When most of us think of the Brontë sisters, we are transported to the wild, windswept moors of Yorkshire in northern England, where the celebrated sisters were born and raised – and where many of their books were set.But for a crucial two-year period in the early 1840s, two of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte and Emily – briefly became Brusseleirs. From 1842 to 1843, before their literary careers took off, the women taught at a girls’ boarding school called Pensionnat Heger in the city centre.“Very few people would associate the Brontës with Brussels, and they wouldn't think of Charlotte and Emily Brontë eating waffles in Grand Place – but they probably did,” says Helen MacEwan, a leading expert on the Brontë sisters and co-founder of the Brussels Brontë Group. (...)Helen, who moved to Brussels in 2004, has made it her mission in life to educate people about the Brontë sisters and their time in Brussels. Villette provided her gateway into what she describes as her “obsession” with the Brontës.“Shortly after moving here to work, I re-read Villette and became fascinated by the Brontë sisters’ time in Brussels,” says Helen. “You could say I became obsessed.”The novel resonated with her because, she explains, it is an “expat novel”.“It’s about an expat in Brussels observing, trying to adjust to a foreign city and foreign life. And it feels very modern, not only is it about a working woman, but there's a lot about mental illness in it – depression and isolation – and finding your place in a foreign city.”According to Helen, Charlotte Brontë’s feelings towards Belgium were “intense, but they were also painful”.“It was the place where she fell in love,” she says. “But she had mixed feelings because it was an unrequited love.”Charlotte was, Helen explains, “fairly satirical about the country and the people in general”. She criticised Belgians, primarily for their Catholicism, but also for being “too phlegmatic, too laid back – and for not really caring very deeply about anything”. (...)Over the years, Helen and the Brussels Brontë Group have made valiant efforts to inform people about the Brontë sisters’ link to Brussels – but she feels more can be done by local authorities to promote the connection.“I've always thought that the fact that the Bronte sisters lived here for two years is a really good literary link for Brussels and Brussels has never made as much of it as it could,” says Helen.In addition to the guided walks (organised via Waterstones) the group, which was founded in 2006, has organised numerous literary events over the years to celebrate the Brontë link.Emerald Fennel’s recent film interpretation of Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, has been a boon for the group, reigniting interest in the sisters’ work among a new generation of readers.While the reviews for film have been mixed to say the least, Helen is not among the naysayers. “Let's just say that I went expecting to hate it, and I found that I was quite well entertained,” she says. “It's just visually so wonderful.” (Katie Westwood)
Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell has spoken about the figures who have shaped and inspired her career, as she appears on The Independent’s Influence List marking International Women’s Day.From winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 to seeing Hamnet adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company — and most recently transformed into a star-studded film featuring leading British talent — O’Farrell has reflected further on the literary influences that have shaped her work.“There are so many women I look up to,” she says.“Creatively, I think about the Brontë sisters in their passage, writing, all three of them sat around the table and discussing their work and walking around and round the room reading it aloud to each other.” (Lucy Leeson)
Plans for an escape room attraction on a picturesque street near the world-famous Brontë Parsonage in Haworth have been rejected.The application included converting the upper floors of two Grade II listed cottages into an eight-room venue above a cheese shop but planners said the works would result in "substantial unjustified harm" to the building. (Chris Young)
It’s incredible to think that several of the greatest English novels were written by different authors in the same house, let alone that they were all related, and talent as rare as the Brontë sisters seems unbelievable, but in their Yorkshire home, titles like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were penned by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.The siblings were born in the village of Thornton, before moving to nearby Haworth, where their father became the perpetual curate at the parsonage – it was this small village, surrounded by sweeping countryside moors and perpetually gloomy weather, that inspired the sisters’ work, although one street in particular unlocked the key to their eventual success.Take a trip to Haworth, and you can visit the Brontë Parsonage, where relics of the family’s creative endeavours and personal lives are on display… You can even see the very spot where Emily succumbed to her weakening health, passing away at the age of just 30, but once you walk a short distance up the street, past the churchyard where you can see a plaque dedicated to Emily and Charlotte, you’re on the main street that runs through the village, and it was here that the sisters were granted access to a world beyond their own.
