Cousins, orphans and retellings

The Economist has an article on cousin marriage.

Throughout Western history attitudes about consanguineous marriages have varied. The Bible does not directly ban sexual relations between cousins—how else would all of mankind have descended from Adam and Eve? The Roman Catholic Church did later prohibit first cousins from marrying, though exceptions were made for a fee. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, objected to such payments, so many Protestant denominations allowed these marriages free of charge. As is clear from novels such as “Mansfield Park” and “Wuthering Heights”, the people of Georgian and Victorian England were not too squeamish about such relations. Queen Victoria was married to her first cousin, as were both Albert Einstein and Edgar Allan Poe.

Swift recommends '18 Books To Read For Those Warm And Fuzzy Feelings' and one of them is

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is the original wallowing-in-misery-for-love novel that all the rest of modern romance novels attempt to live up to- but simply cannot. Being an incredible work of literature, Wuthering Heights is a beautiful and emotionally-ripping novel that drags readers through the depths of passion and despair, and you will relish every second of it.

Since its publishing in 1847, this novel has been cherished for generations for its lingual elegance, epic love story, and irreplaceable literary characters. It is a classic that, if you have not read it yet, you should definitely put it on your booklist! (Maura Bielinski)

While The Daily Campus includes Jane Eyre on a list of 'Love, Loss and Lust'.

2: “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë 

Taught across the nation in middle and high school English classes, Jane Eyre makes the perfect book for lovers of “Beauty and the Beast.” Mr. Rochester, the brooding, mysterious and morally complex master of Thornfield Hall, falls into a deep infatuation with Jane Eyre, an orphaned young woman who gains an occupation at Thornfield Hall as a governess. With Mr. Rochester’s complex past and secretive present, and Jane’s compassionate, honest and introspective characterization, the two make for quite the interesting, but contradictory pair. Besides the pair’s romance, a central theme for the book is Jane Eyre’s illumination of feminism, independence and individuality. (Thaomy Phung)

New Left Review discusses the forthcoming novel James by Percival Everett, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 'narrated not by Huck, the young white boy runaway, but by his friend Jim, the fugitive slave with whom he takes a raft down the Mississippi'.

James’ most obvious antecedent is Jean Rhys’s terrifying and indelible Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) which takes Jane Eyre as its predecessor, and proceeds in the same dialogic spirit as Everett’s novel. ‘Do you think’, Jane demands of Mr. Rochester in Brontë’s original, with all the indignation of Coetzee’s Lucy Lurie inveighing against her father a hundred and fifty years later, ‘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!’ Security, for Brontë’s soulful and impecunious heroine, finally comes by way of a dead wife – the banished ‘madwoman in the attic’ and in Wide Sargasso Sea that silenced voice finds full expression. The implication of Rhys’s book is not that Brontë’s needed to be put right, but that hidden behind Jane’s story is the story of another woman. Wide Sargasso Sea assumes its own priority, scarcely acknowledging the presence of Jane Eyre, in a way that Snycker’s Lacuna, for example – trapped in protest against a famous work, thereby ironically reinforcing that work’s power – cannot. Both Everett and Rhys seem to recognize, to return to Elizabeth Costello’s term, the prodigality of self in the figures of Jim and Antoinette. It’s this same abundance that also allows characters within novels to become more than the sum of their parts. In other words, this extramural phenomenon – taking a character from an existing novel and writing a whole new novel for them – redounds upon the intramural qualities of literature. (Hermione Hoby)

Inside Higher Ed has an article on orphans that mentions Jane Eyre.