What Could They Have Been Thinking?

What could they have been thinking, the producers of the new Jane Eyre for PBS's Masterpiece Theater (which so far — despite certain lapses, several of which are fairly egregious — is quite yummy and blessedly absent any "relevant," postmodern "inspired reinterpretation," to use The New York Times's TV reviewer Alessandra Stanley's wistfully if moronically regretful phrase)?

First, they had the unmitigated effrontery to cast as Jane an actor (Ruth Wilson) whose physiognomic resemblance to my real-life first love is so uncanny as to have caused me to do a startled double take that almost unseated me from my armchair, and which guarantees that throughout the production I'll have to work overtime to separate the character she's portraying (and portrays quite well) from the real-life person whom she so startlingly resembles.

Second, they had the unmitigated stupidity to cast as Edward Rochester an actor (Toby Stephens) who's so young-looking and matinee-idol pretty that it's difficult to believe his Edward Rochester is other than a too-rich-for-his-own-good, devil-may-care playboy only recently out of his aristocratic parents' pampered custody much less believe he's a deeply wounded man of experience and substance; a world-traveler who's gotten himself into some genuinely deep shit along the way.

Ah, but we'll persevere, for we love Jane Eyre to distraction, and if we can't have a young, strong-willed but vulnerable Joan Fontaine as Jane, and a masterful, masterfully brooding and deeply wounded Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, well, we can at least have the rich, forbidding, and frisson-inducing gothic settings which this production has so far captured most wonderfully (we've seen only Part 1 of this two-part production). As the clichéd (and mindless) sayings go, one can't have everything, and we ought to give thanks even for small favors.