Jane Eyre was a gold digger

I love it when (clever) writers take a classic and rework it a bit. Give it a different slant or change the era or tell the tale from a different character’s point of view. Thus, we have Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, reworked into the cult sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet, with Robbie the robot as Ariel. There have been countless retellings and versions of Dickens’, A Christmas Carol, including a rather good book by Gregory Maquire called, Lost, in which the main character’s family claims an ancestor on whom Ebenezer Scrooge was based.

My own family boasts of a court jester as an ancestor about whom no one has yet written. Maybe that will have to be me. But I digress.

Currently on Broadway and on tour throughout the country is a musical based on the Good Witch Glenda and the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz called, Wicked. This take is also based on a book by Gregory Maquire. Now to the classic, Jane Eyre, the only one of the books any Bronte wrote that I could actually get through. There has been a very well received book telling the story from Mr. Rochester’s first and not-quite-yet-mad first wife’s point of view called Wide Sargasso Sea. The producer, Val Lewton, one of my favorite’s, gave us the horror movie, I Walked with a Zombie, based on Jane Eyre, since Lewton needed a story and, with a minimal budget, had to adapt something already in the public domain. The author, Jasper Fforde’s, book, The Eyre Affair, is a hilarious tale of a world where people can enter their favorite books as long as they don’t break the law by changing anything in the story. Someone begins their nefarious doings by messing about with a character in Dickens who is so minor only scholars notice the change and escalating to kidnaping Jane Eyre right out of her book.

So I’m waiting for the book that asks of Jane Eyre, what did she know and when did she know it? I’m waiting for the book that paints dear Jane as a scheming little gold digger who set her cap for Mr. Rochester. I’m waiting for the author who wonders if Jane just happened to leave something flammable in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Maybe that will have to be me.