Love is in the Eyre with erotic rewrite

Readers have long enjoyed the romantic undercurrents of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, but a new rewrite promises to be "sensual" interpretation of the Victorian classic.

Jane Eyre Laid Bare will mimic Bronte's original tale of the innocent 18-year-old employed by the brooding and mysterious Mr Rochester, but the young governess "soon comes to realise that Thornfield Hall is a much more sensually arousing place than she had first assumed" and Jane finds herself "embroiled in a passionate, sexual, sensual romance with Rochester".

The author, debut novelist Eve Sinclair, described Bronte's novel as "my favourite classic" and added: "I think that readers through the ages have appreciated the smouldering sexual chemistry between Jane and Rochester and I have changed very little of Bronte's original to retell the timeless story of a young girl falling for an unattainable older man and getting out of her depth in a sensual world she cannot control."

The agents who struck the deal, Vivienne Schuster and Felicity Blunt, said: "Rochester and Jane Eyre were always passionate characters; this book fully imagines those passions and melds them with Charlotte Brontë’s original and beautiful text. Fans will delight."

Recent years have seen a vogue for reimagined versions of the classics, with Seth Grahame-Smith's zombie mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies spawning a publishing phenomenon and a long-mooted film. Meanwhile saucy fiction has seen something of a resurgence in recent weeks, with erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey topping the charts.
 

Jane Eyre Laid Bare by Eve Sinclair will be published by Pan Macmillan in August.