EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal that the BBC has joined Working Title’s new TV adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre, which will be led by The White Lotus and Sex Education star Aimee Lou Wood.

As we revealed earlier this year, Emmy nominee Wood is attached to play the indomitable heroine in the buzzy adaptation, which is being produced by UK powerhouse Working Title and is penned by Miriam Battye, a WGA Award winner for her work on Succession.

We understand the BBC is now attached to develop the project and become its broadcaster-financier. (Andreas Wiseman)

Andrew McMillan: If you’re having a fragile day while midway through a tour, how do you take care of yourself?

Kate Ceberano: It’s very infantilising, but you’ve got to feed yourself and put yourself to a little afternoon nap. You’re just going to think me completely ridiculous; I don’t know why, but I find listening to old English novels, like Emily Brontë in an audiobook, and it’s just the weirdest thing. I find it so soothing to go to a drawing room in 1870 or 1880, and know that there’s nothing out the window (in the story) except for a few lowing cows, and one spare lamb, you know? (laughs) And she’s just sitting out of that window, wondering what Darcy’s doing that afternoon. I find that has a sort of a therapeutic kind of “om” (effect) for me.

So when I’m driving from one venue to the next, sometimes it’s up to 4½ hours’ drive, and I know I’ve got to recover, put it back up on soundcheck, and then the gig in the evening … God help me if I don’t go and escape to Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice. It’s definitely comforting to me to cuddle into that space. I’m like a kid: put the kid on the couch, put on something quiet on the television, take everything away and make sure the stomach’s fed, give her a little “nanna nap” – and then she’s good to go.

Tras muchos años de abandono, la ruinosa mansión de Wildfell Hall es habitada de nuevo por una misteriosa mujer y su hijo de corta edad. La nueva inquilina, una viuda, no tarda, con su carácter retraído y poco sociable, sus opiniones a menudo radicales y su extraña, triste belleza, en atraer las sospechas de la vecindad, y a la vez la rendida admiración de un joven e impetuoso agricultor. Pero la mujer tiene, en efecto, un pasado... más terrible y tortuoso si cabe de lo que la peor de las murmuraciones es capaz de adivinar. La inquilina de Wildfell Hall (1848), segunda y última novela de Anne Brontë, une al bello relato de un amor prohibido e invernal el retrato intensísimo del fracaso de un matrimonio degradado por el abuso y la violencia. (Translation)

Desde su aparición en 2020, la novela ha sido calificada como una adaptación de los elementos del gótico romántico al contexto mexicano. Sin embargo, Silvia Moreno-García, en una entrevista para el podcast “Books Connect Us”, de Penguin Random House, revela que esto no es del todo cierto.

“En realidad no estaba pensando en el gótico romántico como el de ‘Cumbres borrascosas’ o ‘Jane Eyre’, sino más bien en el gótico de terror. Es decir, títulos como ‘Drácula’, ‘El monje’ o los relatos de Horacio Quiroga”, dice la autora que relata que la historia surgió de un viaje a Real de Monte en Hidalgo, donde hay minas que fueron explotadas primero por españoles y luego por ingleses. (Kevin Aragón) (Translation)

The Brontë Sisters UK publishes a video about this 1850 painting by Abraham Solomon, Portrait of Charlotte Brontë. An intriguing portrait, hardly of the real Charlotte but curious, anyway. The latest post by AnneBrontë.org marks two Brontë-adjacent clergy anniversaries: Sutcliffe Sowden, who married Arthur and Charlotte and later died tragically in a canal, and Hammond Roberson, the fiercely anti-Luddite Dewsbury vicar known to Patrick Brontë and immortalized as Charlotte's Reverend Helstone in Shirley.

Naomi Alderman returns with a new series of the programme that examines the minds of great thinkers and discovers where their creativity came from and how they applied it to work that influences us today. She begins with Emily Brontë, whose Wuthering Heights has spawned many remakes, and asks if her reclusive nature contributed to the intensity of her writing. The Behind the Glass: A Parsonage podcast from the Brontë Museum in Haworth takes an in-depth look at items in its collection, plus social issues that would have affected the family.  (Clair Woodward)

The Brontë Parsonage is a must-visit and will help you learn more about the sisters’ lives through immersive exhibitions.

If you are up for a walk, the Brontë waterfall and bridge that was often visited by the sisters is a 45-minute walk away.

To explore more of the surrounding area, you can get a Day Rover ticket for the heritage steam train that runs along the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

For food, you might want to stop at Cobbles and Clay for either some breakfast or a hearty sandwich for lunch.

The café also serves a range of hot and cold drinks alongside plenty of homemade cakes to choose from.

If you are looking for somewhere to treat yourself, you could try the Hawthorn restaurant that offers seasonal dishes created using local ingredients. (Amy Britton)

Different eras posed different challenges. For instance, trying to represent the whole of 20th-century literature by means of 10 books felt like trying, in Emily Brontë’s words, to plant an oak tree in a flower pot (...) [The quote is from Chapter XIV and goes like this:

He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!] 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The first reviewers were horrified – “How a human being could have attempted such a book… without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,” declared one American critic – and poor Emily Brontë died at 30 within a year of publication, not knowing her only novel would come to be seen as the masterwork of Victorian fiction. 

What raises Wuthering Heights above other love stories, including Emily’s sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, is the way it conveys passion as a physical force, as irresistible as gravity and potentially as dangerous. Adaptations never do the book justice, because capturing the elemental essence of “imp of Satan” Heathcliff and his lover/possible half-sister Cathy is trickier than taming tigers.  (Jake Kerridge)

The play takes a few liberties with the historical Brontë sisters — Emily, Charlotte and Anne — who were never simultaneously at the Roe Head School for Girls. But that matters little for the purposes of the charming ghost story that Zolidis has created. Emily (Taylor Curtis) seeks to understand why her mother died young and spins a series of tales aimed at relieving her sense of loss. (For Brontë enthusiasts, there will be the added poignancy of knowing that Emily herself would live only to age 30.)

At the final dress rehearsal seen by The News-Gazette, director Emily Ritter’s production appeared to need more rehearsal time given the challenges faced in performance. Although the playwright estimates a 90-minute performance, the Twin City production adds 45 minutes to that. In comedy, less can often be more, and the trick is to know when to simplify. (Jeffrey Eric Jenkins) 

BBC Four reairs tonight  (21:40 h GMT) The Brontës Live Here: Writer's Houses with Margaret Drabble visiting the Parsonage in 1973. The influencer and writer Carolina Müller recommends Wuthering Heights in Alternativo (México). The Sunday Guardian (India) lists ficional character with powerful life lessons, including Jane Eyre.