'The furious ghosts nowhere but in the heads of the visitors'

Mancunion fives a 4 out of 5 to the film Emily.

However, Frances O’Connor’s impressive directing and writing alongside a standout performance from Emma Mackey ensure that Emily is a passionate, gripping, and refreshing take which manages to blend period drama tropes with its own authenticity to avoid becoming just another biopic. [...]

The affair with Weightman (played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is heavily suggested to be the inspiration for Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship, and the extensive similarities do not end there; Emily adopts the novel’s gothic themes, continually suggesting Emily Brontë had a connection with the dead, as well as the (almost contrasting) motif that love is liberation. Unfortunately, scenes where Emily and Branwell are spying and are chased by dogs seem a little on the nose for fans of Wuthering Heights.

This is perhaps slightly jarring for Brontë historians, given that there is no evidence that Emily Brontë ever had an affair with anyone, and the little known about her mysterious and undocumented life suggests she was extremely socially reclusive. The principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Ann Dinsdale, even told The Telegraph that Emily “spent her life in her imagination” and “she would have likely been considered somewhere on the autistic spectrum” in a time where neurodivergence was not recognised.

It is somewhat frustrating, then, that in seeking an explanation for how Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights with such passion, despite her internal struggle; position as a woman in a strictly patriarchal society; and level of genius, the biopic landed upon a man. This detail is ironic when Brontë had to publish her novel under a male pseudonym at first (another detail changed for the film’s narrative). [...]

 As much as I enjoyed Weightman’s Mr Darcy walk through the beautiful northern countryside and was entertained by their whirlwind enemies-to-lovers romance, I could not escape how the film downplays Brontë’s genius of imagination.

I do, however, appreciate how O’Connor adapted the timeline and suggested Wuthering Heights was written before Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The resulting closing scene is a powerful ending that left me in tears as O’Connor suggests Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre after being inspired and motivated by Emily. Whilst this may be true, Charlotte actually published her novel first.

If Emily is understood as a work of fiction, rather than an accurate biopic, it tells a classic period drama story of an outsider amongst her sisters and society, struggling to balance her writing with external expectations and internal struggle. The blend of this beloved theme with the gothic and the tragic, as well as the appeal of the Brontës, makes the film an extremely powerful and entertaining one. Whilst I may be a little biased in saying this, the Yorkshire setting and surprisingly accurate accents are also very appealing. (Maisie Outhart)

The Gauntlet also gives it a 4 out of 5 after the Calgary International Film Festival screening.

Emily is the type of movie you watch curled up at home while the wind is biting outside. The film felt cold and distant from the titular character, Emily Brontë, author of her only novel, Wuthering Heights. This stylistic choice captured the essence of the story perfectly as it was a tale of a woman who was misunderstood her whole life. Emma Mackey portrayed this version of Brontë beautifully, embodying the energy of an estranged young woman who doesn’t quite fit in with the expectations of society. But rather than her being a defiant and confident character who actively fights against societal expectations, she’s awkward and uninviting. The film was faithful to the depictions of her by her sister Charlotte and didn’t stray away from the author’s perceived persona. 

The film chose to understand Brontë by the relationships in her life, first with her sister, then brother, then with her secret lover. The heavy contrast between her relationships with Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling)and her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) was jarring — while both encouraged her to live her life on her own terms, one was filled with careful expression and the other with lethal hedonism. Her later romance with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) was intense and passionate, but wasn’t as emotionally evocative as the earlier depictions of her. This film was a looking glass into Brontë’s life and dipped its toe into a multitude of different stories without straying too far from the source, which made it both entertaining and palatable. (Sheroog Kubur)

Church Times reviews it too.

In an imaginative, if imaginary, treatment of Brontë’s short life, the writer-director Frances O’Connor (best known for acting) depicts a passionate affair with William Weightman. He was her father’s curate at Haworth from 1839 till dying from cholera in 1842, aged 28. There’s no evidence that he (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) was the bodice-ripping hunk of this over-the-top and yet remarkable movie. Tender, dramatic, and eerie in turn, the film in many ways transforms Emily into Catherine, the protagonist of her great novel. It is as if all the things that she didn’t (couldn’t) bring herself to do in real life found their expression in the writings.

Emily reverses it, envisaging how this particular Brontë might have behaved but for the social and religious norms of the time. It is probably no accident that O’Connor’s Roman Catholic background kindled interest in a conventional churchgoer who displayed a wildness of spirit which questions faith when the latter freezes our humanity. The film counters the stern religion of characters such as Aunt Branwell and Wuthering Heights’ Joseph with the liberating beliefs and behaviour of Emily and William.

At first, it is a case of Weightman’s French lessons becoming a neat subterfuge for indulging in the language of love. There is an interesting change in the balance of power when discussing religion. He, the theologian with social status as a cleric, is forced to concede that her objections (also in French!) have validity. Emma Mackey gives a beautiful performance as the iconoclastic misfit. By and large, Emily and her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Anne (Amelia Gething) rub along together, but sibling rivalry also raises its head from time to time.

Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar is Patrick the overbearing father to his children, while nevertheless retaining at least with Emily’s siblings that touch of warmth which we know so well. And Branwell, the often wayward son, is here a source of inspiration to Emily in Fionn Whitehead’s moving account. [...]

The film is in some ways a great What If of a picture. Just suppose Emily Brontë, aided and abetted by Weightman, strove to reconcile passionate lovemaking with Christian beliefs. Like the book, the untamed Yorkshire landscape captured by Nanu Segal’s cinematography is a character in its own right, reflecting or even dictating the way its human subjects behave. Brontë’s frequently troubled persona is played out against backdrops equally disturbing. And what, we’re being asked, lies behind the masks we all wear? O’Connor portrays this very literally in a chilling scene where covering the face represents those oppressive cultural norms. The only release for all three sisters is to put their emotional turmoil into writing. Passion, no longer bookish, encompasses its complete range of meanings in this film — from heights of sexual ecstasy to crucifying suffering. We should be grateful. (Stephen Brown)

Wall Street Journal reviews the book Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser.

In her 1929 essay “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf declared that in the 19th century “a woman lived almost solely in her home and her emotions.” Male novelists could derive inspiration from first-hand experience of war, seafaring, politics and business. Female writers worked from more circumscribed worlds. Novels such as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Wuthering Heights,” Woolf argued, “were written by women from whom was forcibly withheld all experience save that which could be met with in a middle-class drawing-room.” Such restrictions required extraordinary compensatory powers of observation and imagination from authors like Jane Austen and Emily Brontë. (Malcolm Forbes)

Yesterday was Sylvia Plath's 90th birthday and The News Statesman had an article on her.

But in her calendar around the same period she described herself as “weary”, “depressed and sterile” and noted her “growing sense of suffocation & loneliness”. In her poems “Hardcastle Crags”, “Wuthering Heights” and “November Graveyard” – a poem inspired by the churchyard she didn’t know would become her burial ground – the sense of the landscape is awe-inspiring but bleak. [...]

In a journal entry from December 1956, Plath wrote of a trip to Haworth, where the Brontë family lived. She jotted down notes about “Charlotte’s bridal crown of heirloom lace & honeysuckle, Emily’s death couch… They touched this, wore that, wrote here”. She walked on to Top Withens, the setting said to have inspired Wuthering Heights, in search of further connection with the Brontës. But what she found there was “all eternity, wilderness, loneliness… The furious ghosts nowhere but in the heads of the visitors.” (Anna Leszkiewicz)

Il Giornale (Italy) features  J.M. Miro's Ordinary Monsters.

Ma se Oscuri Talenti eredita la costruzione dei personaggi e la struttura dell'intreccio dalla tradizione gotica, l'ambientazione è un chiaro rimando alla letteratura di epoca vittoriana, con le sue strade scure e polverose, castelli dispersi in brughiere non proprio amichevoli. L'atmosfera che riempie il romanzo sembra rimandere da una parte la povertà che trasudava in Oliver Twist di Charles Dickens, dall'altra l'eco di quelle che hanno riempito le pagine di romanzi come Jane Eyre e Cime Tempestose, a cui si aggiunge un senso di minaccia costante che tiene avvinto il lettore, che gli fa annidare lo stomaco. Il mostruoso e l'horror si prendono dunque per mano, costruendo un intreccio in cui all'inizio tutto viene solo suggerito, ma rimane nascosto, come se davvero ci fosse uno strato di polvere e fumo che annebbia la vista, ma permette ugualmente di avvertire il pericolo imminente. Primo capitolo di una trilogia, Oscuri Talenti è uno dei fantasy più interessanti proposti dal mercato editoriale negli ultimi anni, un romanzo di formazione e horror, con rimandi dark academia e una prosa che sedurrà nel giro di pochissime frasi. (Erika Pomella) (Translation)