Adapting Jane Eyre for the Celebrity Book Club

Abstract

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017), the debut novel by Scottish writer Gail Honeyman, represents an ingenious adaptation of Jane Eyre that appeals strongly to modern book clubs. Eleanor Oliphant’s intertextual approach is not a straightforward translation of the events of Charlotte Brontë’s novel but rather a thoughtful transformation of its themes and characters. Moreover, the allusions to Jane Eyre are interwoven so thoroughly throughout Eleanor Oliphant that a reader with any degree of familiarity with Brontë’s novel will notice them and be able to comment on them. Eleanor Oliphant was the flagship selection for Reese Witherspoon’s enormously popular book club, “Reese’s Book Club,” which depends on social media to promote her selections, including Goodreads, an Amazon-owned book review platform. These social media platforms’ rating scales and digestible blurbs, as well as the imprimatur of a well-liked celebrity, provide the opportunity to choose middlebrow books quickly that the reading community will enjoy discussing with their friends. Eleanor Oliphant’s success provides a compelling model for authors looking to reimagine classic literature for modern audiences in addition to scholars looking to understand the appeal of popular fiction in our technologically oriented society.