Dancing through 183,858 words

The Yorkshire Post reviews Northern Ballet's Jane Eyre.

There are 183,858 words in the novel Jane Eyre (I didn’t count them, a Brontë superfan did the hard work). There isn’t one in Northern Ballet’s version, but every nuanced detail of the original is there. [...]
Thankfully, Northern Ballet has done the decent thing and brought it back. Marston’s master-stroke is in finding a fresh way to tell a familiar story and one that unashamedly puts the female characters centre stage. Rochester is there too, brought to life by a brooding Javier Torres, but this is definitely and defiantly Jane’s story, danced with beautiful strength and vulnerability by Dreda Blow. More flimsy adaptations might have demoted Rochester’s insane wife to a bit part, but not here. Victoria Sibson’s Bertha is wild, highly sexualised and a reminder that Jane Eyre is not a simple love story. While Marston packs an emotional punch, there is light and shade here, with Pippa Moore’s desperate-to-please housekeeper Mrs Fairfax and Rachael Gillespie’s flighty young Adele responsible for creating much of the former. Much praise too for Patrick Kinmonth’s set design which is a thing of beauty in its own right. Designed as a series of foils, the moors, painted in broad brush strokes, capture Brontë country perfectly. Jane Eyre has been reimagined a thousand times before, but maybe never quite so perfectly as this production by Northern Ballet. See it while you can. (Sarah Freeman)

The Australian reviews a couple of recent Brontë releases: Sarah Shoemaker's Mr Rochester and Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney's A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf.

In Mr Rochester, debut American novelist Sarah Shoemaker gives us Rochester’s history and voice. His lonely childhood after his mother’s death is nothing like Jane’s: ‘‘though I lacked for love, I was never actually mistreated’’. His butterfly-spearing brother is their frosty father’s favourite and Edward is sent to school in the unpromisingly named Black Hill. There he makes friends and learns about Jam­aica, where his father and brother are pursuing business prospects.
Working in the counting house of a worsted mill, he meets young women, creepily accosting a young employee, reflecting later that it was wrong to ‘‘take advantage of a girl whose living depends” on him. Later, he goes on a “date” with a Miss Kent. Since “dating” wasn’t a thing until the 1880s and Jane Eyre was published in 1847, this feels a bit odd, as does the ensuing intimacy­ when Miss Kent curls up in his lap during their unchaperoned picnic.
On travelling to Jamaica and encountering the dazzling, libidinous and scantily clad Bertha Mason, surrounded by an aphrodisiacal haze of ‘‘distance and mystery’’, he marries in haste. Mr Rochester’s readers probably know Jane Eyre, so the novel’s energy lies in Shoemaker filling in the history of Edward’s circumstances.
Jane is often uncertain about Rochester’s thoughts. As Michigan-based Shoemaker has it, she isn’t missing much, as his thinking is fairly pedestrian. He muses that ‘‘as with many marriages­ … a person could manage more or less with a sham’’, asking, ‘‘what sort of man would I be if I did not keep my vows?’’ Encountering Jane (a ‘‘ray of light’’), he tends towards sentimentality, noting: ‘‘As her eyes studied mine, I felt myself falling into a dream.’’
This doesn’t always mesh with Jane’s words, which are as Brontë wrote them: quiet, bold and thrumming with restrained ardour. Woolf ­suggests that whatever we might imagine — the drawing room, the moor, the ‘‘general blending of snow and fire’’ — ‘‘what is that all except Jane Eyre?’’. ‘‘Think of Rochester,’’ she writes, ‘‘and we have to think of Jane Eyre.’’ Mr Rochester is good fun for Eyre-ites, but likely to send us back to Brontë and to Jane, which is no bad thing. [...]
In their study of the friendships of four women writers — Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf — English academics and writers Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney portray each in the context­ of ‘‘hidden alliances that were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring, but, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows’’. [...]
The Brontë sisters’ lot is similarly awful. Charlotte endures the deaths of her sisters Maria and Elizabeth at boarding school, going on to study at a second school with a view to earning a living as a schoolmistress. Her triang­ular friendship with schoolmates Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor — the latter ‘‘too pretty to be alive’’, according to their teacher (though consumption appears to have endangered more lives) — is often prickly, sometimes passionate.
As a governess, shortsighted Charlotte is ‘‘starved almost to breaking point by her job’s restrictions on her writing and thinking time’’. When she eventually publishes Jane Eyre, pol­itically minded Mary writes in reproach­: ‘‘Has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities?’’ [...]
The vivifying spark of affinity — fictive or biographical, expanding into erotic­ism or dim­inished by competition, flickering or flaring — lights up both books. ‘‘It is my spirit that addresses your spirit,’’ Jane tells Rochester, evoking a radical equality, harmony and friendship that underpins their legendary love, central to the novel’s endurance and exhilaration. (Felicity Plunkett)

Playground (Spain) recommends Jane Eyre as one of 150 books to read after International Women's Day.

89. Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brönte [sic]. Porque retrata una protagonista independiente, que no soporta la injusticia y se enfrenta a las desigualdades de género y de clase en una sociedad opresora como la Inglaterra victoriana, de la que sale victoriosa sin renunciar a sus principios. (Translation)

A columnist from The Mount Airy News disagrees with the concept of young adults' literature.

It boggles my mind that back in the 60s, when we as children were far more sheltered than kids of today, we were allowed to read anything as soon as we had the skill to sound out the words, and kids today, who watch porn before puberty, require special age-appropriate literature.
I chose “Jane Eyre” that first week out, mainly because it was the fattest book I could find. I also chose it the second, third and fourth weeks because it took me a solid month to read that sucker. My name took up about half of the little card in the back of the book that I signed again each week when I renewed the book. That was embarrassing. Now that libraries are computerized, kids don’t have to endure that kind of shame, not that they would, since they’re all reading titles directed especially to their non-fully-formed ‘young adult’ brains.
When I finally finished “Jane Eyre” a month later, I had enjoyed it enough to pick the book next to it on the shelf “Wuthering Heights,” whose author shared a last name. Turns out they were sisters, but I didn’t know that at the time. I did not enjoy it nearly as much, it seemed kind of silly. Later on, I saw a film version in high school and liked it enough to re-read the book. Liked it much better after the hormones had kickeb in. God alone knows what those Brontë sisters were up to out there on the moors to get their material. (Bill Colvard)

In Questemberg  (France):

La Fabrique de l'image - Photographie au CinémaDu 10/03/2018 au 11/03/2018
Carte Blanche au realisaeur et chef operateur Guillaume Kozakiewiez
SAMEDI 10 MARS A 17H15
Les hauts de Hurlevent2011. GB. 2h08. Drame, romance de Andrea Arnold (Fish tank, American honey) avec Kaya  Scodelario, James Howson… VOSTF