Emily Brontë did not care about being likable

The New York Times reviews Deborah Lutz's biography of Emily Brontë.

Emily Brontë did not care about being likable.

She was described as introverted, odd, guarded to the point of taciturnity, and her “extreme reserve seemed impenetrable,” said her friend Ellen Nussey. “Except to go to church or take a walk on the hills,” wrote her sister Charlotte, “she rarely crossed the threshold of home.”

Her one published novel, the darkly Gothic “Wuthering Heights,” was met with bafflement, but has come to be regarded as a work of genius, and Brontë is also today considered a poet of unusual power. This, combined with her early death and sparsely documented life, has led to a public image as a farouche outsider artist leaping around the Yorkshire moors like a Victorian Kate Bush.

As the scholar Deborah Lutz writes in her engaging new biography, “This Dark Night,” it’s not quite that simple. Emily was indeed a knotty character of “devilish ferocity,” but she was also informed, engaged, even cosmopolitan in her reading and outlook.

Emily left behind tantalizingly little ephemera. Much of this biography ends up being speculative. But by drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, the author is able to evoke the comets and heat waves her subject would surely have experienced; the local suicides she would doubtless have read about; the inn where she conceivably might have stayed. No detail goes unaccounted for, from (probable) feminine hygiene practices to (likely) interaction with a mesmerist.

Lutz pulls off this sometimes tricky approach with élan, partly because she isn’t wedded to one thesis. (Sadie Stein)

Variety has an exclusive on the UK cast of Jane Eyre. The Musical.

Charlie Burn and Ashley Gilmour are set to lead the cast of “Jane Eyre,” the musical by John Caird and Paul Gordon, when the show makes its U.K. premiere at Southwark Playhouse Elephant in London.

The play opens Aug. 28 and plays through Oct. 24.

Burn, who recently starred as Cady Heron in “Mean Girls” at the Savoy Theatre and has played Cosette in multiple productions of “Les Misérables,” will take on the role of Jane. Gilmour – currently in the West End run of “The Phantom of the Opera” and previously the lead in the U.K. and international tour and West End production of “Miss Saigon” – will play Rochester.

“I’m so honored to be joining the cast of the U.K. premiere of ‘Jane Eyre,’ a sweepingly beautiful musical that brings one of literature’s most beloved female icons to life,” Burn said. “The opportunity to work with theatrical royalty like John Caird, Paul Gordon and Megan McGinnis is incredibly special, and I can’t wait to get started.”

“It’s hugely exciting to join the cast of this wonderful musical, marking the first time it has been seen on U.K. stages,” Gilmour added. “Playing alongside the great Charlie Burn is set to be a thrill and I can’t wait to bring this epic story to the intimate setting of Southwark Playhouse, Elephant.”

The production will be co-directed by Caird, the Olivier and Tony Award-winning director who adapted and co-directed the original “Les Misérables” for the West End and Broadway and most recently helmed the stage adaptation of “Spirited Away” at the London Coliseum. He will share directorial duties with Megan McGinnis, the Broadway actress known for “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Women” and “Beetlejuice.”

The musical – based on Charlotte Brontë’s novel and tracing Jane’s path from orphaned childhood to independence, set against the gothic atmosphere of Thornfield Hall and her relationship with the conflicted Rochester – originally premiered in Toronto in 1996 before transferring to Broadway in 2000, where it received five Tony Award nominations. The Southwark production is being staged in the show’s 30th anniversary year and is produced by Adam Blanshay Productions in partnership with original Canadian producers David and Hannah Mirvish. (Naman Ramachandran)

Other news sites follow suit: West End Best Friend, Theatre Weekly, What'sOnStage, Theatre Fan, etc.

Still on the stage, London Pub Theatres Magazine gives 2 stars to the play Jane Eyre Convention.

Greeted by a Jane Eyre in drag offering us biscuits, we took our seats in the Bread and Roses Theatre, transformed for this night into the community hall, hosting the first ever Jane Eyre Convention. Describing itself as an "ill advised enactment of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre", we were served up a performance where four actors played out the main scenes from the more than excellent novel by Charlotte Bronte.

Perhaps the instruction to familiarise ourselves with the emergency exits, like those of a cabin crew just in case the flight hits some shaky patch or worse, was not exactly a metaphor but more a warning of where to run to if the show should crash and burn. For a comedy the night was surprisingly silent and short of laughs. Was it because of the references to dealing with some of the cast member's issues and neurosis, dealt with in a heavy or clumsy way. We were also reminded that this was a story of survival and it was easy to empathise with Jane's plight if you were in the audience that night.

It was easy to get the feeling that this play didn't really make the most of the massive amount of material from the novel. It had a fair attempt, and at a running time of just over an hour, you could be forgiven for thinking this was not everything the writer has to offer. The stark difference between attitudes towards many things from the period and the way the modern world would shred, criticise or destroy those opinions now-a-days was not entirely exploited. This major difference in the way people view the world could have been used, whether PC or not, to produce something more dynamic and funny; but it all depends on the amount of reverence you have for the source material. Though I have never thought parody or just crude piss-taking was ever a show of disrespect for the creator but more an expression of the writer's taste or even an intimate peep into their psyche.

On the other hand, the set, costumes and props gave it what I hope was a deliberate aura of tacky "am-dram" and in a way this worked well to adhere to it a certain amount of charm. It tried to get immersive by getting the audience involved by offering them broken "bickies" at half time, and the opportunity to join in by wearing a stupid-looking, though I know, historically accurate bonnet. But it was, for some reason, difficult to get fully committed to the whole thing. 

