A fanciful biography indeed

Easy Reader News reviews Emily, takes it too literally and basically makes a muddle of facts and fiction.

Actress Frances O’Connor, in her feature writing and directing debut, has tried to translate her fascination with the enigma that was Emily Bronte into a fanciful biography. [...]

O’Connor portrays Emily as a non-conformist, losing herself in the moors, absorbing nature, injecting it into her poems. Sister Charlotte is by turns supportive and cruel to Emily, often ridiculing her solitary nature. As portrayed in the film, Emily and Branwell shared a rebellious streak, causing no end of havoc in town and always resulting in punishment for him. [...]

The complicated relationship between Charlotte and Emily is more or less accurately portrayed [sic]. They, along with youngest sister Anne, wrote together and Charlotte was always trying to take Emily with her whenever she left for teaching jobs. But Charlotte was also disdainful of Emily, whom she viewed as difficult and limited in her writing. [...]

In the end, what we get is a glimpse at the books Emily has written, lying rather conspicuously on a shelf near her bed. Publication of Wuthering Heights shocked the public with its graphic portrayal of passion and forbidden love, much with the same effect that Lady Chatterley’s Lover would have almost a century later.  Charlotte was horrified. What shame will be visited upon the family. But, yet again, O’Connor chooses to play with the facts for her own convenience. Wuthering Heights, published a mere months after Jane Eyre, was written under a pseudonym. Charlotte would have easily been able to discern who wrote the shocking book because all three sisters wrote under related aliases. As a matter of fact, Jane Eyre was published under the alias that Charlotte had used in the past. [...]

I would have much preferred that O’Connor had chosen to create an original story in a gothic setting rather than fictionalize a biography for her own purposes. Emily Brontë has captivated the literati for years because so little is known. I can understand why O’Connor was fascinated and wanted to invent a backstory for a seemingly repressed young woman who wrote what was a scandalous book at the time but is now the gold standard of intellectual bodice-ripping gothic novels that came after the more demure prose of Jane Austen, books that were no less revolutionary for the time.

Production values are very good, revealing the beauty more than the danger of the moors. Cinematographer Nanu Segal, using a dark palette, sets a foreboding mood. “Emily” greatly benefits from a cast led by Emma Mackey who shines so brightly in the Netflix series “Sex Education.” O’Connor has made very good use of her pout and dark eyes, but Mackey takes full advantage of the script, infusing Emily with a personality of much complexity. Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays her secret love interest William Weightman and is definitely a man to long for. Alexandra Dowling as Charlotte is by turns surly and sweet, making her a cipher in this story. Poor Amelia Gething as Anne is given little of substance to do. Sadly wasted are two veteran actors of note, Adrian Dunbar as the girls’ father, Patrick Brontë, and Gemma Jones as Aunt Branwell. Emily and Weightman were given the lion’s share of development but it would have helped to shore up the other characters who, more than likely, played major roles in Emily’s life. (Neely Swanson)

An article on The Conversation discusses 'Victorian visions of the nation'.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is perennially crisscrossing the moors of the Pennines familiar to her author. Settings like Thornfield Hall and Morton School are situated first and foremost by their remote regional locations, rather than in relation to the geography of a wider England.

This foregrounding of regional characteristics complicates the status of both these places because they are sites where Jane, as both school mistress and governess, is responsible for teaching an English education that takes for granted the unity and cohesion of the nation. (John Blackmore)

NNN (Nigeria) looked for 'Love, obsession, lunacy and damnation in 11 tales on St Valentine’s Day'. One of them is Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has roughly the same relationship to love as hammers have to nails. The story of the turbulent relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff is one of obsession, hatred and revenge that might – just might, mind you – have eventually mellowed into the resigned mutual tolerance of marriage had Cathy and Heathcliff ever leaped the broom. But no! He had a temper like her jealousy, apparently, and her temper was nothing to be sneezed at either, while his jealousy was Olympic-gold standard. Ultimately, though, we have it on very good opinion (ie Cathy’s) that whatever their souls were made out of, his and hers were the very same stuff, which – if we might judge classic romance according to Plato’s theory of twin souls sundered – suggests that Wuthering Heights is not only a love story but also the greatest tale of Platonic love ever told.