Jane Eyre is clearly in the public domain

On the opening night of Bradford UK City of Culture 2025, BBC News mentioned the Brontë family as one of Bradford's cultural claims to fame.

The Brontë sisters - Emily, Charlotte and Anne lived in Haworth, in the Bradford district.

And BBC Radio Leeds featured Bradford 2025 Executive Director Dan Bates who spoke about the year ahead for the UK City of Culture and said that, 'People forget the Brontës were Bradford'.

Westword features Grapefruit Lab's Jane/Eyre which opens next Friday January 17th at Buntport Theater, Denver.

As the country prepares for Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, Grapefruit Lab, a hybrid Denver-based performance group, faced a question that many artists are asking themselves: What does it mean to create in this moment?

“In the political climate, we had a moment of looking around and saying, ‘What are we doing as artists right now?’” recalls Julie Rada, co-creator of Jane/Eyre, Grapefruit Lab’s queer adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. “We were already working on the show, but had an existential moment about what we were doing with our art in Denver. America has major human rights issues, and our show is opening the weekend of the inauguration, so what do we have to say?"

That questioning sharpened the group’s focus and clarified the stakes of their work. "During rehearsals, we realized how important it was to tell this feminist, queer story about women claiming agency in the face of oppression while remaining joyful and fun," Rada says.

As a result, the timing of Jane/Eyre, which opens on January 17 at Denver's Buntport Theater, feels almost prophetic. First staged by Grapefruit Lab in 2018, Jane/Eyre brings Brontë’s 1847 novel into sharp, modern focus, using humor, Gothic aesthetics and live music by indie band Teacup Gorilla and musician Dameon Merkl to explore the constraints of gender, class and power.

Jane/Eyre follows its title character, an orphaned young woman, as she navigates a life shaped by societal expectations. Her story begins in an oppressive childhood and moves through her journey as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she encounters the enigmatic and deeply flawed Mr. Rochester. As their relationship unfolds, Eyre grapples with her own agency, questioning her place within a world that limits her choices as a poor, single woman.

What sets Brontë’s work apart, especially for its time, is Eyre’s unwavering defiance. She refuses to compromise her principles or autonomy, even when doing so risks her happiness or security. Jane/Eyre co-creators Rada and Miriam Suzanne leaned into the queer elements they identified in the novel.

“Jane has a lot of close relationships with other women,” Suzanne explains. “We found queerness in the text. Jane is constantly talking about how beautiful the women in her life are and how much she wants to spend her life with them. Does that mean it was intended? Who knows? But does it really matter if it was intended?"

Grapefruit Lab emphasizes these dynamics, drawing attention to moments where Jane expresses deep admiration and affection for the women in her life. The adaptation doesn’t erase Rochester’s role — his problematic, magnetic presence remains central to the story — but it broadens the lens to explore how Jane’s connections with women shape her identity. By doing so, the production reframes Jane Eyre as a story of fluid relationships, where love and intimacy take many forms.

"That's what makes it queer in the contemporary sense of the word; there's a fluidity to her relations with all the people she interacts with, from Helen Burns to Diana to Rochester," Rada says. "We're fortunate to have this language of queerness and fluidity that wasn't available then. Are these relationships experiments? How are we defining them? It's left a little open-ended even in our piece."

At the same time, the team reckons with the novel’s problematic elements, including its colonialist undertones and ableist depictions. “We don't lean into this very hard, but we recognize that the book has some issues in a way that doesn’t discard or cancel people but holds them accountable," Rada notes. "In a way, that message feels more relevant than it did before."

Teacup Gorilla and Merkl's live music play a critical role in this conversation. More than a soundtrack, the music serves as a narrative device, giving voice to Jane’s inner world and the Gothic mood of the production. "We're always interested in not limiting ourselves to a single discipline, and music is certainly evocative and capable of emotional storytelling in a way that text cannot always provide," Rada says. "The band creates a lyrical, Gothic, romantic mood."

Songs alternate between narration and first-person reflections from Jane’s perspective, amplifying the tension and depth of her journey. Teacup Gorilla’s full-length album, Jane/Eyre: No Net Ensnares Me, drops on January 10, allowing audiences to connect with the story’s emotional landscape before they see the show. The album is a watershed moment for the band, serving as its first full-length vinyl release.

“With a lot of our projects, we have this question: Is it theater or a concert?" Rada says. "You get a full album of original music played live during the show, so it is equal parts concert and theater. This feels more like a true partnership with Teacup Gorilla than our other projects that were maybe more theater-led. In this production, the two elements are not separate distinct entities but come together as the fullest expression of our artistic skills." (Read more) (Toni Tresca)

The Atlantic looks at the copyrights expiring this year and joining the public domain.

If public-domain defenders are to prevail over deep-pocketed fights to hold on to lucrative copyrights in near-perpetuity, they might have to remind the public of why copyrights expire in the first place. They could point to the many examples of derivative work that is not only genuinely creative but in fact enriches and broadens the cultural landscape. Think of the way West Side Story brought Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a bustling, diverse, and radically different cultural setting. Or consider Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, one of five mind-expanding books recommended last week by Ilana Masad. Rhys’s 1966 response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre fleshes out the backstory of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Mr. Rochester’s attic, to tell an original tale about the toll of Caribbean colonialism. “Rhys’s project deals with Jane Eyre specifically,” Masad writes, “but her intervention asks us to consider other great literature in its historical and political context as well.” The novel is no less original for having been sparked by another. Like the plays of Shakespeare, who stole shamelessly himself, it serves as strong evidence that nothing will come of nothing. “Creativity,” Nevala-Lee writes, “doesn’t follow the logic of copyright law.” (Boris Kachka)

The i Paper recommends Wide Sargasso Sea as one of 'The 14 best classic novels under 200 pages'.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

In Rhys’s terrific answer to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, now a classic in its own right, we follow the journey of the young woman who would eventually be known as the madwoman in Mr Rochester’s attic. Antoinette is a Creole heiress born in Jamaica – and far from the “lunatic” she was first described as. (Anna Bonet)