Like Dickens and many other titans of the Victorian Novel, Charlotte Bronte provides us with a text that is crammed with more than enough unbelievable twists of the story line, strange characters who turn up for the strangest of reasons, bazaar coincidences that revive what was looking like a derailed plot and so much other stuff to play with that it was a little sad that this wealth of material was not used to its utmost potential. Maybe a rethink is needed, or some additions, some more dynamic acting might make this into a better play and something worth seeing but at the moment it isn't much more than a really nice idea with some dedicated hard-working actors doing their best with what was at hand. I hope this isn't too harsh a comment to make and I hope it is just me who was disappointed. (Robert McLanachan)

Also 2 stars from a contributor to The Reviews Hub.

Not really a convention at all, but Jane Eyre done quickly. And unfortunately, even though the show lasts barely an hour, not quickly enough. Four Charlotte Brontë stans, donned in bonnets and frocks, meet to enact the famous story of Jane and her relationship with gruff Mr Rochester.  The premise may sound promising, but it’s undone by some very unfunny jokes and poor character development.

Welcoming the delegates with lanyards and Brontë biscuits, Prof Jane, Jeff Jane and Charlotte Jane begin proceedings only to be interrupted by a latecomer, Jane Air, who knows nothing of the book at all and is only there because her name is almost the same as the titular heroine. This new arrival is brought on stage to help with the retelling.

Writer Eleanor Zeal plays Prof Jane, the slightly bossy chairman of the society. Ben Everett Riley is Jeff Jane, who still smarts from his father’s many absences when he was growing up. Charlotte Jane, whose parents are from Jamaica, is played by Georgia Jackson, while Rachel Overd is Jane Air, who confides early, much too early, that her boyfriend is abusive.

With such a title, the show surely will attract audiences who are well aware of the identity of the woman in the attic and the subsequent postcolonial readings of the Gothic novel. But the cast does nothing new with these ideas, and Charlotte Jane, eager to highlight the racism within the novel, comes across as overly earnest, a bit of a killjoy. With an unnecessary joke about dyslexia and a panic attack scene involving a Gregg’s paper bag, Jane Eyre Convention struggles to find the right tone.

The actors try their best, but the script is thin, the slapstick heavy-handed, and the backstories insultingly weak. Of course, they are acting as amateurs, but even amateurs who love the source material as much as these people apparently do would have better ideas. Brontë deserves better. (Richard Maguire)

USA Today lists 'The best 2026 movies so far' and the list includes

8. 'Wuthering Heights'

Sure, it takes enough liberties with the original source material that it might make an Emily Brontë nerd's head explode. Still, it's impossible not to be pulled in thanks to director Emerald Fennell's sumptuous vision and Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's hot-blooded performances. They play childhood pals whose relationship turns quite complicated as adults when they begin a torrid love affair full of betrayal and resentment. (Brian Truitt)

Irish Independent looks into 'The Margot Robbie effect: Why the demand for Victorian jewellery is surging'.

Bless you, Margot Robbie, for fuelling the trend for weird Victorian jewellery.

For the London premiere of Wuthering Heights (2026), the actor wore a bracelet made from human hair. It was a museum-quality replica of a bracelet once owned by Charlotte Brontë and probably woven from the hair of her sisters, Emily and Anne. The original is now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Emily Brontë, author of the novel that inspired the film, died in 1848.

Anne died five months later, but Charlotte, the last surviving sibling, lived for six more years. She would have commissioned and worn the bracelet as a way of remembering the dead. The replica was woven by Wyedean Weaving in England. It’s beautiful and creepy in equal measure, as is the film.

The i Paper comments on the fact that Skipton in Yorkshire has been named 'the UK’s happiest place to live'.

Charlotte Brontë spent an unhappy few months in 1839 on the outskirts of Skipton in North Yorkshire, as governess to the unruly children of John Sidgwick, a wealthy cotton mill owner in the town.

Charlotte wrote to her sister Emily that she found the countryside, which is close by the Yorkshire Dales, to be “divine”. But the scenery did not make up for the misbehaviour of the Sidgwick children, whom she found to be “riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs”. Charlotte did not keep her job long, but she would have seen Skipton as it entered its Victorian heyday, with the chimneys of mills sprouting everywhere, a busy canal linking the town to Liverpool and Leeds, and a big sheep and cattle market in the town centre.

Nearly two hundred years after Charlotte was in Skipton, the mills are gone, demolished or converted to other uses, with only one chimney still standing. But the market in the broad high street in the town centre still takes place four days a week, though the cattle and sheep part has moved to a big facility on the edge of town, while the barges on the canal cater for tourists instead of transporting raw cotton, coal and stone from the quarries. As for everyday life, a survey by the property website Rightmove found Skipton to be “the happiest place” to live in the UK, though as Charlotte Brontë knew all too well, happiness is very much a matter of personal circumstance. (Patrick Cockburn)

Valencia Plaza (Spain) interviews writer Espido Freire:

-¿Crees que la literatura puede contribuir a preservar la memoria de los territorios rurales?

-Lleva siglos haciéndolo. Muchas veces conocemos mejor un paisaje por los escritores que por los geógrafos. Pensamos en la Asturias de Clarín, en la Castilla de Delibes, en la Galicia de Emilia Pardo Bazán o en el Yorkshire de las Brontë. La literatura conserva voces, costumbres, formas de hablar y maneras de entender el mundo que de otro modo desaparecerían. No sustituye a la historia ni a la documentación, pero guarda algo igual de importante, y me refiero a la experiencia humana. (Ana Artero) (Translation)