Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.

Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from 4 Janes by Marian Yee, which releases on June 30th 2026.

Jane Eyre is a missionary’s wife.

A bookseller in Vietnam.

A time traveler.

A hero in a modern gothic tale.

What if Jane’s story didn’t end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?

In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she’s Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…

Each thread tells Jane’s story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn’t get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it. (Elise Dumpleton)

Chapter One

Marseilles, France, 1851

Jane Eyre is dead.

The plain gold band on my finger is the sign of her demise.

I am Jane Rivers now. Or, more accurately, Mrs. St. John Rivers.

Mrs. St. John Rivers. I try on the name like a pair of new calfskin gloves. The syllables glide along my tongue smoothly enough once I get over the little bump at the beginning. Then I study the small hands lying calmly in my lap. They are encased in soft, pale-yellow leather, and like my new name, they seem to belong to somebody else.

I have been a missionary’s wife for barely a week.

I wait at one of the fashionable coffeehouses on La Canebière, surrounded by wonders: gilding, mirrors, paintings, tapestries, and a large revolving clock in the center that gives the time on three continents. They bring together the charms of this port city as if in miniature. I look about, my senses heightened: The drink served here is not to my liking, but I savor its rich, smoky aroma.

For these moments at least, I sit alone. St. John is at the purser’s office, seeing to our cabins and passage. We arrived at this bustling French port last night, and were deposited, along with the English mail that had departed on the London train with us, in a damp heap along the quay. This followed a Channel crossing that was in itself a trial. I spent most of that time huffing short, shallow breaths and moaning miserably into my handkerchief while my stomach roiled. St. John held my hand dutifully while I battled nausea, but I could not entirely dismiss a sense that his patience was forced, that he hid his disapprobation at finding me such a poor traveler before we had even ventured beyond Europe.

No matter. Now all is near ready. We have said our goodbyes. I wait with our few belongings, only the baggage we will need on the crossing, hardly enough for a journey of nearly two months. Fortunately, our present needs are few, and the rest of our trunks will be sent along. In our haste to depart we left them to Diana and Mary—his sisters, my cousins—to assemble, to cord, to nail the cards that would direct them to our final destination. They will chase us from port to port until we are reunited—only six weeks from now!—in India. At that point, we will open them with a sense of wonder that such luxuries and extravagances exist; we will puzzle what to do with calfskin gloves and fur muffs in the blazing heat of a sun-drowned continent.

As I wait, I return to the book I laid aside and open it to the point where a folded sheet of paper divides the unread pages from the finished ones. The paper is nothing more, or less, than the very letter that started me off on this journey, having arrived for Mary two months ago from a friend in ⸺shire. As Mary shared its contents with Diana and me, one set of ears heard, with distant concern and casual curiosity, the misfortune of others that did not touch upon itself, while another set heard the end of the world.

It was news of a devastating fire at Thornfield: The entire estate had been burned to the ground, and no one there had survived the destruction. No one. God forgive me, there was only one who mattered in that moment, only one whose death meant my own. I could barely bring myself to whisper his name. Edward. I recall Mary’s voice droning on, then pausing; Diana’s sharp oh dear. Was it for the news or at my fainting dead away? I was told afterward that I had collapsed in a wordless heap.

I have no recollection of those hours, those days (five, they told me) immediately following, when I drifted in a haze of blankness. Feeling fled me; I was disembodied, perceiving only strange scraps. A slight stirring in the current of air let into the sickroom. Fragments of hushed speech floating in and out of range. Gradually, shadowy forms constellated into people coming in and going out, though one body remained the longest, hovering near my orbit like a constant moon. As the boundaries of my vision drew in, the blurred edges slowly sharpened into clear features: twin orbs of blue that floated, then settled upon a finely boned visage.

“Jane.” The eyes probed my face. “You know me.”

“Yes, St. John.”

He heaved a sigh. “You have been gone a long time.”

“I have been right here,” I said, bewildered. “In this bed. I have not moved.” Indeed, I felt stiff all over, for I had been practicing the pose of a corpse.

“Stay,” he gently implored.

“I am right here,” I repeated.

“Nay, you were drifting again, Jane. To that place you have been these past five days, five years, it seemed. Sorrow’s shores. Come back to the living, Jane.”

And then I remembered.

   

The Haunting of a Brontë

Miss Darcy Investigates

by Amelia Blackwell

Macmillan

ISBN: 9781035054145

June 2026

Georgina Darcy travels through time to save the Brontës from a killer in The Haunting of a Brontë, a wildly amusing cosy crime adventure from Amelia Blackwell, author of A Crime Through Time.

Pemberley, 1799.

Like many a Regency heroine, Georgiana Darcy is pining for the man she loves. The difference being, her lover is in 1995, while she has been left behind in 1799 waiting for the mysterious device that transports her through time to re-activate.

