Will the Bronte sisters finally reach the same level of interest that Jane Austen gets? The Guardian thinks that perhaps it's time.
From the piece...
James might be surprised to find that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are both widely read and critically esteemed today. There's been no let-up, either, in attempts to translate them into different media: the Enthusiast's Guide to Jane Eyre Adaptations website lists 25 since the 1980s. New film versions of both novels are appearing this autumn: Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre (with a screenplay by Moira Buffini) was released on Friday, and Andrea Arnold's version of Wuthering Heights will follow in November. Still, the issue James raised back in 1905 remains pertinent. Is our infatuation with the Brontës more to do with their lives than with their work? How to explain their enduring popularity?
The fact there were three of them may be part of it. It's not just that the phenomenon of three siblings who all published poetry and fiction seems extraordinary (which other family can boast as much: the Sitwells?), but the number itself has a mythic or folkloric appeal: the three Fates, the three Furies, the three witches in Macbeth, the three daughters of Lear, the three bears. For some, the idea of these "three weird sisters" (as Ted Hughes called them, borrowing from Shakespeare) weaving their magic together is sinister in its resonance – the stuff of Grimm fairytales. For others, their encouragement of each other is as inspiring an image of sorority as the Sister Sledge song: "We are family, I got all my sisters with me." (Though they hadn't, Maria and Elizabeth having died in childhood).
More important is that the Brontë story remains unfinished; they may have been dead for more than a century and a half, but important new discoveries are still being made.
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