ZDF Enterprises has partnered with Parsonage Productions to develop The Bronte Girls, a fictional account of the last summer Reverend Bronte’s three daughters spent together as teenagers.
The drama, with the initial series set to be a six parter, is based on the play of the same name by playwright Caroline Kelly Franklin (Last Night at the Carmine). Franklin will adapt the story for TV together with the director Darcia Martin (Riches, Shakespeare & Hathaway, Call the Midwife).
The executive producers, Harvey Myman, Patty Lenahan Ishimoto and Patrick Irwin, first worked together on Miss Scarlet & The Duke. ZDF Enterprises will hold international distribution rights.
In 1835 in the village of Haworth, England, Reverend Bronte’s three daughters, Charlotte (19), Emily (17) and 15 year-old Anne spent their last summer together as teenagers. Not much is known about that time but it’s assumed, this being the Victorian era, that they were well-behaved sisters and did little of note. But was that true, was it all about decorum and propriety for these three females who, 13 years later, changed what strait-laced society thought was possible of women?
The Bronte Girls imagines everything we’ll never know about that summer for Charlotte, Emily and Anne whose novels were rebellious, passionate and controversial. 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.