In the 1944 Hollywood version of Jane Eyre, the first image is the embossed cover of Charlotte Brontë's novel, which opens so the pages can turn during the credit titles.

Film adaptations serve the same purpose of reappraisal: in retelling a story they revalue it in relation to the different reality we now inhabit. Whenever we reread a favourite book, we bring to it an updated self and look back at it from a changed world. It dispenses with the fictional magic on which the Brontës and Dickens rely and forces us to ask whether love is just an enlightened calculation of financial advantage and whether, if we make an error of judgment, we can expect a second chance.

Pride and Prejudice – superficially frothy, actually profound – calculates the odds against personal happiness in a society ruled by cash and class. Wuthering Heights warns that the outcome may not be so fortunate: the past with its ghost or demons is inescapable. Oliver Twist is about an even more disadvantaged boy who survives thanks to the kindness of strangers and remains angelically immune to the depravity around him. In Jane Eyre, a disadvantaged girl prevails by force of will and by the intensity of an uncompromising imagination. When we first read them, they prospectively sketch our quest to discover who we are and our struggle to impose ourselves on the world in later decades, they remain as markers of our progress or testaments to our disillusionment. Certain books – by the Brontës and by Jane Austen and Dickens – are indispensable to us and accompany us through life. They are doing it, I'd suggest, because it needs to be done. 'People,' Langan sighed, 'will be saying, 'Why the hell are they doing all that over again?'' C hristine Langan, who runs BBC Films, recently felt obliged to defend the latest cinematic adaptations of novels by Charlotte and Emily Brontë – Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, which opens early next month, and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, due for release in November – against accusations of deja vu.

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