Film adaptations and shifted perspectives

BookBub lists some recently-released books that already have movie deals. Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele is one of them.

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
“Reader, I murdered him.”
A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.
Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents — the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him — body, soul, and secrets — without revealing her own murderous past?
A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls “superstar-caliber” and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared “spectacular,” Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre.
The adaptation: Deadline reports that Chris Columbus’s 1492 Pictures, Ocean Blue Entertainment, and Prescience in association with Altus Media acquired the film rights for this thrilling retelling prior to publication. (T.A. Maclagan)

BookRiot asks readers about their 'shifted perspective novels'. Wide Sargasso Sea is used as an example of this 'genre'.

Shifted perspective novels are some of my favorite ways of re-living classic and beloved books. These are reimagined versions of our favorite stories, told from the point of view of an under-appreciated side character, or even the villain. From the stepmother in the updated Snow White retelling Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of the mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre, readers can’t get enough of these novels. (Amanda Nelson)

Writer Rebecca Solnit gives some writing tips on Lithub.

7) Facts. Always get them right. The wrong information about a bumblebee in a poem is annoying enough, but inaccuracy in nonfiction is a cardinal sin. No one will trust you if you get your facts wrong, and if you’re writing about living or recently alive people or politics you absolutely must not misrepresent. (Ask yourself this: do I like it when people lie about me?) No matter what you’re writing about, you have an obligation to get it right, for the people you’re writing about, for the readers, and for the record. It’s why I always tell students that it’s a slippery slope from the things your stepfather didn’t actually do to the weapons of mass destruction Iraq didn’t actually have. If you want to write about a stepfather who did things your stepfather didn’t, or repeat conversations you don’t actually remember with any detail, at least label your product accurately. Fiction operates under different rules but it often has facts in it too, and your credibility rests on their accuracy. (If you want to make up facts, like that Emily Brontë was nine feet tall and had wings but everyone in that Victorian era was too proper to mention it, remember to get the details about her cobbler and the kind of hat in fashion at the time right, and maybe put a little cameo at her throat seven and a half feet above the earth.)

The Baltimore Sun publishes again an article which originally appeared in the newspaper a week after rapper Tupac Shakur died 20 years ago.

His taste in music was wide and varied, ranging from LL Cool J to Peter Gabriel and Eric Clapton, Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and Don McLean's "Vincent" At 15, Shakur chose the latter song for an acting assignment. Donald Hicken, teacher and friend, found that a surprising choice. (M. Dion Thompson)

Deutschlandfunk (Germany) has a short article on Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. Salt Sweet Bitter shares some thoughts on Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff. ANZ LitLovers LitBlog has a post on Justine Picardie's novel Daphne. Finally on Facebook the Morgan Library and Museum shared a picture of Charlotte Brontë's dress from its current exhibition and added some tidbits about the history of the dress itself.