There’s Bertha’s first attempt to set the castle ablaze, Edward Rochester’s declaration of love to Jane after spurning a glamorous, gold-digger, and his confession the alter that he already has a wife, after a last-minute “I object!” His plea to Jane to live with him as his wife, her refusal, her departure.

Yes, gentle and kindly - this she writes before finding out that the man she has fallen in love with has stashed his mentally ill wife in the attic - Bertha Antoinetta Mason is the proverbial madwoman in the attic. I was to learn that this was indeed true, and that beneath the harsh mask he assumed lay a tortured soul, fine, gentle, and kindly.” “What sort of man was this master of Thornfield - so proud, sardonic, and harsh? Instinctively I felt that his malignant mood had its source in some cruel cross of fate. The best part of the film is seeing actual passages from the book appear on the screen, such as this one: The casting is excellent, with Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre - a character likely very much based on Charlotte Brontë herself - and Orson Welles as the peculiar, brooding, yet ultimately redeemable Mr. There are the attendant bursts of overly dramatic background music typical of that era’s films. The film is dark and moody, even gloomy, with black clouds always swirling, in keeping with the gothic mood of the story.

Peggy Ann Garner as young Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns She’s uncredited in the cast, but her breakthrough role would come soon after as the star of National Velvet(1944). Helen is played by a young and lovely Elizabeth Taylor. Maria was likely the inspiration, if one can call it that, for the character of Helen Burns, one of Jane’s fellow students who becomes a dear friend. The experience proved fatal for one of the Brontë sisters, Maria, who became gravely ill and died. Nearly a quarter of the film covers young Jane’s torturous experience at the Lowood School, based on the actual place that Charlotte and her sisters attended in Yorkshire. The film was released at the end of 1943 in Britain, and had its American release of February, 1944. How can Charlotte Brontë’s masterwork be crammed into a time frame of just over an hour and a half? This feat of compression was accomplished by Hollywood for the 1943 film Jane Eyre.

Jane eyre movie