'Reader, She Dances With Him'

The New York Times features Cathy Marston and her take on Jane Eyre.

With its first-person narrative and intense focus on an interior consciousness, Brontë’s novel isn’t an obvious candidate for a ballet. But Ms. Marston, 43, a British choreographer who has slowly forged a reputation for her ability to create narrative works, seems undaunted by the challenges of transmuting literary complexity into dance.
It was the strength and unpredictability of Jane’s character that attracted her, she said, adding that she was often drawn to strong women as protagonists, including Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” Cathy in “Wuthering Heights” and Queen Victoria — all characters around whom she has created ballets.
Jane, she added, “is a kind of early feminist, fighting both the world and questioning her own emotions and reactions.” [...]
Although Ms. Marston’s sources tend to be set in the past, her physical vocabulary can be contemporary and unconventional, with a considerable amount of floor work and off-balance partnering in which the women often bear their partners’s weight.
“There is a lot of counterbalancing in the partnering,” said James Whiteside, who performs the central male role of Rochester in “Jane Eyre.” “In conventional ballet, the man is often just holding the woman upright. Here we do a lot of dropping to the ground, and I make a lot of noise. I’m working on finessing that.”
Ms. Marston said she was very conscious of the way that classical ballet suggests gender roles. “A contemporary vocabulary allows us to show women differently,” she said. “You need the full range, so that women can partner and support men, in order to express what women actually feel and do. There is a long way to go there. It should give me a job for the next 20 years.” (Roslyn Sulcas)

Her (correct, in our humble opinion) vision of Jane Eyre contrasts with the opinion of writer Lauren Willig on Bookpage:

But the bit of it that really calls to me is the fleshing out of the historical record. On book tours, I’ve found the most frequent question I get (other than “How do I find an agent?”) is, “But would women in previous centuries really have [fill in blank here]?” It’s not surprising that people wonder. Like those long-ago bedtime stories I was read, the history we’re taught in school tends to be men’s history. In my old textbooks, the history of the slave trade is Wilberforce thundering in Parliament; World War II is Roosevelt chomping his cigar at Yalta. Our image of women’s reality is shaped by equal parts Jane Austen and Jane Eyre: women in a parlor, sitting in a neat line on the settee, harp practice and needlepoint. War, politics, commerce: Those were male pursuits. We’re told that women weren’t and didn’t. 

Not that she mentions settees, harp practices or needlepoint (because they don't really appear in Jane Eyre after all), but we definitely prefer Virginia Woolf's point of view in the matter:

But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop--everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of  conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman', or protesting that she was 'as good as a man'. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others. (A Room of One's Own)

According to Ruskin Bond, quoted by The Logical Indian:

“You know, all great books are really based on their characters. It is the characters that make a book last. If it’s Treasure Island, you think of Long John Silver, and you think of Heathcliff when it comes to Wuthering Heights. In fact, when you think about Oliver Twist, it’s not just the main character but so many other odd characters that make the book so loved,” Bond says. (Sumanti Sen)

Print Week (India) interviews publisher Arpita Das, who makes quite a blunder.

Your favourite five books? Impossible to do, so I shall name my five favourites from five genres I love: Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre from the classics; Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis from graphic novels; Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani from Indian languages; W G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn from non-fiction; Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian from fiction. (Leonard Fernandes)

Spoilers aplenty about the first episode of season 3 of The Handmaid's Tale on Bustle:

He's neither a bad guy nor a good guy, given everything we know about him so far. He's a little of both. What's the deal with his wife? Why is she kept hidden upstairs, living out some kind of Jane Eyre and/or Southern Gothic fantasy in the heart of New England? (Leah Marilla Thomas)

Now Toronto reviews the film Wild Nights With Emily.

There’s a throwaway joke about someone missing the point of Wuthering Heights that’s ingenious in its construction. [...]
But seriously, that Wuthering Heights joke. I’d give anything to have come up with something that sharp. (Norman Wilner)