Jane Eyre, book vs movie, is really a question about one voice. Charlotte Brontë’s novel is narrated by Jane herself, who addresses “reader” directly, argues with us and tells us what to think of her. Every film and television version has to decide what to do with that voice: hand it to a narrator, cut it, or trust an actress’s face to carry it. Here is how the five best-known adaptations, from 1943 to 2011, answered that question, and what each one kept, cut and changed.
The novel: an autobiography with a reader in the room
Jane Eyre was published on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co., under the pen name “Currer Bell”. Its subtitle was An Autobiography, and Brontë means it. Jane stages her own story, and at the start of chapter 11 she says so outright:
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), chapter 11
She is director as well as heroine. That is the hardest thing to film, because a camera shows everyone’s point of view equally. The other hard thing is the shape of the book: Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, and then Ferndean. A two-hour film cannot give all five their weight, so each version chooses which to squeeze.
1943: Fontaine, Welles and a borrowed narrator
The Twentieth Century-Fox film was directed by Robert Stevenson and written by Aldous Huxley, Stevenson and John Houseman, with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester, according to the AFI Catalog. Made in 1943, it opened in America in February 1944. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, Margaret O’Brien plays Adèle, and the AFI’s cast list includes a young Elizabeth Taylor as Helen. Welles had already played Rochester on the radio.
Its answer to the voice problem is the obvious one. The AFI notes that Fontaine speaks offscreen narration throughout as Jane. The film also invents a character: a kindly “Dr. Rivers”, played by John Sutton, who “does not appear in Brontë’s book”. He borrows the Rivers surname and gives Jane a friend at Lowood. St John’s household goes entirely: after the failed wedding, this Jane flees back to Gateshead and makes peace with her dying aunt. A 1942 New York Times piece cited by the AFI reported that Huxley meant Bertha to be a character “discussed rather than seen”, so the menace would be more effective.
Mick LaSalle, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, put the casting problem bluntly: Fontaine is “a pretty actress whom everyone in the film pretends is plain for the sake of the story.”
1983: the BBC’s eleven half-hours
The BBC serial ran in eleven parts between 9 October and 18 December 1983. It was directed by Julian Amyes, produced by Barry Letts and adapted by Alexander Baron, with Zelah Clarke as Jane and Timothy Dalton as Rochester, according to the BBC history site What Was Pebble Mill? Deene Park in Northamptonshire stood in for Thornfield.
The format is the advantage. Reviewing the 2011 film, Variety‘s Justin Chang noted that condensing Brontë’s episodic story is “a task more easily managed by five-hour-plus adaptations such as the beloved 1983 miniseries.” The Pebble Mill cast list includes St John Rivers and both his sisters, so the Moor House section that films throw away survives. Long formats also have room for the book’s oddest episode, Rochester disguised as an old gipsy fortune-teller. Here is the moment she gives herself away:
Where was I? Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream still? The old woman’s voice had changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter 19
1996: Zeffirelli’s plain Jane
Franco Zeffirelli’s film was written by Hugh Whitemore and Zeffirelli, released by Miramax and runs 112 minutes, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane, William Hurt as Rochester and Anna Paquin as the young Jane, according to Godfrey Cheshire’s Variety review. Cheshire praised Gainsbourg’s “exemplary performance” and found the film’s look “somewhat staid and conventional”. He also observed that the script “sensibly condenses” Jane’s childhood and school years. The film also compresses most of the book’s last quarter, from the flight to the new relations and the new job.
What it gets right is the face. LaSalle wrote that Gainsbourg “makes a gawky, rather homely Jane — and true to Bronte, she doesn’t blossom once she’s in love.” That honours a novel in which looks are discussed frankly, and in both directions:
“You examine me, Miss Eyre,” said he: “do you think me handsome?”
I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I was aware—”No, sir.”
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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter 14
2006: the BBC’s four-parter, and a list of complaints answered
The 2006 version was made for BBC One in four parts and shown in America on Masterpiece Theatre in two parts in January 2007. Its PBS press release credits Susanna White as director, Sandy Welch as writer and Diederick Santer as producer, with Ruth Wilson as Jane and Toby Stephens as Rochester.
