Plot Twists in Windswept Moors

Shemazing! lists plot twists in literature:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

A classic for a reason, I have to imagine Jane Eyre’s twist shocked audiences in the eighteenth century just as much as it shocks modern readers. A twist that inspired an entire spin off novel (read ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys afterwards), it will keep you guessing up to the end.

Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard.

But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again? And what are the dark presences lurking around Thornfield Hall? (Lulu McKenna)

New Statesman interviews the writer Sarah Moss:

Who are your heroes?

In childhood, Jane Eyre. I’ve outgrown heroes – we’re all flawed and fallen – but I admire clever women who face down misogyny and racism in public.

The Guardian reviews her memoir, My Good Bright Wolf:

But there’s a troubling layer that sits over the narrative, harming it. Moss frequently stops the flow to apologise for her privilege. (...)  Even in the otherwise excellent critical analysis of her childhood literature, she can’t stop herself. Jane Eyre sitting “cross-legged, like a Turk” gets a parenthetical “hello again, feminist racism”. As an Iranian I want to scream: we do sit cross-legged, and so do our neighbours the Turks. I’m sitting cross-legged now. We like it. Tell your story! (Dina Nayeri)

We love that. Not every mention of another culture has to be read in a colonial, cultural-appropriation-guilty-woke lense. You can acknowledge its post-colonial substrate and still don't need to apologize for how society was a couple of centuries ago.

Financial Times discusses two exhibitions that will take place at the end of September about Paula Rego's work:

That series’ importance is acknowledged in two major forthcoming exhibitions: Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya at Bath’s Holburne Museum and Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, a Hayward Gallery touring show being launched at Nottingham’s Djanogly Gallery. (...)

The Hayward Gallery, by contrast, places the Nursery Rhymes with Rego’s print series Peter Pan (1992) and Jane Eyre (2002). Here, Rego is visual interpreter of a particularly British phenomenon: Victorian and Edwardian obsessions with the culture of childhood. (...)

Her “Jane Eyre”, which followed, is a feminist reading told through harsh expressive gestures within a chiaroscuro Gothic milieu. Rochester, ridiculed, swaggers like a Hollywood cad, seeking sly sexual encounters with Bertha the insane woman in the attic, who is drawn from the same model Rego used for Jane — twinning madness with (socially unacceptable) female desire. Thus Rego nuances the happy ending: “Come to Me”, Jane’s response to Rochester’s eerie cry summoning her back, portrays her in anguished indecision, against Thornfield Hall’s flames. “She does go to him,” Rego says, “but it’s not such a good deal, I put her doubting.”

A colour painting of a woman in a late 19th-century long dark  blue dress against a backdrop of blood red

With the child Jane, Rego supremely empathises: as a crumpled ragdoll, terrified, thrown into the haunted red room; as a tiny puppet, rigid with fear, held up for the monster school torturer Mr Brocklehurst’s inspection. Best of all, in the erotic “Loving Bewick”, Jane opens her mouth to the beak of an enormous pelican who nourishes her literally, as Bewick’s History of British Birds consoled her imaginatively in the hostile Reed household. “Each picture told a story,” Brontë wrote. Later, to paint becomes for Jane “one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known”.

In the sumptuous “Getting Ready for the Ball”, Rego satirises Thornfield Hall’s aristocratic ungainly girls in red and gold velvet — the inspiration is Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”. But in the corner she places “little Jane . . . making pictures so that she can get her own back on these posh people”. What a self-portrait: the artist as rebel storyteller, original, authentic and ruthless. (Jackie Wullschläger)

Love Property lists "the most mysterious houses around the world":

Norton Conyers, Yorkshire, UK

Charlotte Brontë visited Norton Conyers numerous times in 1839, some eight years before her most famous novel Jane Eyre was published. Brontë had heard stories about a 'mad woman' confined to the building’s eerie attic, more likely epileptic or pregnant with an illegitimate child. 

The tragic tale is said to have inspired her infamous character, Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s first wife, who has been locked away. The house contained an undiscovered mystery until the early 2000s.

Hidden staircase leading to fabled attic

In 2004, a narrow stairway near Mr Rochester’s bedroom and leading to the attic was discovered within the thickness of the panelled wall, which further linked the historic property to the fictional Thornfield Hall in the novel.

The stairs have been repaired, though there is no public access to the attic. “It’s such a sad room,” said Lady Graham to British newspaper, The Guardian. She and her husband Sir James Graham, whose ancestors bought Norton Conyers in 1624, are current owners of the house. (Daniel Coughlin)

Seattle Magazine interviews the writer Christina Hwang Dudley:

Samantha Pak: If you were to do another Jane Austen retelling, which story would you go for?

CHD: Probably Persuasion. I’ve also thought about Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë). It’s been done less and I love Jane Eyre as well.

The Times and the best hotels in Yorkshire:

A source of great literary inspiration, favoured for filming locations and master of arguably Britain’s best pint — Yorkshire has many fans and there’s much to recommend it. This is the home of Theakston brewery and Betty’s tea rooms. It’s where the Brontë sisters wrote their novels, while living on the windswept moors. (Lorna Parkes)