'I’ve always been beyond your comprehension and I always will be'

On Twitter, the Brontë Parsonage Museum shares some brief impressions of their staff and volunteers after seeing Emily.

“Frances O’Connor clearly admires Emily”

“Emma Mackey is utterly convincing as Emily”

“EMILY will open up the Brontës to new fans”

Here are some of the reviews from our staff and volunteers at the Brontë Parsonage Museum about new cinematic release EMILY. pic.twitter.com/oCvegeJFNl

— Brontë Parsonage Museum (@BronteParsonage) October 11, 2022

There's a short review of Emily on LondonNet.

Emily abandons the rigid constraints of a traditional biopic to corrupt timelines and invent a scandalous dalliance between the writer and a curate as the template for the turbulent romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Reactions of characters to Emily’s work mirror polarised opinions of the era: younger sibling Anne acknowledges a masterpiece but older sister Charlotte dismisses the writing as “ugly” and the guilt-ridden clergyman laments: “There is something ungodly in your writing.”

There is something delicate and beautiful in O’Connor’s screenwriting, which deftly navigates painful dynamics within the Brontë family through the eyes of a socially awkward loner, who is cruelly nicknamed The Strange One by residents of Haworth. Her defiant, outsider status threatens to bring shame on the household, creating friction between Emily and her kin. “I won’t let you drag me down!” spits Charlotte during one heated exchange. In response, Emily embraces the motto etched on her brother Branwell’s arm – Freedom in thought – and gradually accepts her individuality as a badge of honour to be embroidered on her bosom.

Emily (Emma Mackey) yearns to win the respect of her father, Irish Anglican priest Patrick Bronte (Adrian Dunbar), but his praise is reserved for her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). She is assigned French lessons with the new parish curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and an initially combative relationship kindles forbidden desire that tests his faith and resolve to breaking point. Youngest child Anne (Amelia Gething) witnesses deep fissures between family members as Emily inherits Bramwell’s casual relationship with opium and unstoppers her emotions so they cascade over ink-filled parchment.

Anchored by a terrific central performance from Mackey, who captures the writer’s manifold contradictions, Emily is an unconventional character study that employs handheld camerawork to catalyse a feeling of intimacy with the Brontës. Cinematographer Nanu Segal rejects a chocolate box colour palette for earthy browns and greens to capture the rugged beauty of rain-lashed 1840s West Yorkshire. “I’ve always been beyond your comprehension and I always will be,” coos the conflicted protagonist. O’Connor’s picture understands Emily Jane Brontë very well.

The Scotsman gives it 3 stars.

It’s a tricky thing capturing writing on screen. The hard graft required to transform something ephemeral into a tangible work of art doesn’t exactly lend itself to scintillating cinema. In Emily, the new film about Emily Brontë, actor-turned-writer/director Frances O’Connor attempts to get round this problem by reverse-engineering a psychological portrait of the author from the pages of Wuthering Heights in order to provide an origins story / creation myth for the novel itself.

Loosely biographical in its fidelity to the Brontë family’s real lives, the film divines a source for the raging passions coursing through her only novel in a thwarted, clandestine affair between Emily (played by Emma Mackay) and William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), her father’s handsome new curate. At first Emily is sceptical of Weightman’s Byronic charms, but gradually she succumbs, bonding over French lessons, wild walks on the moors and vigorous sex on the sly. But when things inevitably sour, the film suggests the emotional detritus finds its way into the story of Catherine and Heathcliff that’s beguiled readers of Wuthering Heights since its first publication in 1847, before Emily’s death the following year.

That the affair is unlikely to have happened is hardly the point. O’Connor is trying to conjure something about the power of the imagination in general and Brontë’s imagination in particular. She doesn’t let historical pedantry get in the way of the story, in other words, especially a story about a woman using writing to process the frustrations and traumas of living in a world that doesn’t understand her.

Around the edges we get a tale of sibling rivalry as the prim and proper Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), who has designs on Weightman herself, pleads with her to reveal the inspiration for her “ugly” novel, which according to the film, also inspires her to write Jane Eyre, even though Jane Eyre was published the same year and was embraced long before Wuthering Heights really found success.

Again, such flagrant disregard for historical accuracy isn’t necessarily an impediment to the success of a film trying to examine the blurred lines between life and art. Emily may not be as daring or as interesting as some of the more radical films exploring this theme, such as Josephine Decker’s pleasingly strange 2020 film Shirley, about the horror writer Shirley Jackson, or Todd Haynes’s shape-shifting Bob Dylan film I’m Not There. Nor is its interrogation of the Wuthering Heights mythos as artfully reimagined as Andrea Arnold’s brutally realist adaptation of the novel back in 2011. But O’Connor does inject some expressionistic flourishes that help clue us in to the way Emily’s restrictive exterior life inflamed her expansive interior one and even though it’s a speculative portrait, unlike the recent Blonde, O’Connor at least has some respect for her subject. Indeed, the creative license she takes with Charlotte plays more like an attempt to imagine how Emily might have been remembered had she lived long enough to oversee her own legacy. (Alistair Harkness)

El Diari del Festival de Sitges talks about the screening of Emily today at the Official Fantàstic Competiton:

