Jane Eyre

The commercial networks, led by NBC, which announced its fall schedule Monday, aren't the only television operations getting ready for a new season.Cable networks, too, have a bunch of new offerings for the coming months. And with TV writers throughout the country primed to cover the network's fall lineups, is it an accident that some cable operations have chosen now to reveal what the next year has in store?Of course it isn't. Here's a sampling of what the cable folks want us to tell you about.

Just when Jane Austen's boomlet seemed to be at last petering out, along comes Charlotte Bronte.AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!Now that I've got that out of my system, I must point out that Franco Zeffirelli's adaption adaptation of Bronte's highly tTC melodramatic "Jane Eyre" is quite an effective piece of work. It may even restore William Hurt to leading manhood; it certainly should boost Charlotte Gainsbourg to leading womanhood.These roles, played most legendarily by Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in a 1944 version, are fully realized by the stars.

"Rapist Caught by Own Cat."That headline from the Sun, Rupert Murdoch's London tabloid, writes Robert Sherrill in the current the Nation, is part of the formula that has made it the largest English-language newspaper in the world. The rest of the formula is "nude women on page three, sex advice, fabricated news and racial scares."Mr. Sherrill's dense, splenetic attack on "Citizen Murdoch" cautions that Mr. Murdoch's "empire building on the edge, financial loosey-goosey" has been propped up by the FCC's refusal to strip him of his Fox TV stations even though its May 4 ruling acknowledged him as "an outlaw in the industry."

I'll never forget the summer I first read "Little Women." Twenty-six years later, that memorable opening (" 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug") is a literary madeleine, taking me back to an earlier time when reading was an unmixed pleasure and a book a magical charm that sealed me off from the world.I recently turned to "Little Women" again, partly out of a need to recapture that old feeling -- I had just moved and felt lost and disconnected -- and partly out of a critic's curiosity to see if it "held up."

The first year was the hardest.Even now, six years later, I can remember with amazing clarity waking up that Sunday morning two months after my mother's death and thinking:Today is Mother's Day. And for the first time in my life I will spend this day as a motherless child.It was a mournful thought, one that played over and over in my head like a dirge. But since I was a mother as well as a daughter I put aside my sadness, or tried to, in order to concentrate on the Mother's Day surprises planned by my sons for me.But when I was alone that night -- the night of my first Mother's Day without a mother -- I found myself sitting under a small circle of light in my bedroom, rereading parts of "Jane Eyre."