The Story in Brief
Jane Eyre is an orphan who survives a brutal charity school to become governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with the brooding, morally complicated Edward Rochester. Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel is narrated in Jane's first person — direct, passionate, and morally certain in a way that was radical for its time. Cary Joji Fukunaga's 2011 film, with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, is the finest screen adaptation of the novel yet made. It is still a reduction of a work that lives in its voice.
Key Differences
Jane's voice
Brontë's Jane addresses the reader directly — "Reader, I married him" is the most famous instance of a sustained intimacy that runs throughout the novel. Jane's narration is the experience: her specific moral intelligence, her refusal to be patronised, her way of seeing the world with absolute clarity. Wasikowska's performance is excellent and communicates much of this through expression and bearing. She cannot communicate the sentences.
Michael Fassbender's Rochester
Fassbender plays Rochester with a barely contained volatility that captures the character's essential quality — the darkness that Jane sees and loves in full knowledge of what it is. This is one of the great casting decisions in literary adaptation. The novel's Rochester is rendered entirely through Jane's perception, which gives him a complexity the film slightly simplifies by showing him directly.
Fukunaga's visual language
The film opens in medias res — Jane fleeing across the moors — before moving back to tell the story. Fukunaga's cinematography gives Thornfield Hall a Gothic weight that matches the novel's atmosphere. The Yorkshire landscape becomes a moral landscape in both versions, though the novel's language and the film's images achieve this through entirely different means.
The attic and Bertha Mason
The novel gives Bertha Mason — Rochester's imprisoned first wife — more presence and more ambiguity. She is a figure of terror and also of kinship with Jane; their situations as women are not entirely different. The film handles Bertha efficiently but cannot sustain the novel's more disturbing parallels.
The novel's length
Brontë's novel is substantial and covers Jane's full childhood — the abuse at Gateshead, the years at Lowood, the slow development of her character before Thornfield. The film compresses the early sections to reach Thornfield faster, which is cinematically necessary and means you meet Jane as a formed person rather than watching her form.
Should You Read First?
Yes — Jane's voice is the novel and no film can render it. Read first and Wasikowska's performance becomes the finest possible visual gloss on what Brontë put on the page. Watch first and you'll know the story without the experience that makes the story matter.
Brontë wrote one of the great first-person novels in English literature — Jane's voice is its own argument, its own world. Fukunaga made the finest adaptation yet and it remains considerably less than the novel. Read Jane Eyre. See the film for Fassbender. The book is the thing.