A kind of emotional truth

According to Time, Frances O'Connor's Emily is one of 'The Best Movies of 2023 So Far'.

Emily

We know very little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, one of the great gothic novels, a story of melancholic obsession and of love that seeps into the soil of the grave. But Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, which blends fact with fanciful fiction, paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person Emily Brontë might have been. Emma Mackey plays Emily, the sheltered and eccentric daughter of an uptight Yorkshire curate, growing up with siblings—including the competitive, passive-aggressive Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling)—who help shape the writer she’ll eventually become. But the spark that truly ignites her imagination is an intensely erotic but ill-fated love affair with the young curate hottie, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who has come to assist her father in the parish. Is this really how Wuthering Heights came to be? Almost certainly not. But in surfing the wave of Brontë’s unknowability, O’Connor ultimately reaches a kind of emotional truth, one that chimes with the ideas this enigmatic writer folded into the prose of her only book. (Stephanie Zacharek)

Kate Griffin, the author of Fyneshade, discusses Henry James's The Turn of the Screw on LitHub.

My new novel, Fyneshade, owes a great debt to Henry James and also to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The glory of ‘governess gothic’—as I like to think of it—is that it allows the central character to occupy a space that is a crossing point. Neither upper class, not quite servant class, the governess is an outsider and observer. My own ‘turn of the screw’ to the genre is the fact that Marta, my beautiful young governess, is the most terrifying thing in the house.

Núvol (in Catalan) interviews writer Luna Miguel and asks her about her experience reading for 48 hours in public.

Aquest passat mes d’abril vas dur la teva Lectora Somàtica al límit amb la performance ‘La muerte de la lectora’, en la que et vas tancar a llegir ininterrompudament durant 48 hores, davant d’un públic que t’observava.

Amb aquesta performance vaig aconseguir accedir a un espai que desconeixia del meu cos, i que em va interessar molt: l’espai dels somnis en relació amb la lectura. En els instants de petitíssimes migdiades durant el procés em venien malsons bogíssims. Somiava que estava allà al teatre, en pijama, llegint, i que venia Jane Eyre a llançar-me coses amb la voluntat d’assassinar-me. Vaig comprendre que la lectura segueix en el somni. El llibre es continua escrivint dins d’una. Si bé un llibre el pots tancar, el somni no es pot interrompre. Properament, m’agradaria escriure sobre com afecta el que llegim als nostres somnis, però llavors m’hauria de llegir a Freud i mil coses que no em venen de gust ara mateix. (Adrià Ibáñez Pelegrí) (Translation)

A contributor to Cosmopolitan blames Jane Eyre for her preference for 'older men'.

Then there’s the simple fact that I like older men because I do. Call it a kink, call it a type, chalk it up to the often untraceable and unseen forces that influence the unique thumbprint of our sexual preferences. Either way, no one should have let me read Jane Eyre at such a young age. (Kayla Kibbe)