Diana in the attic

A couple of reviews of the film Spencer, based on the life of Princess Diana, mention the Brontës' works. Town and Country wonders whether it is 'the Ultimate Horror Movie'.

Spencer bucks the trend; its version of Diana sees ghosts, throws herself down the stairs, barricades herself in bathrooms, becomes obsessed with a scarecrow, and proceeds to dress it in her own clothes. Spencer’s Diana asks: Who wouldn’t go a little insane under these circumstances?

For women, that’s horror at its root, explains Jim Hansen, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of the forthcoming book The Impossible Demand of Hitchcock’s Cinema. “There are a lot of horror stories that feature paranoid men,” Hansen says. “But the kind of thing that is almost exclusive to the female protagonist is the ‘losing-her-mind’ narrative. Women being confined is one of the biggest conventions in those works; women feeling trapped inside.” He rattles off a list of the stories that have exemplified the form—Jane Eyre, with its mad woman in the attic, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a husband shuts his wife in an upstairs bedroom while she’s suffering from postpartum depression. “In each of these stories,” Hansen adds, “it’s the structural limitations of the world that are making women crazed.” As Larrain recently told T&C, “Certain things that are an illusion—extensions of her memory or mental distress—can be taken as psychological terror. And I’m not saying that it isn’t.” (Mattie Kahn)

And from Daily Times (Pakistan):

“Past and present are the same thing,” Diana tells her beloved young sons of this coldly traditional world, in which a secret candlelit cuddle provides a rare moment of warmth, adding that in this house there is “no future”. Little surprise that Diana longs to return “home” to nearby Park House, a childhood idyll now sealed off behind barbed wire, eerily shrouded in moonlight and mist like Wuthering Heights.

AnneBrontë.org discusses the lucifer-matches-like quality of Charlotte Brontë's correspondence.