My wife, Barbara, is a real Charlotte Brontë aficionado—and Jane Austin, and. . . .   She can practically do a "sing-along" with the dialogue of a number of these books.

In our library of videotapes we have almost every version of Jane Eyre committed to film, even as far back as Joan Fontaine (a bit long in the tooth for the role) and Orson Welles (really rather good as Rochester). That one also has Peggy-Ann Garner as the young Jane and a very young Elizabeth Taylor as her friend Helen. CLICKY

We watched Sunday evening, and are awaiting the second episode coming up. Very good.

But by far the best of the film versions of Jane Eyre is the 1983 miniseries starring Zelah Clarke as Jane and Timothy Dalton (yes, that Timothy Dalton) as Rochester. Zelah Clarke is "plain and Quakerish" as described in the synopsis, and very convincing with her quiet, strong portrayal of Jane. Timothy Dalton (whom I had seen in a few movies before this, but hadn't really noticed that much until this) is a powerful, dark, brooding, and tragic Rochester. Both of them were perfect for the roles.

We have the VHS version CLICKY, but I think it has recently been released on DVD. It ran several episodes on "Masterpiece Theatre," something like a total of thirteen hours as I recall.

Barbara's take on this new version is that it captures the general spirit of the story, the actors are good, and the performances are good. But the dialogue and several details of the story have been dinked with a lot (e.g. in the book and in the Clarke-Dalton version, the old gypsy fortune teller was Rochester himself, all tricked up, not some woman he hired), and we're a bit apprehensive about seeing how they've handled Jane's encounter with the Rev. Rivers and his family. Definitely a Reader's Digest Condensed version of the story.

If you're really into Jane Eyre, see if you can rent the Clarke-Dalton version.

Don Firth