No saccharine sentimentality in Yorkshire

The Spectator discusses 'The sexing-up of Emily Brontë' and wonders 'Why couldn't this biopic tell the truth about her life?'

So why make a film about a passionate affair between Weightman and a different sister? No doubt a drama about Anne would have been a less commercially savvy choice. It is certainly unfair how routinely Anne’s place in history is derided, with the Guardian dismissing Helen Graham, the protagonist of her groundbreaking final novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as a ‘goody-goody bore’. This is despite the character's fierce principles, and eventual flight from an alcoholic spouse, upending the conventions of most marital depictions of the era. The novel also probably functioned as a daring comment on Lady Caroline Norton’s desperate bid to divorce the violent husband who accused her of adultery with the then Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.

Yet so much of Anne's story is unfashionable material for a sexy screenplay. While progressive scholarship routinely misconstrues religiosity as a nefarious apparatus for reinforcing oppressive traditions, Helen and her creator's faith functions as a principal source of strength as they encounter vice. So perhaps it is unsurprising that O’Connor substituted Anne for an outlandish caricature of her more famous sister, who the film then posits as a post-modern rebel against Weightman's Christian sensibilities.

The film's scenes of Emily dabbling with opium borderline on the offensive, particularly given the real-life trauma of her brother Branwell’s substance abuse, which ultimately proved fatal. These real-life events were a key inspiration for the dysfunctional characters of all three sisters' fictional universes, including that of Wuthering Heights, and surely merit as much attention as make-believe affairs. It seems that popular culture refuses to bear witness to the past without forcing it to mirror our present permissive environment.

Aiming to be bold, Emily lazily returns to cinema’s long-running preoccupation with the shock value of sex and scandal. While O’Connor says that the film is ‘not intended to be completely accurate’, the reality is that most viewers will wrongly take its biographical nature as evidence of its broad alignment with fact. [...]

Of course, when it comes to art, there is often no room for hand-wringing purity tests. Modern twists on old tales can be fruitful and fun. The 1995 film Clueless, for example, is a lively and enjoyable reinterpretation of Jane Austen’s Emma. However, it is surely one thing to reimagine an older story in a modern setting, and another to present sensational fiction as fact.

It is unfair to resurrect the memories of real people to promote inaccuracies about them for the sake of profit. O’Connor’s decision to shoehorn Emily into an illicit dalliance before drafting her best work also snidely implies that she could not possibly have been a truly liberated creative if she was chaste – no doubt an impression the likes of St Thomas Aquinas and Sir Isaac Newton would find fault with. It also plays into the misconception that a story as powerful as Wuthering Heights could not possibly have come just from her imagination, and must have drawn on experience.

O’Connor’s aim of acquainting a broader audience with the Brontë genius is laudable. But wouldn’t a better way of achieving this be encouraging more people to read the sisters’ work, rather than promoting damaging falsehoods about their tragically brief lives? (Georgia L. Gilholy)

On Twitter, Samantha Ellis chimes in with some real-life facts about William Weightman.

Entertainment (Ireland) shares a video interview with director Frances O'Connor.

For The Handbook, Emily is a must-see this October.

The Upcoming reviews The Moors at The Hope Theatre, London, giving it 2 stars out of 5.

The Moors, written by Jen Silverman, is a Gothic thriller, inspired by the letters of Charlotte Brontë. It follows the story of a governess hired to look after a child, but no such child presents itself. What follows is an absurd look into the themes of loneliness, love, power and discontent. Hope Theatre’s resident director, Phil Bartlett presents this version of the show. It is a tawdry, queer tale, masked as Gothic writing, and does not go far enough to explore the themes it so painfully wants to make apparent. (Natallia Pearmain)

The Stage also gives it 2 stars out of 5.

The Telegraph is not a fan of Colleen Hoover's It Starts With Us giving it 2 stars out of 5 and dismissing it as the work of a BookTok superstar.

Actually, it’s oddly old-fashioned. There are interminable journal entries and letters, nodding towards an epistolary novel, while Ryle could be striding angrily across a Brontë moor. But the writing quality is closer to Fifty Shades of Grey, a strange mix of twee and graphic, plus the added irritant of solemn therapy-speak pronouncements. Hoover alternates chapters between the first-person narration of Lily and Atlas, but without any significant change in voice or perspective. She favours blunt dialogue and inner monologues over description, subtext or character development. (Marianka Swain)

Northern Life looks at the influence of the Lancashire and Yorkshire landscape in local authors, dismissing Wordsworth as writing with 'saccharine sentimentality' somewhere else.

In the nineteenth century, poets and writers from other parts of the country began to write affectionately about their environments. Think of Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud,

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

This kind of saccharine sentimentality is not easy to find reflected in the relationships of Lancashire and Yorkshire writers and poets with their surroundings. For example, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights suggests a very different relationship.

On the opening page, Mr. Lockwood describes the landscape around Wuthering Heights as ‘a perfect misanthropist’s heaven’, an insightful, ironical opinion of the negative capabilities of this wilderness if ever one were needed. Throughout the novel, the bleak landscape is used to reflect and reinforce the torrid, wild love affair between Cathy and Heathcliff.

Understandably, many other poets have been moved to write of their experiences of this countryside, notably Mathew Arnold, whose ‘Haworth Churchyard’, written in homage to the deceased Charlotte Brontë, continues in the tradition of her description:

… but the church

Stands on the crest of the hill,

Lonely and bleak; – at its side,

The parsonage-house and the graves.

Lonely and bleak are undoubtedly two of the most fitting descriptions of this terrain, so if the landscape can impress such powerful human conditions as loneliness upon its churches and parsonages, what can it impress upon us? [...]

After all, Hughes himself was born in the sleepy wool and textile town of Mytholmroyd, and he and Plath lived together for a spell on the outskirts of Heptonstall. Both poets—Hughes particularly—were deeply affected by the landscape of the barren countryside, and on moving to the area, Plath too was moved to write of it herself, fittingly in homage to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Her poem ‘Two Views of Withers’, for example, includes the lines:

Help over hill

And hill, and through peaty water.

I found bare moor,

A colourless weather,

And the house of Eros,

Low-lintelled, no palace.

Hughes himself, though captivated by the surrounding countryside, was critical of the steep valleys in which he had lived his early life. Hughes said of West Yorkshire that ‘everything was slightly unpleasant. Where nothing quite escapes into happiness.’ For his relationship with Plath, the area’s scenery would prove the perfect, tragic backdrop. (Marc Waddington)