experience a story told with sweeping music and dramatic choreography.
“If there are people out there who don’t know Jane Eyre, I think they’ll find this a new telling. Theater does things that film can’t, and I think it can bring things to life in a different way,” Howard said.
“They’ll hear a really passionate, moving score,” she said. “There are a lot of new faces in the cast, and some glorious voices.” [...]
[Choreographer C. Robin Marcotte] Marcott is a specialist in “physical theater,” which Howard said focuses on using the movement to convey the inner character. She said the story takes place on “an emotional landscape.”
“The movement is always coming out of the character and emotion of the story. It’s evocative of the inner world of Jane,” Howard said.
Jonas said she was struck by the power of Brontë’s words, which are reflected in the song lyrics. “Songs in musicals are generally heightened emotional moments, and the fact that the lyrics in this particular musical are directly from the novel ‘Jane Eyre’ underscores how heightened these emotional moments are. Those words become even more important and more weighted because they are Charlotte Brontë’s words originally.”
Jonas, who played the socially-climbing Alice Beane in “Titanic,” said she dove eagerly into researching Jane Eyre’s character and Brontë, and it gave her a new take on feminism. “I really like that part of the process. It is important to understand the historical and literary significance of this particular work,” Jonas said. “I remember being like, is Jane Eyre really that feminist? And I read it, and it really is. ”
“She’s very austere, and she’s very stern and she’s watchful and very quiet. Her strength comes from her watchfulness and her humor, but also she’s constantly thinking. Within the context of this time period, she actively decides how her life is going to go,” she said.

NPR reviews the book The River Bank by Kij Johnson, a sequel to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

Fan fiction — fiction written by fans of a given intellectual property, set in that property's world — is frequently disparaged as self-indulgent, amateurish, immature and derivative. To call someone's original work "fan fiction" is, likewise, to denigrate it. This is a shame, because I've read fiercely beautiful, accomplished, insightful work that is absolutely fan fiction — work which, were it acknowledged as fan fiction more regularly, could go a long way towards rehabilitating the practice of imagining oneself into one's favorite worlds, foregrounding their backgrounds, and asking of them "what if?" Wide Sargasso Sea is fan fiction about Jane Eyre; Clueless is fan fiction about Emma — and Kij Johnson's The River Bank is fan fiction about Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. (Amal El-Mohtar)

The Irish Times discusses the auction of several items connected to W.B. Yeats wondering whether these items should belong to the nation.

The value of preserving writers’ material contexts is well understood. Think of Emory University’s Seamus Heaney collection whose recent show used the poet’s desk as its centrepiece; or Proust’s preserved cork bedroom in the Musée de Carnavalet in Paris, the Hemingway home in Key West, the objects in Haworth’s atmospheric Brontë parsonage or Manchester’s Gaskell house. (John McAuliffe)

Brand South Africa has an overview of South African literature.

Olive Schreiner’s novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883) is generally considered to be the founding text of South African literature. Schreiner was born on a mission station and worked as a governess on isolated Karoo farms, an experience that informed the novel.
The novel draws on the post-romantic sensibility of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and is still a key text in the formation of a truly South African voice. However, it has been criticised for its silence with regard to the black African presence in South Africa. (Mary Alexander)

Variety features the film Mother! starring Jennifer Lawrence.

When asked if she thought the film was a feminist story, Lawrence answered in the affirmative. “To me, this is incredibly feminist in the way that these Victorian, patriarchal novels show these loving, amazing husbands that are very slowly and delicately taking away their wives’ dignity,” said Lawrence, who was reading “Jane Eyre” during the shoot. “To be a feminist movie, we don’t have to all be women and all be aggressive. Before we knew what feminism was, people were writing these novels that showed women’s strength being drained from them.” (Ramin Setoodeh)

While The Hollywood Reporter reviews the film Una questione privata.

Their mutual passion for Wuthering Heights and American music, notably Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the record player, makes him hope they can become a couple, but his better-looking best friend Giorgio (Lorenzo Richelmy, who played Marco Polo in the TV series) seems to be equally high in her affections. (Deborah Young)

Writergurlny posts about Edgar Linton. Book Fifty reviews The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell. On Facebook, The Brontë Parsonage Museum commemorates the anniversary of the death of Maria Brontë (née Branwell) on a day like today in 1821.