Thorp Green Hall, 1845.

But when her Motorola pager finally comes back to life, Georgiana finds herself transported only forty-six years into the future to gloomy Thorp Green Hall, where Branwell and Anne Brontë are the tutor and governess.

Georgiana assumes she will soon come across a murder to investigate, but even before she discovers the cook’s father dead on a chopping block, she finds herself entangled in a web of passion, deception, and danger centred on the eccentric Branwell Brontë.

Branwell is engaged in a perilous affair with the mistress of the house and experiences a series of sinister omens and terrifying encounters. As Georgiana uncovers the mysteries of Thorp Green Hall, and learns more about the origins of her time-travelling capabilities, she must find the killer and save the Brontë siblings from an evil plot to prevent a most terrible loss to readers everywhere . . .

The second entertaining entry in the Miss Darcy Investigates series of timeslip mysteries. Start here, or go back to the beginning with A Crime Through Time.

   

Saturday, June 27

Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY

14.00 h  Wuthering Heights 1939

1939. 104 m. William Wyler. Park Circus. US. English. Rated NR.

Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven, and Geraldine Fitzgerald star in William Wyler’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Emily Bronte’s tale of passion, hatred, and revenge.

Hailed as a “timeless masterpiece,” Wuthering Heights is the story of a tortured love affair between Heathcliff and Cathy, her escape by marriage to the wealthy Edgar and Heathcliff’s savage retaliation upon the woman he loves. Olivier portrays Heathcliff the jilted lover who bides his time before extracting his vicious vengeance; Oberon is Cathy, object of Heathcliff’s affections; Niven is Edgar, who steals Cathy from Heathcliff; and Fitzgerald is Isabella, Edgar’s sister who Heathcliff marries in an attempt to gain a measure of revenge.

Wyler’s film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

Join us after the film for a Q&A with Professor Deborah Lutz, author of This Dark Night – Emily Brontë, A Life, the new acclaimed biography of Emily Brontë. Copies of the book will be on sale courtesy of The Village Bookstore.

   

When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, several critics used the word “strange.” As the New York Times’ B.D. McClay points out, one review simply began, “This is a strange book,” while others described the novel as “strangely original” and “a strange, inartistic story.”

“Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it,” another observed. “We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.”

The novel’s first edition was divided into two volumes, released alongside a third volume containing Agnes Grey, a novel by Emily’s younger sister, Anne. Each one was covered with green-grey cloth, with arabesques and floral patterns decorating the cover. The siblings published under the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton Bell.

Of the estimated 250 copies printed, only a few complete copies survive with their full-cloth binding intact. On June 30, Christie’s will sell the first edition’s three volumes in one lot at an auction in London, where the collection is expected to go for between $540,000 and $800,000.

“The last time one appeared at auction was in 1908, so no collector alive has had a chance to acquire one,” Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, tells the Art Newspaper’s Maev Kennedy. “Private and public collectors all over the world will want this book.”

When Emily and Anne saw the printed editions, they realized that the books contained a numbllings of “Agnes Grey” (“Anges Grey”) and three misspellings of “Heights” (“Heer of errors. Some pages were marked with the wrong numbers, while others contained incorrect or missing punctuation. Perhaps the most egregious mistakes were six misspeghts”).

In letters written in the weeks after publication, their sister Charlotte complained that the volumes were full of “errors of the press” that she described as “mortifying.” Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte had published her own debut novel, Jane Eyre, earlier the same year, and it had been an immediate success. She was deeply protective of her younger sisters, and she was disappointed that their publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, had allowed so many mistakes to make it to press. “If Mr. Newby always does business in this way,” she wrote, “few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.”

Newby hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Jane Eyre, but Wuthering Heights, which explored darker themes, didn’t enjoy the same level of success. Readers were “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” according to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. North American Review criticized the novel, writing that “Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.”

Wuthering Heights follows Catherine Earnshaw, a young girl who lives with her family in northern England, and Heathcliff, an orphan who grows up alongside them. The pair forms an inextricable bond that breeds misery across two generations. The story is set against the dramatic, untamed moors of Yorkshire—which is also where the Brontë siblings grew up. [...]

Emily didn’t live to see her novel become so beloved, admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. “The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries,” Woolf wrote in 1925. “She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.” The novel has inspired art, music and film, in addition to literature.

“It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere and its psychological intensity,” Wiltshire tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless.

Few surviving first-edition copies still have their original binding. Wiltshire has only been able to track down five others: Three are in the university libraries of Leeds, Oxford and Princeton universities, according to a statement, while the fourth is housed at the British Library in London. The fifth, which contains Charlotte’s annotations, is missing several pages, and it sold for $86,500 in 2009. (Ellen Wexler)