The Wee Review gives 3 stars out of 5 to Emily.
Physically, Emma Mackey’s Emily is taller and darker than her delicate sisters: a judgemental Charlotte played by Alexandra Dowling and the gentle Anne played by Amelia Gething. Mackey’s Emily is described as a, ‘scruff’ and, ‘the strange one’. She is a changeling and outcast in this family of English roses, just as Heathcliffe was.
O’Connor’s filmed exploration of Emily Bronte has a strong cast and vivid imagery. Branwell and Emily embrace for the final time through a bedsheet hanging on the washing line, when Emily pulls the sheet back Branwell is not there. The intensity of Emily’s emotions in Wuthering Heights is explained in the film by giving her a volatile sexual relationship with curate William Weightman, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen. Weightman existed but such an affair is unlikely to have happened. Historically it is supposed that the pretty Anne was his romantic interest.
Frances O’Connor has presented the life of Emily Brontë through the prism of her masterpiece Wuthering Heights. The Brontë sisters’ writing is revered, and the film Emily enhances their myth while presenting the audience with the conundrum: what is fact and what is fiction? (Fiona Black)
Rice's irreverence certainly makes for a breezily entertaining evening. Whether it adds anything to our appreciation of Brontë's original text is more debatable. Her most intriguing touch in that regard (albeit one perhaps inspired by Andrea Arnold's 2011 film adaptation) lies in the casting of Heathcliff. Liam Tamne is of African, Indian, and Irish heritage, while most of the principal cast are white, thus furthering the sense of an outsider trying to penetrate a well-protected inner circle. Tamne also plays the role in a way that strips his character of any shred of romantic warmth — perhaps a more honest approach, given that Heathcliff is, in many ways, a deeply unsavory character, a man driven almost entirely by resentment once he's given the keys to this particular Yorkshire kingdom.
Otherwise, though, considering how faithful Rice is to the book (in letter if not in spirit), how one responds to this Wuthering Heights depends on what one thinks of Brontë's novel in the first place. Those who don't know the book going in will certainly find in this production a reasonably engaging entry point into its themes of forbidden love and class struggle, but may ultimately find it all rather dated and emotionally remote. But at least the show's playful surface scintillates. (Kenji Fujishima)
Dwell discusses the 'enduring literary trope of the Bad, Haunted House'.
The Bad House is a very old literary trope that crops up again and again, like the mushrooms you might find in and around a particularly alarming example. It goes all the way back to lurid 18th-century Gothic page-turners like The Mysteries of Udolpho, which were such a well-established genre that Jane Austen took a crack at satirizing them in Northanger Abbey. Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall, the titular House of Seven Gables, Rebecca’s Manderley, Hill House—all iconic bad houses. The trope was absolutely core to the gothic romance—you know, the ones with the girl in the white nightgown on the cover, running away from a big house—which was hugely popular in the late 1960s, before taking a nosedive in the 1970s. But the bad house didn’t go anywhere, looming large in the horror genre via ’70s classics like The Amityville Horror and Burnt Offerings. (Kelly Faircloth)
This columnist from the
Irish Examiner may need to read *the* Emily Brontë novel because as a joke this doesn't make much sense:
It has been a week of crusty eyes, phlegmy coughs, and all-round infirmary vibes in our house this week.
Ted and I have been hit by an eye infection and a chest infection, respectively. Illness, rural landscape, plus the apocalyptic weather, mean I increasingly feel like I live in an Emily Bronte novel. (Julie Jay)
There's a post by Marina Saegerman on ''UNvictorian' female writers: The Brontës, Rossetti, Eliot' on the
Brussels Brontë Blog.
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