osprey_archer | The Autobiography of Jane Eyre

I haven’t given up on Welcome to Sanditon, exactly, but I think the show is designed to demand multimedia interaction in a way that the Lizzie Bennet Diaries didn’t, which has sapped a lot of my interest. I still watch the videos when I remember to, but I’m not waiting for them like I did for LBD.

But in a way this is a good thing! Because otherwise I might never have remembered to check out The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, a vlog adaptation of Jane Eyre that was, as Jane confesses in an early episode, inspired by the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

This means that it almost demands comparison to LBD, which is in a way unfortunate. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre seems comparatively amateur: Jane isn’t as rehearsed and funny as Lizzie, and the camera work is often odd and shaky, because Jane is holding the camera herself and thus can’t see if she’s in frame.

But therein lies some of the charm: Jane’s down-at-the-heels operation really captures her social marginality and loneliness. In both P&P and LBD, while the Bennet family is in financially precarious position, they’re nonetheless enmeshed in local society: Lizzie has her sisters and her friends to help her with her videos. She has enough social support that when her not-quite-a-thing with Wickham falls through early in the series, she can more or less shrug it off.

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is a nobody, an orphan cast off by her next of kin, and no friends except poor dead Helen Burns. The amateurishness reflects her isolation, and I think it amplifies the sense of her loneliness: she’s reaching out, imperfectly as she can, to try to connect with the world.

That said, I suspect The Autobiography of Jane Eyre will appeal most to people who like the book and are curious to see a modern adaptation. It doesn’t have the same effortless appeal that LBD did, and I’m still not as invested in it as I was in, say, Lydia and Mary’s friendship. (But it is still only early days, after all.)

A lot depends on the depiction of Jane’s relationship with Mr. Rochester, because that will carry a lot of the emotional weight of the show. Because of Jane’s isolation, The Autobiography of Jane Eyre doesn’t have the cushion in this department that LBD did: if Rochester’s jackass tendencies are not properly balanced by his growing respect for Jane and their verbal duels/dances, there’s no Charlotte or Lydia or anyone to distract us.

Rochester showed up in the last episode - or at least his feet did - so I guess we’ll soon find out how it’s going to go...

At least we know he has interesting taste in socks.