The visual palette was truer to my vision of Austen than could perhaps be expected in the world of Bridgerton and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, even if there were a few more stray strands of Elinor’s hair (Daisy Edgar-Jones) than suited her character. (Felice Basbøll)

Autrice d’It Ends with Us, de Regretting You et de Reminders of Him, tous trois adaptés à l’écran, la prolifique Colleen Hoover aime traiter de sujets graves sous le couvert de la romance ou du thriller psychologique. C’est dans ce second camp que se situe Verity, thriller domestique où l’on retrouve de (très) faibles échos de Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë, de Rebecca, de Daphné du Maurier, et de Gone Girl, de Gillian Flynn. (Manon Dumais) (Translation)

at a flat on Chelsea Embankment in the centre of the capital, where more than 400 of the books the performer owned are on display at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Or, nearly; the library, assembled by the artist Alex Margo Arden, comprises volumes of the same age, edition and condition as Winehouse’s ones, though none of them were actually ever in her possession. Arden calls them “parallel objects”. [...]

Most of the volumes are out-of-print paperbacks with glossy, candy bright covers. They have little resale value so Arden struggled to track them down online. There are themes: books about Hollywood (biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Dean Martin, Alfred Hitchcock); about music (Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley, Peggy Lee); about gangsters (Ronnie Kray); and a few literary choices: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. (Evan Moffitt)

And as for favourite books that have helped shape her as publisher and would feature on her desert island reading list?

“The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Going To Meet The Man, by James Baldwin, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,” she adds. (Dan Carrier)

   

When Emerald Fennell released her cartoonish take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she explained its squishy, S&M silliness as being an adolescent fever dream. Yet, if teenage rebellion were the aim, that other Brontë novel of 1847 might have made a more likely candidate. I refer, of course, to sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre: that manual for how a young woman might live – and love – independent of social norms.

This is why news that the text has been made compulsory for Chinese 14 and 15-year-olds comes as something of a surprise. The Communist Party made clear that this is to steer “the innocent, budding stage of first love”. So Brontë’s classic is now a conformist dating manual.

One wonders whether anyone in President Xi’s regime has read the novel. From the moment Jane fights back against her tyrannical male cousin, toeing the party line is emphatically not our heroine’s thing.

Instead, Brontë’s tale is one of constant rebellion against the conventions of love, work, society – whatever worldly authority is imposed. Contemporary critics linked the narrative to the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Jane was not only a proto-feminist, but a red under the chaise longue. However, she would be just as likely to rebel against the Five-star Red Flag as she would the domestic autocrat.

This, after all, is a heroine who proclaims: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart! … I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!”

The man she addresses is rich and powerful; her employer has cross-dressed to flirt with her, while concealing his wife in the loft. It’s complicated, as contemporary parlance goes. Yet, what is never complicated – or compromised – is Jane’s autonomy.

The first and foremost lesson our roving rebel gives us is to love – or rather respect – oneself. In her life’s great crisis, beset by the thought “Who in the world cares for you?”, comes the “indomitable” cry: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” A woman who has been haunted by beggary chooses vagrancy rather than terms she cannot accept.

Still, Jane determines that she will be loved body, brain and soul – or not at all. When offered the passionless union proposed by priggish St. John Rivers, she refuses to countenance such emotional deprivation. Rivers is what Love Island contestants refer to as “good on paper”, but intolerable in the sack.

Instead, Jane’s devotions are to, first, another female (the doomed Helen Burns); second, a man who married for money, abandoned a vulnerable wife, shagged his way around Europe, attempted bigamy, and was rendered maimed and vulnerable.

Behold, another love lesson: the right person, may be she/he that society deems wrong. Cathy baulks at Heathcliff. Jane embraces a castrated Byronic hero: mastering her master in a domesticity in which they can at last be equals.

When Jane declares: “Reader, I married him,” it is a triumph of radical self-assertion. Chinese educationalists may believe they’re signing up for Victorian values. However, in Brontë’s moral bruiser, they’re getting a counter-cultural heroine who would have no truck with Marxist-Leninist axioms or Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”.

And how glorious this will prove: another generation of freedom fighters becoming Eyreheads.

Where “Wuthering Heights” left me angry, this Netflix Original has restored my faith in adapting classic literature. (Kate Sánchez)

How could any contemporary adaptation of East of Eden not linger on Cathy? After decades of perspective-shifting literary retellings like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Mists of Avalon and the current trend of feminist Greek myths, Cathy is an enigma begging for some traumatic backstory to staple her flaws together. (Kathryn VanArendonk)