Last year, fellow Jane Austen fans had a bumper harvest of new shows and audiobooks as part of the 250th anniversary of her birth.And though the response to Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film version of Wuthering Heights has been pretty mixed, there’s no denying it’s brought about a bit of a Brontë boom; sales of the book have skyrocketed.(If you ask us, that’s a good reason to adapt the two Brontë novels that have never had a TV or movie version made).To me, that also means we’re long overdue for an Elizabeth Gaskell revival. After all, the author is said to have been influenced by Austen’s Pride & Prejudice when writing North & South (to great success, IMO).She also wrote the world’s first controversial Brontë biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë; she had been friends with the subject. (...)I think The New York Times were right to call her a “very Victorian feminist”. And I reckon fans of Brontë and Austen will enjoy her novels immensely; I certainly did. (Amy Glover)
Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.) (...)Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.) (...)Like Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Noem was aspirational, always trying to move up. Cathy traded up to the big house nearby; Kristi commandeered the Coast Guard commandant’s waterfront residence. (Maureen Dowd)
Books, unsurprisingly, are his lifelong companions. As a child, he was shaped by classics such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. (Rashmi Gopal Rao)
Jane Eyre´by Charlotte BrontëA landmark Victorian novel tracing Jane’s journey from hardship to self-respect. Her insistence on dignity and independence gives the romance enduring depth and power. (Sangeeta Das)
And now, the Wuthering Heights 2026 section:
El enorme mérito de la versión cinematográfica 2026 de Cumbres borrascosas es haber destruido, con una ráfaga de ametralladora de utilería FN SCAR–H color rosada, el malentendido –la maldición bienintencionada– trenzado durante casi dos siglos sobre Emily Brontë y su obra.El grito de horror propinado por las lectoras de literatura romántica ante la brutalidad –el grado cero de sevicia– del héroe brontëano del film, Heathcliff, es el grito de todas las generaciones que se rehusaron a aceptar la verdad intolerable de la demoníaca novela original.Ya fuera por razones de marketing, por su asociación con el género de terror, porque las prácticas BDSM exploten las taquillas; ya sea por los motivos más espurios, viles, bajos, antiartísticos y mercantiles, ninguno va a lograr opacar el hecho contundente de que esta versión capturó el espíritu bestial de la novela.Un espíritu que ninguna de las hermosas –románticas– versiones anteriores pudieron tomar. Aunque Lawrence Olivier haya sido el más grande actor trágico inglés y Juliet Binoche atesore toda la espiritualidad de la que carece Margot Robbi; pese a que Ralph Fiennes –¡un Heathclif rubio!– actuara y transpirara el personaje, cosa que no pudo hacer Jacob Elordi; aun así, las adaptaciones anteriores de Cumbres borrascosas son más infieles a Brontë que la directora Emerald Fennelll.A excepción, claro, del genial Luis Buñuel, que con el 1% del presupuesto de Fennelll, bajo los chaparrales tórridos de México y en las peores condiciones posibles, con actores de telenovelas con acento polaco –pese a que la productora se llamaba Tepeyac– logró realizar la más embrujada y fantasmagórica versión de Cumbres borrascosas del cine.El artefacto se llamó Abismos de pasión y, a diferencia del film de Fennelll, el suyo comulga hasta el tuétano con la pasión metafísica, el material del que está hecha la novela. Con sus actores de cuarta categoría, un vestuario lastimoso y los acentos espurios, Buñuel trazó con maestría las tensiones entre una superficie dramática y las profundidades del bien y del mal.Porque Cumbres borrascosas, y eso Buñuel lo entendió muy bien, es un romance metafísico: trata más de fuerzas que de personas. (Translation)
Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story. (...)But for most of the film’s running time, I was bored. After about an hour, I began to wonder when, how, and if all of this was going to end. Part of the problem is that for all their strenuous exertions, there’s no chemistry between Elordi and Robbie at all. Elordi is good-looking and swarthy enough, but he doesn’t have the hammy charisma of, say, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. It doesn’t help that, for the first third of Fennell’s movie before he makes his fortune and cleans himself up into Hot Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff resembles a stringy-haired, bushy-bearded hobo (like Charles Manson, but a lot taller). Whenever he kissed Margot Robbie, much less licked her fingers, I recoiled on her behalf. (...)Nor is Robbie well-served by the movie’s much-praised but actually ugly and unflattering costumes—the handiwork of Jacqueline Durran (who also designed the costumes for Barbie). Nearly every one of Robbie’s frocks features a tight-waisted bodice that makes her look like an opera coloratura instead of a Yorkshire ingenue, and a neckline (if it can be called that) cut to emphasise her heaving cleavage (I don’t know whether it was push-up bras or nursing, but Robbie isn’t that busty). (Charlotte Allen)
I am a sucker for movie adaptations of literary texts. So, despite the deluge of bad press, I simply had to watch Emerald Fennell’s recent remake of Wuthering Heights. Let’s say, the only good thing to have come out of that experience was my keen desire to revisit Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”, a year before her untimely death at the age of 30.My singular takeaway this time around is a deep appreciation of the story’s resistance to following a single arc or steady moral compass. The plot is unsuited to quick judgements because it is hard to affix feminist or misogynist labels on the text and be done with it. The psychological complexity of Brontë’s characters creates a slippery cognitive terrain for the reader. The frequent twists and turns in the plot, triggered by the gap between action and intention, leave us confused, unsure of whether to align our feelings with Catherine or Heathcliff, the two central figures. This difficulty also explains Fennell’s Mills & Boons-style interpretation in her movie version. The only way she could attempt to tame, and make presentable, a sublime but rugged masterpiece was by turning it into a Hollywood-style sob story. (Somak Ghoshal)