Emily Brontë publicó Cumbres Borrascosas en el 1847, un melodrama gótico con trazas de necrofilia, que marcó a todo el cine y la literatura fantástica que vino después. Un buen ejemplo es la adaptación libre de la novela que hizo Luis Buñuel en Abismos de pasión, una de las obras maestras de su etapa mejicana. Emily, debut en la dirección de la actriz Frances O’Connor, es un fastuoso biopic, con licencias poéticas, que también explica los aspectos personales que dieron origen a la historia de amor entre Heathcliff y Catherine Earnshaw. Emma Mackey, como Emily Brontë, está soberbia. (Translation)

In the same issue we read also:

Al cap de poc d’iniciar-se Emily, la inusual aproximació de Frances O’Connorala figura d’Emily Brontë, una escena un pèl tètrica ens treu del cap la idea d’un biopic a l’ús: l’autora de Cims borrascosos s’amaga rere una màscara i espanta les seves germanes fent-se passar per l’esperit de la seva mare morta. O’Connor, aqui potser recordareu com la mare de Haley Joel Osment a A. I. Inteligencia artificial, va llegir l’única novel·la de Brontë durant l’adolescència i va quedar captivada perles seves atmosferes gòtiques, gairebé sobrenaturals, i el caràcter rebel i torrencial dels seus protagonistes, la Cathy i el Heathcliff. I aquest embruix lector adolescent impregna una opera prima que no vol ser tant una crònica distanciada d’alguns fets de la vida de l’escriptora com una vindicació contemporània de tot allò que O’Connor va trobar entre les seves pàgines. (Toni Junyent) (Translation)

L'humanité (France) describes Emma Mackey's role as

merveilleuse incarnation fantasmée de la romancière des« Hauts de Hurlevent ». (Michèle Levieux) (Translation)

The Telegraph interviews author Maggie O'Farrell.

Best story you’ve ever seen, read, heard?

Oh I can’t answer that! Anna Karenina! I love Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout for its elegance and psychological depth. The one I re-read every few years is Jane Eyre. Now that is the work of a genius. It has an astonishing structure, which is almost like a Rorschach painting; it hinges in the middle and there’s a symmetry to it. Everyone should read that book, it’s just so brilliant. That was three – am I cheating? (Jack Rear)

Xtra reviews Ann-Marie MacDonald's new book Fayne.

Direct references as well as allusions to these novels are scattered throughout Fayne. For example, the protagonist’s friend urges them to read Jane Eyre between repeated appearances of a ghostly face in the window overlooking the Wuthering Heights-esque moor where Fayne is situated. (Eva Crocker)

Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Gwendoline Riley’s First Love and My Phantoms.

When Bridget was a child, Hen put on novelty slippers and danced to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” in the kitchen, taking care to do so only when Bridget and her sister were nearby to watch. (Oona Holahan)

Her Campus suggests you 'Fall into Dark Academia Autumn with These Five Books' one of which is

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 

This list would be incomplete without Wuthering Heights by literary icon, Emily Bronté. Published in 1847, this Victorian novel is the pinnacle of dark academia. As a large part of the theme is a yearning for the past, what is better than a gothic novel from the 19th century? Wuthering Heights follows the decades-long love story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, from their childhood running on the English moors to their marriages and children to their deaths. It is a tragic romance that weaves an eloquent tale of passion, desperation, and agony. A note of advice: do not expect to like these characters. They are meant to be irritating, which only lends itself to tragedy in unexpected ways.  Including a bleak British setting, lyrical language, and even a ghost, Wuthering Heights is a quintessential dark academia novel to pick up this fall. (Olivia Womack)

A contributor to Excelsior (Mexico) recommendas Wuthering Heights for melancholy, rainy days.

Aun no siendo mi género favorito, hay algunas novelas románticas que pueden considerarse como obras excelsas. Imperdibles por su complejidad, por la riqueza de su historia.[...] Cumbres Borrascosas, de Emily Brontë, una joya: el amor en su máxima expresión, pero también la maldad y los convencionalismos sociales. (Miguel Dová) (Translation)

Hidden Remote interviews Bring It On: Cheer or Die director Karen Lam.

Hidden Remote: Karen, from which horror classics did you pull inspiration from? What were your favorite movies growing up?

Karen Lam: For Bring It On: Cheer or Die, I was pulling from a lot of 80s films as well as my favorite teen movies growing up. There are references to Goonies, Saw, Halloween, as well as to classics like Psycho. There are also internal references to The Graduate, John Woo movies, Jackie Chan, Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” dance movies. Not to mention, the original Bring It On. (Sandy C.)

Writer Bernardine Evaristo has contributed an article on literary London for The New York Times.

Also entombed in Poets’ Corner are Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and there are memorial tablets to many more writers, including John Betjeman; Jane Austen; Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Ted Hughes; Henry James; William Shakespeare; Oscar Wilde and Philip Larkin. In a noisy, hectic city, this is a quiet space where you can commune with the spirits of the literary past and reflect on the power of literature to resonate far beyond a writer’s life.

Yorkshire Press recommends '8 of The Best Places to Eat in Haworth'.