Give it some welly, Emily

A contributor to the Daily Mail went to see the film Emily and wondered about a phrase used in it.

I went to see the film Emily at our local cinema last week. Like so many movies these days, it’s ‘based on a true story’ — about the three Brontë sisters, all huddled together in their father’s parsonage, on the windswept moors around Haworth.

In films billing themselves as ‘based on a true story’, I find myself distracted by the nagging need to know what is true and what is false. ‘Based on’ has become an increasingly liquid term.

Often, the plot is so strong that I find myself caught up in it. But then something ludicrous occurs, or something preposterous is said or done, and I start fussing about the film’s authenticity. [...]

At first, Weightman captivates the other two Brontë sisters — Anne and Charlotte — with his handsome face and sensitive sermons.

Emily seems less enchanted, but in due course she succumbs to his charms and the two of them begin rolling around in the hay. Not knowing for sure whether their romance was true or false, I was happy to go along with it.

But then came something very trivial that brought me up short. Emily is out on the moors with her black sheep brother Branwell. He is trying to get her to throw off the chains of convention and shout as loud as she possibly can. ‘Give it some welly!’ he urges.

Give it some welly? For the rest of the film, while this or that character was dying, or having sex, or communing with the dead, or bursting into tears, this phrase —‘Give it some welly’ — kept niggling away.

Would they really have used such a phrase back in Victorian times?

It seemed unlikely but, then again, you can never be sure. [...]

Back to Emily: as the young curate eagerly unbuttoned Emily’s corset in their rural hideaway, I found myself thinking about the phrase Branwell Brontë had employed, just a few minutes before. Welly, I told myself, must come from the Wellington boot, which was named after the Duke of Wellington.

The date of the Battle of Waterloo was 1815, so presumably the Wellington boot arrived on the scene around that time, or soon after. It must then have taken a while before it was nicknamed ‘welly’, and longer still for the phrase ‘Give it some welly’ to have entered the language.

By now, Emily and the curate were hard at it, but I was not going to let them distract me. What were Emily Brontë’s dates? I knew she died young, in the mid-19th century. But would 35 years or so — from 1815 to Emily’s death — have been long enough for the birth of the phrase, ‘Give it some welly’? I thought not. And even if the phrase was around in the mid-19th century, would it really have been used in that particular way?

When I got home, I looked it up. Sure enough, my first instinct proved correct: the first recorded use of ‘welly’ was in 1961 and the phrase ‘Give it some welly’ didn’t enter the language until 1977.

Emily Brontë was born in 1818 and died in 1848. This means that the producers of Emily are out by 120 years or more and pedants the world over can feel a small tingle of satisfaction. (Craig Brown)

Movimentarios (Spain) reviews the film.

‘Emily’ está contada con gusto, son 130 minutos de películas, pero pasan como un suspiro. Es una cinta muy bonita, ya no solo por la historia, sino que en lo visual me parece una maravilla. Vemos las campiñas inglesas, esos campos verdes con sus tremendas lluvias. La fotografía está llena de contrastes, pero es más bien oscura. Al final nos están contando la historia de una muchacha que está más bien perdida en el mundo. Emily, es una mujer adelantada a su tiempo y le cuesta adaptarse a las normas que le imponen.

Emma Mackey (‘Muerte en el Nilo’) está formidable. Su mirada nos enseña la delicadeza de esta mujer, de su inconformismo y a la vez su necesidad de que la acepten, sobre todo su padre. [...]

Nanu Segal, es la encargada de la fotografía de ‘Emily’, como he dicho, su trabajo me ha encantado, logra darnos paz y tormentas en una historia llena de fuerza que no sería para nada igual sin su trabajo.

También otro de los grandes aciertos es el vestuario, si que es cierto, que este tipo de historias en la Inglaterra victoriana ya están muy estudiadas a nivel vestuario, pero la verdad que está muy cuidado. Vemos a Emily y a su hermano con ropajes oscuros mientras que sus hermanas siempre van con colores claros. Esto también nos muestran sus personalidades, de una manera visual. Esto es gracias a Michael O’Connor, encargado de películas como ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Dredd’ o ‘El último rey de Escocia’.

Para terminar comentar que Frances O’Connor ha realizado un gran trabajo para ser su ópera prima, logra que mantengamos el interés de esta historia y sorprendernos con escenas aterradoras dentro de una historia donde el amor, desamor y el inconformismo son los protagonistas. (Vicky Carras) (Translation)

Telegraph (India) looks back on the best moments of season 3 of Derry Girls.

Hot plumber in the house: Ma Mary has had it enough with everyone in the house hankering after her for every little thing they need. But little does she know that a cheering up would arrive on her doorstep in the form of a hot plumber named Gabriel. What more? He even reads Emily Brontë and talks about forbidden desires after having fixed the boiler and served more than one cup of tea. (Santanu Das)

The Guardian reviews Running Up that Hill by Tom Doyle.

“Those shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief to me,” said John Lydon in 2009, recalling the day he came home with Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, and played it for his mother. She thought it sounded like “a bag of cats”, but Lydon, who had just left the Sex Pistols, heard a fellow renegade. (Caroline Sullivan)

Wiltshire Live has found the grave of a Jane Eyre in St. Paul Churchyard in Salisbury.

Jane Eyre (1626-1695) is thought to be the namesake for Charlotte Brontë's character with the same name. (Hannah Molnar)