Jane Eyre Laid Bare

The Bookseller reports that another erotic retelling of Jane Eyre is on its way:

Pan Macmillan is adding a further twist to the erotica trend, acquiring a racy re-telling of Charlotte Bronte's classic, Jane Eyre.
Publishing director Wayne Brookes bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Vivienne Schuster and Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown in the debut novel, Jane Eyre Laid Bare, by Eve Sinclair.
Macmillan will publish as an e-book in August 2012 with a mass-market paperback to follow "shortly afterwards".
The author described it as "an erotic version of my favourite classic", adding: "I think that readers through the ages have appreciated the smouldering sexual chemistry between Jane and Rochester and I have changed very little of Brontë's original to retell the timeless story of a young girl falling for an unattainable older man and getting out of her depth in a sensual world she cannot control."
Brookes said: "When I received the opening chapters of this novel I instantly knew it was something that Macmillan had to publish. The idea is genius; Jane Eyre Laid Bare is a fan fiction re-write of Charlotte Brontë's much-loved novel, giving the original an exciting and enticing erotic make-over.
"The original is full of sexual tension and Eve Sinclair has cleverly explored and exposed the sensual underbelly of a highly-regarded classic." (Charlotte Williams)

More information in the Telegraph:

Speaking about her book, Ms Sinclair said that she has built on the dark repressed eroticism already contained in Brontë's original.
“I think that readers through the ages have appreciated the smouldering sexual chemistry between Jane and Rochester.
“I have changed very little of Brontë's original to retell the timeless story of a young girl falling for an unattainable older man and getting out of her depth in a sensual world she cannot control," said Ms Sinclair.
Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Keighley, West Yorkshire, welcomed the book.
She said: “I am quite OK about it. Anything that brings the Brontë [sisters] into the limelight has to be a good thing. It is quite a passionate book anyway."
Ms Dinsdale added that the romance in the book is quite subtle by modern literary standards. (James Hall)

And The Huffington Post goes on to look at similar retellings, with the unavoidable reference to Fifty Shades of Grey.

In all fairness, we feel the need to add that this won't be the first erotic retelling of the novel: Janet Mullany already did it in her Reader, I Married Him (2010) while J.L. Niemann's Rochester (2011) contained erotic scenes. Not to mention the S/M exploitation approach of Disciplining Jane. And those are probably not the first ones either.

Coincidentally enough, the Wall Street Journal discusses fan fiction and its many 'genres', such as

"Crackfic" refers to off-the-wall fan writing that pushes the boundaries of fictional worlds to their logical limits and beyond, reimagining "Jane Eyre" with cat protagonists, for example. (Alexandra Alter)

There's a very interesting post on the Brontë Parsonage Blog on a panel discussion at the recent AGM on why Heathcliff only has one name. The Brontë Weather Project shows pictures of her impressive archive. Worming Through Books posts about Jane Eyre. 411 Mania's Nether Regions reviews Wuthering Heights 1939.