Different takes on Jane Eyre

Many sites in many languages are quoting from Annie Ernaux's Nobel Prize lecture.

From the time I could read, books were my companions, and reading was my natural occupation outside of school. This appetite was nurtured by a mother who, between customers, in her shop, read a great many novels, and preferred me reading rather than sewing and knitting. The high cost of books, the suspicion with which they were regarded at my religious school, made them even more desirable. Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, the tales of Grimm and Andersen, David Copperfield, Gone with the Wind, and later Les Misérables, The Grapes of Wrath, Nausea, The Stranger: chance, more than the school’s prescriptions, determined what I read.

We have a couple of reviews of the TV adaptation of the novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins. From The Guardian:

Still, the fact is that stories with Black female leads are rare in period drama. With gothic romance classics such as Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights being big influences, Collins wanted to put a Black woman centre stage. The era she chose was specifically between 1807 – the UK’s abolition of the international slave trade – and 1833, the emancipation, which gradually set all enslaved people free. “That was a good chance to put our memory of the empire on trial,” says Collins. [...]

Ultimately, though, this is a great gothic romance. “It’s a love story as dark and twisted as the murders that happen at the end,” says Collins, who happily likens it to a “juicier” Jane Eyre (“if Jane had shagged the woman in the attic … ”). Spence sums it up with Frannie’s own words to Madam: “Men write so that they can separate themselves from history – but women write to join it.” (Hollie Richardson)

From The Telegraph:

It’s more Brontë sisters than Austen, with a fiery heroine and Gothic touches. (Anita Singh)

48 Hills features costumer Vicki Mortimer, whose work appears in Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights.

“It’s absolutely a story of trauma and damage in what has happened prior to us meeting Heathcliff and what happens to him in his life in Yorkshire. You sort of observe this child and his emotional options being stripped away,” she said. “It’s got this extreme energy, and it’s Gothic in that the landscape matches the human experience—it’s bleak and unforgiving yet full of extraordinary beauty.” [...]

“Heathcliff and Cathy run out onto moors and see birds wheeling and the natural world,” she said. “You get a sense of the extraordinary freedom in contrast to dour containment in their family lives.”

The costumes were made as sustainably as possible in collaborations with people from several theaters. What the “leader” of the moors wears, for example, is all from second-hand and vintage fabric. The skirt is made from quilts, upholstery, and cushion covers found at antiques markets, and the jacket comes from a mattress cover and worn-out blanket that had belonged to Mortimer. (Emily Wilson)

The Seattle Times features composer Shruthi Rajasekar.

“Behold the Star” will present “I Am My Own,” Rajasekar’s commissioned piece that ponders the intersections of communal and individual effort. The title comes from the Brontë classic “Jane Eyre.” The text of the composition itself derives from three novels by the Brontë sisters: “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

“I return to these books because I am taken by this idea of a departure,” said the Indian American composer, who is based in Minnesota. “There are pivotal moments in the book when the characters suddenly depart. They have a streak of individualism, positioned within the Victorian-era society.”

As an individual, Rajasekar felt similarly, faced by the turbulence of everyday politics. “We seem to be at the precipice of so many crises,” she said. “There are moments where I feel like just leaving it behind, and it feels very, very exhausting. Is it possible to uplift each other, but not in a way where we are draining ourselves as individuals, but through community care?”

The symbolic weight of the choral ensemble helped to forge that conduit for Rajasekar’s message on community. Individuality is important in a choir, shared Rajasekar, but the individual voice must also blend into the greater collective. Rajasekar illuminates this sentiment at the height of the emotional climax of “I Am My Own.” In these measures, each singer is given the choice to sing at their own pitch. Some may decide to harmonize with the group, whereas others “might make the deliberate choice to go against the grain, others might also make the choice to not even participate in that,” said Rajasekar. “It’s about self-expression, while being in community.” (Ann Guo)

The New York Times guides readers in order to 'Read Your Way Through Kingston, Jamaica'.

. . . and in the metafictional bait and switch of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” by Jean Rhys. (Marlon James)

The Conversation and how Jane Eyre's plot became a bit twisted in the COVID days:

Take Jane Eyre, a novel that many readers picked up during lockdown because it was on their shelves. Suddenly, this classic seemed to be a novel about a woman locked in small rooms and living through a cholera epidemic. Many also took it up under conditions that overlapped directly with the book's scenes of homeschooling.

One respondent called Phoebe, for instance, deliberately avoided rereading Jane Eyre for these reasons. Charlotte Brontë's classic novel of loneliness and love was, in 2020, "too creepy". The story of Jane being locked up made her feel unsafe while she lived alone through lockdown in the confines of her own room. (Ben Davies and Christina Lupton)

What Nerd lists the Brontë sisters as some of the 'The 10 Most Influential Female Authors of the 19th Century'. The new French translation of Shirley is one of Figaro's books for Christmas.