To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 21st

Charlotte Bronte, b. 1816.

A Circle of Quiet recommends Jane Eyre on CD read by Juliet Stevenson.

I suggest the 1983 BBC version of Jane Eyre. I’ve not really seen any other televised or movie version (not the new one), but I do like this one very much.

BronteBlog is running a contest to give away five DVD copies of the Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine movie version of Jane Eyre.

Books related to the Brontes:
The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. It’s the story of a boy and his sisters who find in the attic of their new house twelve toy soldiers that magically come alive. The soldiers turn out to have belonged to another boy, Branwell, and his sisters, and keeping them a secret becomes a challenge.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhyss. Semicolon review here. I didn’t really care for this story of Mr. Rochester’s wife, Bertha, as she descends into Caribbean madness, but you may like it. Definitely for adults.

Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte is a nice, cozy biography, just what you’d expect from a nice, cozy, Victorian gentlewoman. Perhaps it’s a bit hagiographic, but that’s a welcome change from the obligatory debunking that biographers do nowadays.

Blog Notes;
Lanier’s Books on Jane Eyre.

Dani Torres’s favorite passages from Jane Eyre.

2 thoughts on “To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 21st

  1. I watched the most recent Jane Eyre a few months ago on PBS and liked it very very much. They abbreviated her childhood but not to the detriment of the story, in my opinion. I thought all the actors were excellent and I thought the story was very well told.

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