AN ARTICULATE ADAPTATION ‘Jane Eyre’ is deeply faithful to Brontë’s reserved tone of wistful reflection
Elizabeth Williamson’s new stage version of “Jane Eyre” is a good read. The play opens with its heroine writing at her desk and directly addressing the audience as “Dear Reader.” We’re “Dear Reader” at the very end of the play, too, of course, when Jane utters one of the most famous closing lines of any novel in English literature.
If you don’t know that famous last line, it’s kind of a spoiler, which means you have a lot to take in. You’ll be carried through this spooky, sultry Gothic romance as smoothly as if you were reading it.
For those who have read Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel or seen some of its many other stage, film or TV adaptations, there’s little to argue about.
Williamson — who not only scripted this “Jane Eyre” but directs it — is profoundly respectful of the source material. Yes, she streamlines the plot by rendering Jane’s childhood mostly in short flashbacks rather than the 10 or so chapters it takes up in the book. Yes, that opening “Dear Reader” is not the way the book begins; Brontë’s Jane doesn’t get that familiar for several chapters. Yes, Jane’s once-scandalous opinion that “women feel just as men feel” is put right up at the top of the play, while in the novel it isn’t expressed until chapter 12.
But Williamson is deeply faithful to Brontë’s reserved tone of wistful reflection, pushing the sense of a mature Jane looking past on her youthful adventures.
This is all less of a leap than Hartford Stage took when it premiered an adaptation of a different literary classic, Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” in 2018. For that one, playwright Douglas McGrath created a new narrative device and had to downplay some of the book’s