Corrupting Women in Lost Houses

BBC describes Margot Robbie's stay in Yorkshire while shooting Wuthering Heights:

The locations chosen for the new film included Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and the village of Low Row. Robbie, 35, stayed at the hotel Simonstone Hall, near Hawes, with other cast members. (...)

The hotel is a "historic country lodge" where presenter Jeremy Clarkson famously got into a fight with a Top Gear producer in 2015.

A staff member said Robbie was "very lovely" and even enjoyed a Sunday roast and afternoon tea there with her husband and new baby.

The employee told the BBC: "The weekend was great fun, where she met lots of other guests and visitors and she introduced her baby to the resident pigs and peacocks here."

The film crew's base camp was near Holiday Home Yorkshire in Reeth, whose owner said it was "very exciting" seeing the trailers in the tiny village.

One local holiday let owner said he saw Robbie driving a tractor with her co-star - although the agricultural vehicles were not invented until the late 19th Century.

He said: "There were four tractors, old-fashioned open-to-the-elements style and they were being escorted by two Range Rovers."

Another Dales resident said he had seen filming at Surrender Bridge, which is close to an old lead smelting mill. The landmark also featured in the opening scene of the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small in the 1980s and is on the Coast to Coast path route.

The film's base camp was located in rural Arkengarthdale

Crew members also stayed at the Charles Bathurst Inn, in Arkengarthdale, and were described as "very friendly". (Hayley Coyle)

The Telegraph shows literary houses that have been lost

 High Sunderland Hall

At the time of its demolition in 1950, High Sunderland Hall was a derelict, roofless shell, but its destruction forever robbed us of a slice of Brontë history. The gothic manor house, which had loomed over the Shibden Valley outside Halifax since it was built for the Sunderland family in the 17th century, is believed by many to have been the model for Wuthering Heights, the house at the heart of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name.

For six months from September 1838, Brontë was employed as a schoolmistress at Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill house, just a mile or two away from the Hall. It’s thought that she could see it from the school’s top windows, passed by it on bracing walks with her pupils and was perhaps even invited inside. What evidence survives shows that it had the same exposed and remote situation as its purported fictional counterpart, the same richly carved grotesque statuary on its façade, and the same air of decayed grandeur. Its floorplan was a close match for the foreboding house where Cathy and Heathcliff grow up in the novel, too.

In the late 1940s it was reportedly offered to both the Brontë Society and the Halifax Corporation by its final owner. But its foundations had been dangerously weakened by mining and successive tenants had neglected repairs, so the high cost of bringing the building back from the brink saw it sacrificed to the wrecking ball instead. (Felicity Day)

Texas Public Radio reviews Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores:

Brother Brontë is hard to define. But it is full of adventure, profound themes and unforgettable characters. It’s an electric look at a future that is somehow plausible and resonant. (Yvette Benavides)

NoHo Arts District gives information on the Jane Eyre production in Pasadena:

Mystery and romance abound in A Noise Within’s production of Jane Eyre, the thrilling and heart-wrenching tale of self-determination by Charlotte Brontë, adapted by Elizabeth Williamson and directed by Geoff Elliott. (...)

“I read the adaptation first, having never read the novel, and I couldn’t put it down—it set me on fire,” says Elliott. “It’s a deeply affecting love story that’s also a Gothic horror tale, at once stirring, terrifying, with an impending sense of violence, and, in the end, uplifting. Williamson did a remarkable job of distilling the novel, which I’ve since read three times, into a sweeping, fast-moving two hours that moves like a river.”

A one-hour INsiders Discussion Group will take place prior to the matinee on Sunday, March 30, beginning at 12:30 p.m. Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Friday (except the preview) and on Sunday, April 6. Student matinees are scheduled on select weekdays at 10:30 a.m.; interested educators should email education@anoisewithin.org. (Renee Ronceros)

 Can't we just wait and see? The Guardian steps in in the Wuthering Heights 2026 controversy:

Last week, images were leaked from the shoot of Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine Earnshaw, has been seen in a white wedding dress, which has distressed self-proclaimed ­historical experts.

