ABSTRACT
The Victorian playwrights who first adapted Jane Eyre were fascinated by the economies of the novel, and especially with the working woman's just inheritance. Their plays extracted the thematic binary opposition of status/dignity, shifted the dominant setting from the upstairs parlors to the below stairs workrooms, and reconstructed Bronte's plot with a more radical emphasis on socio-economic disparities. To accomplish this revision, the playwrights spent just as much time dramatizing the lives of the servants as they did imagining the inner life of the heroine. John Courtney's Jane Eyre, or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor and John Brougham's Jane Eyre raise the novel's submerged narrative of class discontent to the highly visible surface of melodrama. Written for predominantly working class theatres in London and New York, Courtney and Brougham's scripts dared to make significant omissions, additions, and corrections to this remarkable new novel by the unknown 'Currer Bell'.
