Challenging the Classic Ballet Heroine

Broadway World announces the upcoming performances of Cathy Marston's Jane Eyre ballet in Chicago:

The Joffrey Ballet opens its 2019-20 season with the Chicago premiere of Cathy Marston's enthralling adaptation of the classic novel, Jane Eyre, presented at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive, in 10 performances only, October 16-27, 2019. The 2019-20 season marks the Joffrey's final season at the Auditorium Theatre. The Company moves to the Lyric Opera House with the start of the 2020-2021 season.
Presented in partnership with American Ballet Theatre and set to music by Philip Feeney, Marston's celebrated adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel combines theater and dance to tell the coming-of-age story of one of literature's most iconic characters.

This production of Jane Eyre challenges the idea of a classic ballet heroine. After a difficult upbringing, Jane becomes the Governess for the mysterious Mr. Rochester, discovering the struggles of society's expectations. With stirring choreography and a captivating Victorian design, this avant-garde ballet shows that love can conquer any obstacle.

"Cathy is breaking glass ceilings in the ballet world, and with Jane Eyre she creates an unconventional heroine whose trials and passions are beautifully articulated through choreography," said Ashley Wheater, The Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director of the Joffrey. "We are thrilled to bring her adaptation of Jane Eyre to Chicago for the first time following its successful North American debut with American Ballet Theatre this past June."

The Paris Review discusses Elizabeth Hardwick's views on the Brontës:

 Hardwick’s essay on the Brontë sisters is invigorating, still contemporary in its analysis of what it takes for women to own their talent without hurting the feelings of the men in their lives. She is the kind of critic who thinks it important to tell us that their reverend father was a failed writer and that the Brontë sisters kept news of their literary success secret from their brother. Why?
They did not wish to rub Branwell’s nose in his own failure as an artist. (...)
Perhaps it takes an American writer to shake some of the dust off the Brontë heritage industry, to gaze without sentimentality, but with full admiration, at how women such as the Brontës prevailed, despite the patriarchal arrangements that beat them down, crushed their hopes for independence, held them back, shortened their lives. Hardwick, born in Kentucky, a long way from the wild Yorkshire moors as reimagined by Emily Brontë, writes, “Wuthering Heights has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for.”
Hardwick does account for it though: she gives us a new view of this strangely brilliant novel, and she is not interested in the bonnets or the length of the Brontë sisters’ skirts. “They are very serious, wounded, longing women, conscious of all the romance of literature and of their own fragility and suffering. They were serious about the threatening character of real life.”
Yet as she points out, if they were quiet and repressed in life, “their readers were immediately aware of a disturbing undercurrent of intense sexual fantasy. Loneliness and melancholy seemed to alternate in their feelings with an unusual energy and ambition.”
When it comes to Charlotte Brontë, Hardwick cuts to the heart of the matter, and she cuts deep. She shocks with the truth: it runs like blood through her every sentence.
How to live without love, without security? Hardly any other Victorian woman had thought as much about this as Charlotte Brontë. The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories—mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium—are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at breaking point, frantic to find any way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practice of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.
If Hardwick elevates Emily as the sister who is the literary genius, she ends with this thought on all their lives: “We are astonished by what they would not endure.” (Deborah Levy)

The screenwriter Katie Silberman is interviewed on MTV News:

The Booksmart screenwriter is calling me from her apartment in Santa Monica, where she is staring at a Jane Eyre poster she stole from Amy's room, just above the fictional teen feminist's desk. It now hangs above her own desk in an homage to a film — and an experience — that she calls truly special. (Crystal Bell)

Reader's Digest lists famous sister rivalries. Apparently, the Brontës fall into this category:

There were three Brontë sisters, but many know only about Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre and Emily, author of Wuthering Heights. The lesser-known Anne may have been a better storyteller, but something derailed her career, and some believe it was Charlotte. “Charlotte had always underestimated and patronized” Anne according to Penguin Publishing Group, and Charlotte may have taken the idea for Jane Eyre from Anne’s Agnes Grey. Not that Anne was entirely blameless; it’s been said she used her book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to critique both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Clearly, these three understood that there’s no one who can get under your skin quite like a sister. (Lauren Cahn)

Vogue quotes the author Plum Sykes as saying

 A childhood spent in a medieval farmhouse, combined with an addiction to such novels as Wuthering Heights, Brideshead Revisited, and Rebecca, had given me the warped view that only old dwellings had atmosphere.

College Magazine recalls how

In ninth grade, I tried to read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights but failed miserably and never looked back. (Katie Grotewiel)

The Recorder  or Reuters, also post about the recent Most Wuthering Heights Day. Sveriges Radio's Klassikern reviews Jane Eye 1944.