My Jane Eyre class is designed, very sensibly, to have the hard stuff in the middle so that we can ramp down to funner, easier stuff at the end of the semester (we went from reading Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea and will end with The Eyre Affair).

The last big project is to pitch an updated movie version of Jane Eyre. I sold the women in my group on a fantasy version. Our take is that when Rochester calls Jane a changeling, he's literally correct. Bronte's novel, then, is the story of the fairy Jane in England.Our movie is the story of the human Jane in Faerie.

She goes to the Lowood School for Wizards and Witches where she endures the stern tutelage of Alan Rickman, meets the Fairy Lord Rochester as he's transforming from horse to centaur to man, escapes Thornfield to the human community of Marsh End where a fellow changeling, the fanatic St. John (Paul Bettany) wants her to accompany him back to the mundane world, and then makes her way back to Ferndean to magically heal a Rochester caught in media transformare between horse and man after barely surviving the witchfire that kills Bertha (the secret source of his power).

It's all Powerpoint and Photoshop, but it's a ton of fun. And a ton of work, so that's it for now.