That release quotes a set of complaints about earlier adaptations from Donna Marie Nudd, writing in the 2001 Norton Critical Edition. “Why is the fire in Rochester’s bedroom almost invariably put out by Rochester alone?” she asked, and “Why hasn’t there been a female director?” White’s version was the answer to the second. The first matters because in the book, Jane is the rescuer:
Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter 15
Welch’s script makes its own changes. It shortens Lowood and the St John section, tells Jane’s flight as a brief flashback, and has Rochester hire a real gipsy instead of dressing up as one. That turns Brontë’s strangest scene, a man in drag reading the future of the woman he loves, into an ordinary party game.
2011: Fukunaga starts on the moors
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film, written by Moira Buffini, stars Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, with Jamie Bell, Judi Dench and Sally Hawkins, and runs 115 minutes, according to Ella Taylor’s NPR review. Taylor counted it as “the 18th adaptation of the tale”, not counting nine teleplays. It was released on 11 March 2011 in the US and in September in Britain, and Michael O’Connor’s costumes were nominated for an Academy Award.
Buffini’s solution to the structure problem is the boldest of the five. The film opens with Jane fleeing Thornfield and being taken in by St John Rivers and his sisters, and tells her childhood in flashback. Chang wrote in Variety that where earlier films “relied on voiceover as a substitute for Jane’s first-person narration,” Fukunaga avoids it. The gamble is that Jane becomes someone we watch, not someone who talks to us. Chang’s complaint was that the film ends up observing “its heroine’s actions without penetrating her consciousness.”
Opening at Moor House also puts St John in the foreground, and his proposal, which films often drop, carries real weight:
I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter 34
Book vs movie vs series: the main differences
| Element | Novel (1847) | 1943 film | 1983 BBC | 1996 film | 2006 BBC | 2011 film |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jane / Rochester | A plain governess; a Rochester she does not find handsome | Joan Fontaine / Orson Welles | Zelah Clarke / Timothy Dalton | Charlotte Gainsbourg / William Hurt | Ruth Wilson / Toby Stephens | Mia Wasikowska / Michael Fassbender |
| Length | 38 chapters | 95-97 minutes (AFI) | 11 half-hour episodes | 112 minutes | 4 episodes | 115 minutes |
| Jane’s voice | First person, addresses the reader | Fontaine’s voiceover | Five-plus hours of room (Variety) | Carried by Gainsbourg | Added scenes of passion | No voiceover; image-led |
| Childhood | Ten chapters | Kept; invented Dr. Rivers | Not covered by my sources | Condensed | Reduced | Told in flashback |
| Moor House and St John | Long section; proposal | Dropped; Jane goes back to Gateshead | Kept | Compressed | Shortened | Opens the film |
| Director | – | Robert Stevenson | Julian Amyes | Franco Zeffirelli | Susanna White | Cary Joji Fukunaga |
What none of them can quite film
The novel’s climax is a sound with no source. Jane, about to accept St John, hears her name across the moors:
“Jane! Jane! Jane!”—nothing more.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter 35
Every adaptation has to stage it, and staging makes it literal. On the page it is one line with no explanation, which is why it is so frightening. The 2006 version keeps the voice and adds one more image: it ends on the whole family gathered in the garden to have their portrait painted, with St John painted in at the side because he is away on his mission.
For more of Charlotte’s own lines, see the Brontë sisters’ best lines. For the same comparison done with Austen, see Pride and Prejudice: the book vs the film adaptations. And for the Brontë novel that became a pop song, see Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. One last fact from the AFI file: in February 1944, Monogram withdrew its own 1934 Jane Eyre from circulation. It said reissuing that film while Fox’s new version was in cinemas would be “unethical”.
Sources
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, Project Gutenberg #1260
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (publication date and publisher)
- AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Jane Eyre (1944)
- Mick LaSalle, “Zeffirelli’s Plain Take on ‘Jane'”, San Francisco Chronicle, 8 November 1996
- What Was Pebble Mill?: Jane Eyre 1983
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (1943 film) (plot)
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (1983 TV serial)
- Godfrey Cheshire, “Jane Eyre”, Variety, 8 April 1996
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (1996 film)
- PBS / WGBH press release: Masterpiece Theatre, Jane Eyre (2007)
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (2006 TV series)
- Ella Taylor, “A New ‘Jane Eyre,’ With Many A Vintage Pleasure”, NPR, 11 March 2011
- Justin Chang, “Jane Eyre”, Variety, 3 March 2011
- Wikipedia: Jane Eyre (2011 film)