Victorian marriages

Emily opens in some cinemas in New Zealand tomorrow and Stuff reviews it.

British-Australian actor Frances O’Connor’s (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) lavish-looking and atmospheric directorial debut offers up an entertaining theory as to the genesis of Wuthering, but it’s one that Brontë purists may bridle at.

If you’re a stickler for historical truth, then Emily may leave you frustrated, as it conflates, twists and moulds events to suit its narrative.

However, if you’re looking to escape into a character study filled with gorgeous costuming, repressed feelings, caddish behaviour and Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar sporting horrendous mutton-chops as Emily’s dad Patrick, then this will be just the ticket.

It’s anchored by a terrific, compelling performance from Mackey (Sex Education, Death on the Nile). Reminding one of Keira Knightley at her most luminous, she’s mesmerising as the daydreaming, wary Emily. [...]

For all its playing fast and loose with the truth, O’Connor’s Emily is certainly an impressive debut, demonstrating an assurance, both in the scripting and direction.

There’s an intimacy to the shooting style that draws the viewer in and if, tonally, it sometimes jars, that feels more a reflection of its central character’s awkwardness, than a fault of the storytelling. (James Croot)

New Zealand Herald is giving away 10 double movie passes to see it.

Eye for Film gives the film 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre have tended to portray the Yorkshire landscape with great sweeping vistas, positioning its emptiness as a landscape of possibility and freedom. O’Connor does this relatively little; for the most part, we are down in the valleys where low stone houses huddle away from the storms. Windows look out at grassy slopes, at foreshortened horizons. The grass is thin; there is dirt everywhere, and endless drudgery involved in keeping it at bay, with which Emily is frequently occupied (as she was in life). This is no country for tall poppies. At what might be Emily’s moment of triumph, the smallness of her father’s ambition brings it all back down to size. O’Connor does not fall for the myth of a romantic place which breeds talent. Instead she recognises the pressure cooker effect of a tightly constrained world. Passion bursts out when all there is is freedom of thought; and sometimes it falls upon stony ground, and sometimes it alights upon the page.

Whatever else she might have dreamed or done, Emily’s life was restricted and short. With dazzling confidence and vision of her own, O’Connor grants her moments of true freedom in the imaginary. (Jennie Kermode)

The New York Times reviews Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, by Brigitta Olubas.

Her parents were an unhappy pair raising two unhappy daughters who, in that warring household between two real wars, did not bond but became adversaries. The only mention of any connection between the siblings came with the Second World War when they, like the sisters Brontë and Alcott before them, wrote epic romances, theirs about injured pilots and devoted girls. (Lily King)

Also in The New York Times a review of Ewan Morrison’s new novel How to Survive Everything.

His 15-year-old daughter, Haley, who is the novel’s protagonist, will spend the entire book alternately resenting and worshiping her father, but initially she is dismayed by her new digs: “It looked like an ancient, abandoned farmhouse surrounded by an old ivy-covered stonewall. It was gray-black, mildewed and decayed-looking against the gray sky, all desolate and ‘Wuthering Heights’-like. Weird, in other words.” (Ben H. Winters)

A young reporter from This Is Local London discusses whether classics are relevant in 2022.

Even supposedly feminist classics like Jane Eyre are problematic in the sense that the focus is on Eyre’s relationship with Rochester, marriage being the end goal which epitomises her happiness. (Eleni J. Taylor)

If marriage had 'epitomised' Jane's happiness she would have married St John, so perhaps there's more to it? Classics are still relevant if read and understood properly, if taken as pamphlets or self-help books then they are not.

A contributor to Palatinate defends BookTok.

That’s not to say the only books which appear on BookTok are self-help guides, novels about adolescent heartbreak, or Russian mafia erotica. For every video on The Mountain is You, It Ends With Us, and Nikolai, there is one on Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Whatever your taste, BookTok has something to whet your appetite. Even before reading the books, there is something intimate about a stranger on the other side of your screen sharing their copy with you. The makeshift bookmark folds in the corners, the neon-coloured sticky notes tumbling out the sides, the tiny annotations pencilled across each page. It is hard to think of anything more special than reading a book, except maybe for being able to share that experience with someone else. (Josie Lockwood)

Ser (Spain) features the book Más allá de Austen, diez mujeres que cambiaron la Literatura by Ana Cemborain and Cristina Blanco.

Denunciaban una sociedad clasista, un orden social donde la mujer tenía su lugar en la casa y carecía de voz propia, un mundo en el que el amor era importante, pero que no estaba acostumbrado a mujeres que defendieran sus convicciones hasta el final. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, las hermanas Brontë, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Wharton, Lucy Maud Montgomery y Flora Thompson nacen en el siglo XIX y beben del magma social que encontraron. Todas ellas son las protagonistas de ‘Más allá de Austen, diez mujeres que cambiaron la Literatura” [...]

El proyecto surgió en tierras inglesas y justo en el pueblo donde vivieron las hermanas Brontë. “Siempre hemos sido muy seguidoras de este tipo de escritoras. Es lo que nos motivó a irnos cinco días de vacaciones a Inglaterra al pueblo de las Brontë, estar por aquellos páramos y es lo que nos inspiró para empezar el proyecto”, dice Cristina. Para cerrar el círculo y terminar el libro se fueron a la casa que la familia de Ana tiene en un pequeño pueblo de Ávila, Navadijos, y allí después de un intensó fin de semana pusieron el punto y final. “Después dimos un paseo por el campo para respirar ese aire puro del pueblo y relajarnos. Lo habíamos terminado” dice Ana. [...]

Ambas consideran injusto colgar la etiqueta de autoras románticas a todas estas mujeres, que con sus historias demostraron ser mucho más. “Es cierto que nos gustan los bailes, los vestidos de época…, pero la Literatura que hacían no era sólo eso. Por ejemplo, Elisabeth [sic] Gaskell es una escritora social básicamente, aunque los editores querían que sus personajes femeninos tuvieran más peso. Las novelas de las Brontë romántico, romántico, no es, sobre todo, es sufrimiento”, dice Ana.

Uno de los denominadores comunes estas escritoras del siglo XIX era que sus personajes reivindican a una mujer encorsetada, haciendo una crítica social importante, usaban lo que conocían de su época y los límites que tenían para reflejarlos en sus libros e intentar romperlos, dicen. Por eso, también reconocen en ellas actitudes feministas. Así, las Brontë aconsejaban no casarse si no era por amor, para no dejar llevarse por intereses económicos o sociales. “Ella lo llevó a rajatabla en su vida, aunque de las once, la única que tuvo una familia feliz y matrimonio feliz fue Gaskell”. Y aun así intentan tener finales de esperanza reflejar lo que les gustaría que hubiese sido, pero otras, “si no sale no pasa nada, ocurre en Cumbres Borrascosas, por ejemplo. Pero creo que eran bastante feministas dentro de lo que podían, aunque no era una reivindicación como tal, sino que lo llevaban de forma natural”, afirma Ana. (Pilar García) (Translation)

Charlotte Brontë also had a happy--if short-- marriage.

Gallatin News has put together a list of the '100 best miniseries of all time' and Jane Eyre 2006 is one of them.