Several years ago, I decided to give Jane Eyre a try. It was an effort. When Jane finally made her way to Thornfield Hall, I set the book down. There seemed to be nothing in it for an adult. I neither liked or disliked Jane, but the landscape oppressed me. Charlotte Brontë’s Yorkshire seemed no closer to London than New South Wales. The writing was hard going. 

The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered wals and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young: I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, nursed by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future period. 

This sort of thing threatened to stretch into some other indefinite future period. Also, I thought that I knew what was going to happen next. So, midway through Chapter XI, I stopped, with uncharacteristic deliberateness, reading. 

Now that I’ve seen Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation, though, I’m tempted to go back and give the book another go. I shall now at least have a face for Jane. Mia Wasikowska. who hails from a town not far from New South Wales and who looks just about old enough to be reading Jane Eyre for the first time — she is in fact 21 — has discovered somewhere a trunk full of old actress tricks, and she blazes through the movie with a yearning self-possession that Olivia de Havilland might be proud of. Of course she trails none of the musky glamour of the old stars; she’s actually credible as a plain girl who has been kept down by circumstances. But her self-respect is never priggish or off-putting, and you don’t doubt for an instant that Rochester would fall in love with her. It is frightening to watch a slip of a girl exercise such formidable powers of magnetism. 

The screenplay, by Moira Buffini, is intelligently laid out. It begins with Jane’s flight across the moors and her refuge with the Rivers. This has the effect of turning down the melodrama a few notches. A poor girl huddles in the elements, her plight awful enough but yet unknown. When bits of this episode are reprised in their rightful narrative order, we understand what Jane is running from, but we’ve already seen what she’s going to find at the end of her ordeal. Jane’s childhood miseries — retailed with a welcome briskness and acted with a surprising power by Amelia Clarkson — are thus enfolded in the adult Jane’s drama. (And how adult Jane is! There is a wonderful moment in a garden when Jane steals a kiss from Rochester with the sudden darting of her neck, while at the same time her eyes acknowledge her right to it. Never has a romantic heroine been so free of gauzy uncertainty, or better known her own mind.) 

Ms Wasikowska shines the more brightly for the concern shown by the filmmakers to recall that hers in the leading part. Charlotte Brontë wrote no Edward Rochester. We are not invited to share in Jane’s mooning attraction to her employer, who in Michael Fassbender’s spirited but light-handed performance is not a monument of brooding ferocity. Mr Fassbender’s hero is brittle and caustic but not suffocating; as a younger and more attractive man, moreover, than a close reading of the novel would seem to allow, he presents Jane with less to feel sorry for and more to be drawn to. Judi Dench does her part as well, flustering about sweetly as if she had spent her entire career in supporting roles. Her reward is to recite the ostler’s narration at the end, recounting the catastrophe that frees Rochester from his grim marriage. 

I always thought that “Reader, I married him” was the last line of the book. It’s the first line of the concluding chapter, is what it is. It’s a thrilling line, pushing up as it does against the very limit of the pretense that a real Jane Eyre has been setting forth her life’s story; never has a happy ending been more succinctly encapsulated. It’s a pity that Ms Buffini couldn’t see her way to incorporating it in her screenplay. In every serious regard, however, this Jane Eyre is one of the finest adaptations of a literary classic that I’ve ever seen, and I hope that I’m not the only one that it sends back to the original.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.