Jane Eyre BBC 2, 8.30pm.

Directed by Cary J Fukanaga with a screenplay by Moira Buffini this is an elegant adaptation of Chatlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  It begins with Jane’s (Mia Wasikwaska) flight  away from Thrornfield Hall across wide sky and desolate moors,  which is more difficult than you imagine when respectable women of that era were expected to wear a whale-bone phone booth nipped at the waist until they couldn’t breath properly.  It skates over Jane having to gnaw on rat bones and the local peasantry giving her funny looks because she tries to trade a hat pin for a piece of bread and even worse asks about gainful employment.  She is found flopping  under a bush by the respectable Mr St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) and brought home to live in sedate comfort with his two sisters. By one of these  great narrative coincidences in which  virtue is rewarded and vice punished, they happen to be distantly related. Jane gains the position of a lowly school teacher, but wins the equivalent of the lottery, with her father’s brother conveniently dying in Grenada, and having worked the black population to death on sugar planations, leaves her the sole heir to £20 000. This god-given bounty allows St. John Rivers to smile for the first time in his adult life. It also elevates Jane to a respectable social position. She can ape the aristocratic gentry (without the land) and employ someone to beat the lazy servants. But Rivers has a little scheme of his own going. He suggests Jane go with him to China as a clergyman’s wife, his wife, as they are both plain simple people and the Chinese are in need of Christianity in much the same way as more modern nations were in need of Rubic cubes. Jane declines his offer. She ups the ante and offers to go as his beloved sister which meant, of course, he got her money, but no sex. In those Victorian times the mention of sex was legally taboo and where all those children came from was always a mystery.  But Jane being a virtuous women splits the profits of slavery three ways with her beloved new-found family and follows the voice she hears. That voice is, of course, Mr Rocherster’s (Michael Fassbender).  His punishment for wanting extramaritial sex with Jane and even worse wanting to marry a governess, thereby committing bigamy and showing bad taste, was to be blinded. This is not a bad thing, his housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax (Judi Dench) explains to Jane as his faithful dog was saved and his mad wife jumped from the roof.  Everyone is very happy about this because now they can marry and –whisper it—have sex, but because Mr Rochester is now blind and won’t know what he’s getting, the dog can be dressed in several ladies’ outgarments and used as a stand in whilst Jane goes to China. This was my idea and not Mrs Fairfax’s or Charlotte Bronte’s.  The term plain-Jane I imagine comes from Jane Eyre. If Mia Wasikwaska is a plain Jane then I’m a Chinaman. The images of Lowood school and the saintly figure of Mary Burns (Freya Parks)  were particularly well done.  Dickens in Dombey and Son captured some of the bullying and brutality of paying schools of that time, but the master and mistress is for me Bronte.  Well worth watching and reading this classic.