Has Fennell committed a crime against period dress? Even Vogue felt the need to weigh in.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has been under fire since it announced lead casting last September. Part of this was inevitable: a female artist such as Fennell, who is both hyper-talented and hyper-privileged, gets two successful films or albums before the envious backlash kicks in.

It didn’t help that, in tackling Wuthering Heights, she was taking on one of the few classic novels to touch with nuance on race in 19th-century England – a nuance altogether lacking from the social media chat about ethnicity and casting.

Robbie’s co-star is Jacob Elordi, a white, dark-haired actor who plays the adult incarnation of the outcast orphan Heathcliff. Brontë clearly wrote Heathcliff as a character who is ostracised in rural Yorkshire in part because he looks foreign to English eyes.

In Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, Heathcliff was played by James Howson, the first actor of black heritage to take the role.

To many racially conscious Brontë fans, including prominent American film critics, Fennell’s choice of a white actor felt like a step backwards. But what form Heathcliff’s “foreignness” takes is deliberately ambiguous in Brontë’s text. In a much-analysed line, one neighbour says Heathcliff could be “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”. Arnold herself had originally searched for a Romany actor.

All the text tells us for sure is that Heathcliff’s adoptive father claims to have found him on the streets of Liverpool. The city’s associations with the slave trade often suggest to contemporary readers that Heathcliff is the child of an enslaved African. That is entirely possible.

But it is also possible he was the child of the seafaring Spanish and Basque community, established in Liverpool during the 19th century. One such prominent family was the Elordietas. They would have looked not unlike a certain Jacob Elordi, whose Basque father emigrated to Australia at the age of eight.

When we assume that a dark-haired outsider must be of African origin, we let English racism off the hook. We forget how narrowly beauty standards defined “Englishness” to exclude even a hint of darker colouring. English chroniclers under the Tudors, keen to whip up anti-Spanish prejudice, would routinely accuse the Spanish population of being miscegenated with north African blood, attributing conventional Spanish dark looks to this ancestry. These attitudes were still around in Brontë’s day. (Kate Maltby)

NewsBytes suggests you improve your vocabulary by reading Wuthering Heights:

Discover descriptive language in 'Wuthering Heights'

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is famous for its vivid descriptive language.

How can you forget the moody landscapes of the Yorkshire moors?

From this, you can learn how adjectives are effectively used to evoke atmosphere and emotion.

By studying Brontë's use of descriptive language, you can gain insights into crafting more expressive sentences. (Anuji Trehaan)

Female sexuality in books is discussed in The iPaper:

Romances, in particular, were charged with corrupting women’s virtue as authors like the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen popularised the genre in the 18th century. (Gwendolyn Smith)

Scroll.in discusses Jane Austen:

Austen had many critics after her death. Charlotte Brontë called her writing “a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden … I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” (...)

The greatest praise for Jane Austen, however, comes from Virginia Woolf. Writing about women writers in A Room Of One’s Own, this is what she says about Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.” Woolf regarded Jane Austen and Emily Brontë as two women who wrote as women write and not as men write and goes on to say, “What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it, and Emily Brontë. They wrote out of themselves,” she added. (Shashi Despande)

Newsday talks about a recent talks by Sarah Jessica Parker and her mother  at Adelphi University Writers and Readers festival:

[Adriana] Trigiani asked Parker and Forste a series of questions about formative books they hold dear, such as the first book they remembered reading and owning, comparing Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, and whether it’s important for a main character to have a moral compass. (Maureen Mullarkey)

Emma Vocchi has read Wuthering Heights and writes about her experience in Vogue (Italy):

Leggendo Cime Tempestose ho imparato che a volte vale la pena lottare per certi amori, certe anime speciali. A volte vale la pena assecondare le proprie pulsioni, perché solo così si può essere davvero felici. (Translation)

Festivaltopia shares some beautiful covers including some classical Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Also in Festivaltopia the most misunderstood characters in literature include Heathcliff and Bertha Mason. Shanghai City News Service is excited about Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights production now playing in Shanghai.

Finally, new episodes can be found on both Behind the Glass (Mia Ferrullo, artist, master's student, and part of the team at the Brontë Parsonage Museum) and House of Brontë (a tribute to Maria Branwell Brontë).