‘The Bronte Girls’: Caroline Franklin’s Stage Play Being Turned Into TV Drama Series
New York-based playwright Caroline Franklin is adapting her stage play The Bronte Girls for television alongside Call the Midwife director Darcia Martin.
ZDF Enterprises and the U.K.-based Parsonage Productions are behind the project, which tells a fictional account of the last summer the Bronte sisters spent together. The six-part series will be executive produced by Harvey Myman, Patty Lenahan Ishimoto, and Patrick Irwin, who previously collaborated on the British-Irish period crime drama Miss Scarlet and The Duke.
The play takes place in 1835 and is set in the village of Haworth, England, and follows 19-year-old Charlotte Bronte, her 17-year-old sister Emily, and her 15-year-old sibling Anne as they spend their last summer together as teenagers. It imagines the trio’s adventures, the men in their lives, and the passion that saw them become literary icons.
“With hormones raging, romances leading to sexual tension, political conflicts and guarded secrets, the sisters’ lives are anything but chaste in this fictionalized drama of three extraordinary women and the men, young and old, who are caught up in this adventure,” said ZDFE in a statement (via Variety).
The Bronte sisters came from a nineteenth-century literary family; their writing, published under male pseudonyms at the time, would go on to be considered masterpieces of literature. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first to reach success, while Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, among other works, were later lauded in their own right.
“Caroline’s play intrigued us right from the start,” said Lenahan Ishimoto. “The idea of reimagining the lives of the Bronte sisters on the cusp of womanhood was just too good to resist. We’re delighted to be partnering with ZDF Enterprises, Caroline and Darcia to bring this story to life for the small screen.”
The Bronte Girls, Season 1, TBA
