Remember when you couldn’t go to a multiplex without bumping into a Jane Austen adaptation? The mid-’90s were a veritable explosion of corseted dresses and witty courtships, from faithful period pieces like 1995′s Sense and Sensibility to 1996′s Emma to updated valley-girl translations like Clueless (1995). In 1999, a Canadian company tackled Austen’s more obscure Mansfield Park, TV viewers tuned in to countless BBC miniseries versions of her work, and the fad lasted until about 2005, when Keira Knightley starred in Pride & Prejudice.

But recently, USA Today notices, Austen’s fashionable fairy tales have begun to fall out of vogue. And it looks like this decade’s 19th-century literary It Girls will be none other than the Brontë sisters: Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre will both hit the big screen next year and a biopic is also in development. So, what gives? Why have the Brontës subsumed Austen in the pop-culture imagination? … Read More