Mia Wasikowska may hail from sunny Canberra but the Australian actress is happiest in colder climes.

That’s an advantage considering she spent the first two days of the shoot for film Jane Eyre trudging through torrential rain in the Derbyshire moors.

“It was so cold, I think I got hypothermia on the second day of shooting but I’m a winter creature, so I liked it,” says a smiling Wasikowska.

Following a critically acclaimed performance in the title role of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, the 20-year-old is riding high.

Now, she turns her hand to English literature’s most enduring female protagonist, Jane Eyre, a girl who the author Charlotte Bronte saw as “a heroine as plain and small as myself”.

There have so far been 18 feature films and nine TV adaptations of Bronte’s novel, so you may wonder if it’s necessary to roll out another version, but Wasikowska believes there’s room for one more.

“When you look at films from years ago, beautiful as those films are, everything’s so much bigger and theatrical. I was excited about bringing her back in a context that was more grounded,” she says, adding that fate may have played a hand in her winning the role.

“I started reading the book in 2009. I was halfway through the novel when I emailed my agent and asked if there was a project planned, because I thought it would be an incredible role to play,” she explains.

The immediate response was negative but just two months later, her agent emailed over a script.

“I met with Cary [Fukunaga, the director] and found we shared similar ideas,” says Wasikowska.

This is a darker, more gothic adaptation of the 19th century tale, in which a teenage girl arrives to work as a governess at isolated Thornfield Hall, and meets the brooding Edward Rochester (Fish Tank’s Michael Fassbender).

“What I love about her character is, despite all the hardship she faces throughout her life, she has this innate sense of self-respect and an incredible ability to do what’s right by herself as an individual,” says Wasikowska.

She believes it’s the reader’s empathy for Jane’s predicament that lies behind the novel’s enduring appeal.

“If you take away the costumes and that period setting, it’s a young girl trying to find love and a connection in a very dislocated world,” she says.

For her preparation, Wasikowska collected a number of visual references “to form an image of Jane in my head”.