Jane MacEyre? Updating an Orphan-to-Nanny Classic – WSJ

It’s not only Jane Austen whose novels have incited a craze of sequels and adaptations. The Brontë sisters, too, have their ardent supporters—Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic, “Jane Eyre,” alone has inspired a bevy of homages, including Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966), Jasper Fforde’s “The Eyre Affair” (2001) and of course the obligatory horror spinoff, “Jane Slayre” (2010).

Margot Livesey now pays her own tribute with “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” (Harper, 447 pages, $26.99), which relocates “Jane Eyre” from 19th-century northern England to remote 1960s Scotland…