This work considers the ways in which two famous Bronte novels have passed into the general culture, including stage, film and television versions, book illustrations, comic books and paintings, operatic, ballet and musical versions, parodies, allusion, all kinds of incidental references, and also later "re-workings" of the original plot. It offers analyses of the various texts in terms of their historical and generic construction, aiming to relate the form of each derivative to its ideological function. This is achieved through a mix of traditional literary criticism with feminist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive techniques.