What remains largely unacknowledged is the middle ground between these poles – between the “savage” and the over-civilised, between material necessity and aesthetic excess. It is precisely this missing middle that makes the film so revealing. In glossing over labour while amplifying wardrobe spectacle, Wuthering Heights inadvertently mirrors the logic of contemporary fashion culture.Clothes come and go. Identities shift. Surfaces remain immaculate. What quietly disappears is the work – and the responsibility – that makes such transformations possible.Wuthering Heights ultimately gestures toward a reality the film itself only partially acknowledges. Beneath the heightened emotions and romantic excess lies a far more persistent force: the clothes that quietly regiment bodies, environments, and outcomes. (Piret Ilves)
Con todo esto, Fenell ha hecho su película importándole un bledo el realismo, la coherencia histórica y, sobre todo, la fidelidad a la obra original, porque a lo que es fiel a su propia visión y a lo que para ella significa la novela. Y, francamente, nada que objetar a esto. La creadora, cualquier creador, puede hacer lo que le dé la gana con los materiales previos. Libertad creativa, se llama eso. (...)¿Que le ha salido desequilibrada y desigual? No hay duda. ¿Que a ratos funciona y a ratos no? Así es. ¿Que es muy bella, pero en algunos momentos parece carecer de alma? También, también. Pero, ¿que esto es cine autoral, por más comercial que parezca la operación y todo el marketing previo? Indudablemente. (Áurea Ortiz Villeta) (Translation)
Esta Cumbres Borrascosas, es pésima, porque no cuenta la historia real, sino que un relato frívolo de quienes son la pareja de actores "bella" de la época. Obvio, no busca ser la versión definitiva y eso está bien, pero no es una película para quien espere un romance gótico clásico. Es una disección del amor cuando se convierte en obsesión. Y en ese sentido, es coherente, aunque no siempre equilibrada, lo cual la hace olvidable. (Leonardo A. Ramiro Reyes) (Translation)
Before we get into the meat of the thing, WB’s Wuthering Heights passed $75 million domestic on Friday and had previously passed $200 million globally on Thursday, with an as-of-Friday $205 million worldwide total. That probably deserved its own post, but... at least for the moment, discussing yet another “not what conventional wisdom says is successful” win for Warner Bros. is yet again a bitter pill. Once again, the likely reward for such efforts will not be fortune, glory, and/or promotions, but another round of consolidation-motivated lay-offs. That’s not even getting into broader concerns about consolidation and the political machinations behind what gets made and why.
A lucky Jacob Elordi fan got the surprise of her life last month when the Aussie actor gifted her with a piece of priceless memorabilia.Patricia Albassit had a chance encounter with the 28-year-old Brisbane-born actor during a commercial flight while he was in Australia to promote his new movie, Wuthering Heights.After landing, Elordi excused himself and ducked into a nearby bookshop and returned with a copy of Emily Brontë's famous novel.Elordi gifted her the book after he signed his autograph and included a message: 'Dear Patricia! I hope the sun comes out for you today. Love, Heathcliff.' (Anthony James)
Hace unos días, el portal Milanuncios anunciaba que el estreno de Cumbres borrascosas el pasado 13 de febrero había disparado las búsquedas del libro en plataformas de segunda mano, que habían aumentado un 455%. Club Victòria y Proa –que disponen de versiones en catalán del libro de Emily Brontë– han explicado a la ACN que el film ha impactado positivamente en las ventas, ampliando y renovando lectores. "Hay una nueva generación que lo ha descubierto, y eso es significativo" sostiene Josep Lluch de Proa. Blanca Pujals, de Club Victòria, cuenta que tuvieron que sacar adelante una nueva edición para servir bien a todas las librerías y subraya que es su título más vendido desde febrero. (...)El éxito de Cumbres borrascosas también ha puesto el foco en otras obras y ha hecho que lectores se interesen por ejemplo por Jane Eyre, de la hermana de Emily Brontë, Charlotte, un hecho que Lluch encuentra comprensible teniendo en cuenta que se trata de otra de las "grandes novelas inglesas del XIX".También lo confirma Pujals, que reconoce que ya se está notando "tímidamente" y que puede ser una tendencia que vaya a más. "Cuando uno empieza con una Brontë, tiene ganas de más", bromea. (Borja Duñó) (Translation)
Incidentally, The Sunday Times Bestsellers list puts Wuthering Heights as number 5 in the Fiction paperback section.
No sabemos quién es Heathcliff. En la novela, es un crío sucio, hambriento y oscuro que el señor Earnshaw recoge en las calles de Liverpool, lo que ahora llamaríamos un MENA, acrónimo que se ha convertido en un insulto que dice más y peor de quién lo enarbola en una manifestación contra un centro de acogida, que de los propios niños solos en un mundo tan violento como el de Cumbres borrascosas. (...)A Heathcliff, de existencia y corazón miserable, nada le importa más que su recuerdo y a los cineastas no les importa que la novela vaya mucho más allá de la muerte de Cathy. Emily no redime a nadie. Todos pierden en Cumbres borrascosas y, sin embargo, cuánta belleza en esta novela despiadada. (Mercedes Corbillón) (Translation)
El Español (Spain) visits Haworth, including the KVWR heritage train, the Parsonage and the moors. El Comercio (Perú) mentions a live Peruvian TV Cumbres Borrascosas from 1964, of which no recording survives. The Telegraph & Argus asks locals about Haworth pronunciation and well... it's complicated.
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