Review: "Jane Eyre" (manga adaptation) by Charlotte Brontë, adapted by Crystal Chan and SunNeko Lee

 

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, adapted by Crystal Chan & SunNeko Lee
Published 2016 via Manga Classics
★★★

Manga Jane Eyre! This is something of a first for me: I've read Jane Eyre many times, and I've read many adaptations of Jane Eyre—including at least one graphic novel—but I've read very very very little manga, let alone a manga adaptation of my all-time favorite book.

It's a very well-done adaptation. It hews closely to the original text, making cuts to keep the length manageable but keeps the critical moments, from Jane's time in the red room to the little (and big) dramas of Lowood to Thornfield Hall to (ugh) St. John. No surprises, no "creative" interpretations, and clean and pretty illustrations.

I did struggle in places with the way Jane is drawn. In the book, she's considered very plain; in the manga adaptation, her "plainness" is really visible only in her clothing choices and hairstyle. (My s.o. suggests that her rounder face shape—relative to, say, Blanche Ingram—is meant to indicate plainness, but as far as I'm concerned it just makes Jane entirely adorable...not plain.) Similarly, Rochester is written to be kind of rough-looking, and something like twice Jane's age, but here he's basically a dashing young man. That said: I'm not sure how much could realistically be done there to keep the story true to manga's classic style as well as to Jane Eyre. (I would have loved a full-color version and was sorry to learn that full-color manga is the exception rather than the rule.)

There are a couple of other places where manga's style and Jane's style seem to clash a bit—every time adult Jane shouts and rages, basically. One of the things I've always loved about Jane as a character is how measured she is, and self-sufficient, and...that's still largely true, but with extra doses of drama and flirtation. (Mr. Rochester, though: it's a good thing that I've never been a fan of him, because here he is something of a tantrum-throwing, skeezy old guy with a good skin care routine who likes to throw his weight around. It should tell you something about how I feel about the Rochester of the original book that that's not a criticism of the manga.)

I can't say that this will mark a shift to me reading lots of manga...but I might save some of the pictures of Jane to use as fodder for my (so far futile) attempts to learn to draw more than a stick figure.