I received an email tonight about a forthcoming book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey, in which a young woman determined to overcome her gothically unfortunate childhood, accepts a position as an au pair on Scotland's remote Orkney Islands. Barnes & Noble tells me that "in the spirit of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, this modern reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre spins a classic novel into something wonderfully new."
This reminds me of other retellings. Who doesn't love West Side Story as an updated version of Romeo and Juliet? One of the first I encountered is the Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Ryes. And there have been a flurry of them since then: The Hours for Mrs. Darroway; and a whole batch for Little Women. But certainly this isn't new: in college I spent a whole semester examining the various versions of the Don Juan legend.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment