‘There was no way we were making the film without Emily having a Yorkshire accent'

The Handbook's 'October Culture Fix' includes

The Film We’re Excited For: Emily 

Literary lovers, you’ll want to bookmark this one. Starring Emma Mackey (Sex Education), Emily is a brand new film that charts the life and legacy of the British literary iconic: Emily Brontë. 

Directed by Frances O’Connor in her directorial debut, the biopic will offer a deeper look into the author of Wuthering Heights, as well as focusing on her close-knit bond to her sisters, Charlotte and Anne; her first love; and her relationship with her brother. (Lottie Woodrow)

Elle features Emma Mackey.

Directed by actor Frances O’Connor, the film stars Mackey in the lead role of Emily, a reclusive rebel who’s in a constant battle with the status quo and forges on to write the classic novel, Wuthering Heights. Emily's plot sees the twentysomething-year-old navigate her relationship with her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Anne (Amelia Gething), a romance with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and the downward spiral of her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). ‘It was a lot to take on,’ Mackey tells us about the pressure to make her debut lead in the film, crediting her castmates for providing her ‘a sense of normality and comfort’.

For Mackey, playing Emily was a ‘no brainer’. ‘It felt like the right sort of project and challenge for me to take on, something I could get my teeth stuck into,’ she continues. But the road to filming wasn’t plain sailing. The actor was originally cast in the role in 2020, but with the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, production didn’t start for another year-and-a-half. The time offered the perfect opportunity for the ever-studious Mackey to get stuck into researching her complex character, from watching documentaries and film adaptations about Wuthering Heights and the Brontë sisters, to listening to music. ‘I’m quite clinical in the way I prep,’ the actor admits. ‘I love it. I’m quite academic, so I need to read real facts.’ [...]

One thing that can’t go unnoticed in the film is the characters' shared Yorkshire accents. ‘There was no way we were making the film without Emily having a Yorkshire accent, but it became a case of seeing how far we could take it,’ Mackey says. ‘I wanted to set the tone and make sure that we all had some flavour of it,’ she adds, noting that she took inspiration for her character’s hybrid dialect form the Brontë matriarch’s Cornwallian and father’s Irish accents. ‘A soft Yorkshire lilt was the final choice,’ she says. [...]

While the similarities between Mackey and Emily are few and far between, the actor says she could empathise with the author’s sense of feeling overwhelmed and often wanting to retire to be on her own with her own thoughts. ‘They’re things that everyone feels to varying extremes. She is the sum total of someone who has a really dense imaginary life, but who also feels incredibly shy and doesn't know how to operate around people,’ she says. Ahead of the film’s release, much has been said of the subtle unpicking of mental health issues Brontë may have suffered, which help make the character relatable to a 21st century audience now armed with the language to talk about the way we feel. ‘I'm really glad that people are noticing that because issues like social anxiety, social awkwardness or depression aren’t something we necessarily focussed on showing,’ she says of the mental health topics raised during filming. [...]

 ‘I love that. I like that it’s being called a sexy film,’ Mackey tells us. ‘From the religion to the male/female roles [in the film], it all makes for a charged forbidden love that is very sexy. It’s one of the reasons I liked the script in the first place - it didn't feel pretentious, self-indulgent or like a pristine thing. It was a bit rough around the edges and imperfect… I hope that it will seduce people in that way.’ (Katie O'Malley)

Cineuropa highlights some of the films not to be missed in this year's Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia and one of them is 'the interesting Emily'.

Financial Times features writer Mariana Enríquez.

Having taught herself to write from anthologies in her parents’ library, which contained everything from Emily Brontë to Edgar Allan Poe, she set out to adapt the anglophone gothic tradition to write “horror that was relevant to my culture, my time, our fears”. (Mia Levitin)

Writer Laurie Lico Albanese discusses retellings on LitHub.

Likewise, when Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in response to Jane Eyre, it was as if a hurricane had ripped off the shutters on a house in Jamaica and revealed the true story of Berthe Antoinette, the wife locked away in Mr. Rochester’s attic. Bronte’s novel allows us to see the woman in the attic only through the eyes of others.  But why is she in the attic? What happened to her before she was put there? Was she insane, or was she imprisoned and driven to madness? Rhys’ parallel retelling of Jane Eyre turns the lens away from Mr. Rochester, our white proto-colonialist, and shows us the effects of that male colonial privilege on a vulnerable young woman.

“Reader, I married him,” is much less a victory when we know why the first wife is burning the place to the ground.

A walk in Brontë country (Haworth to Hebden Bridge) in The Guardian.

In 1861, civil engineer John McLandsborough paid a trip to Haworth, declaring himself a “pilgrim at the shrine of Charlotte Brontë”. The author had died six years earlier and people were curious to see where she and her sisters had been born, raised and so profoundly inspired. McLandsborough was astonished to find there was no railway line so, although he was a specialist in sewers and drains, he proposed a branch line connecting Haworth with the Midland Railway at Keighley. Six years later, a line was opened through the beautiful Worth Valley. [...]

This walk, from Haworth to Hebden Bridge, is an absolute cracker. It’s 13 miles long, but involves mainly gentle inclines and lots of high, level, moorland walking. Anyone reasonably fit can undertake it – I met lots of retirement-age ramblers en route – and there’s little navigating involved. Much of the path is flagged or consolidated to protect the surrounding peat bogs.

I hadn’t been to Haworth in years – decades, in fact. I expected gentrification. It always was too pretty to be gritty and, for sure, steep, Hovis-ad-picturesque Main Street is lined with cafes, delis, bookshops, craft outlets, galleries (“Wuthering Arts”) and gift shops. I needed a coffee so popped in to Fairtrade cafe-bakery Hunters of Haworth, where chef-patron Nick made me a perfect brew. I’d packed a ham sandwich, but couldn’t resist stashing one of his towering veggie pies in my backpack. I asked Nick if the town was very smart these days. “The curtains may have changed, but not the furniture,” he said. Second-homers haven’t spoiled things – not yet, anyway.

Skylarks cascaded, a couple of red grouse skimmed low and the wind blew heartily, if not quite wutheringly

I went on up the hill, taking the path behind the church – not any church, of course, but the one where Reverend Patrick Brontë preached. It was early Sunday morning and there were already people milling around the Brontë Parsonage Museum – a secular church of sorts. I took in the sturdy facade of the house through the lovely graveyard – it’s an evocative setting – before setting off through Penistone Hill country park.

Even without the waymarkers in English and Japanese, the path to Top Withens is easy to find. It’s four miles each way, and a popular outing for those parking and lunching in Haworth. But it’s nonetheless lovely. As soon as you leave Haworth, you’re on heather-clad moorland, which makes for a startling contrast with the sheep-shorn fields across the valley to the south.

The path climbs steadily, passing through a steep clough (or valley) via a clapper bridge (there’s sometimes a waterfall, but it hadn’t rained properly in weeks). A few walkers were having elevenses. Even while I was trying to remember quotes from my A-levels about Cathy’s love being like “the eternal rocks”, I was humming Kate Bush.

Top Withens is said to be the farmhouse Emily had in mind when imagining the house at Wuthering Heights. A somewhat conservated “ruin”, it’s still a magical place. A couple of trees (it had to be just two) add to the drama and romance of the site. Scudding clouds darkened the purples and blacks of the moor. Skylarks cascaded, a couple of red grouse skimmed low and the wind blew heartily, if not quite wutheringly. I drank half my flask of tea behind a drystone wall. (Chris Moss)

Also in The Guardian a review of the forthcoming film adaptation of Matilda the Musical.

Alisha Weir plays Matilda, the free-spirited bookish little girl with a precocious interest in Brontë and Dostoevsky (not Shakespeare, though, which is why she doesn’t remark on the Hamlet-resonance in her surname – Wormwood). (Peter Bradshaw)

DIY Mag on the new music video by Suki Waterhouse for her song Nostalgia.

“This is the story of a woman writing a letter to her childhood love telling him that she’s getting married,” [director Émilie Richard] adds. “She hasn’t heard from him in years and often wonders what might’ve been. I wanted something sweeping and epic and unapologetic. When Suki sent me the song, I was driving through Doolough Valley and the landscape here fit the mood of the music so well. The lake in Doolough had my mind gravitate toward the story of Orpheus & Eurydice and crossing the river Styx. We were also highly influenced by Wuthering Heights and the cliff scene between Heathcliff & Cathy. The whole experience was pretty magical, like the last week of summer camp with a group of old friends.”