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”