The grandmother of the girl-in-peril-at-a-mysterious-estate tale

More on Emerald Fennell, her film Saltburn and her Brontë references in Time:

Is there a similar tension playing out in the scene where Oliver humps Felix’s grave? Is that about lust, or grief, or are they also linked?

It's about grief. It's about love. It's an attempt to get some form of impossible closure. And the reason that scene is so long is because we needed the whole emotional journey. It's an attempt at something that is totally futile; Oliver himself understands how absurd and appalling and ridiculous is the position he's in. There's a scene in Wuthering Heights after Cathy dies when Heathcliff digs down to her coffin and tries to get to her. It’s very clear what he's intending to do, which is to, at the very least touch her, kiss her. So it's part of the Gothic tradition that sex and death are kind of intertwined. (Belinda Luscombe)

AV Club mentions the same scene:

She had similar feelings about the grave scene, in which Oliver strips and fucks Felix’s freshly buried grave. At the October Q&A, Fennell said the scene was inspired by a scene in Wuthering Heights “where Heathcliff tries to dig down into Cathy’s grave, and the sort of implication, subtext there is very much made text, I suppose, in this film.” Of the lengthy sequence, which “goes from funny to horrible to terrible to sort of weirdly sexy to awful again,” she said, “[In] terms of cutting away, of course everyone wants you to, you know, of course the producer and the distributor says a lot of, ‘Are you going to cut away? Can you cut away there? No, you will cut away there,’ and I said, ‘No.’ Because when I saw it, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” (Mary Kate Carr)

CrimeReads has put together a reading list of 'brave women in mysterious circumstances'.

A love of those kinds of books led me fairly quickly from other teen suspense/horror authors like Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan to the more adult fare of Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart. Holt’s and Stewart’s books were considered classics of “romantic suspense” by the time I was a teenager, but I always put their books squarely in the same Gothic canon as books like Jane Eyre.

In fact, Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting have a lot in common with Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel. All three novels have a young governess coming to an isolated estate to take care of a difficult charge. All three stories have a secret related to the family that owns the estate that the heroine must uncover. And all three stories dare the young woman to decide if she should trust some wealthy, brooding man with her love.

I eventually outgrew the nonstop reading of Gothics, but I still love stories where a woman finds herself in uncharted territory, where she doesn’t have all the facts, where she must uncover the truth and determine who to trust (broody rich guy entirely optional). [...]

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847)

The grandmother of the girl-in-peril-at-a-mysterious-estate tale, the template from which so many others followed. Jane herself is distinguished by her bravery, by her strength of character, by her dogged determination to discover the truth about the strange goings-on at Thornfield Hall and its master, Mr. Rochester. Every year, in October, I re-read this book along with my other Gothic favorites. You can’t beat the atmosphere, especially in the Thornfield section of the book. 176-year-old spoiler: It also introduced the notion of the “attic wife”, a devastating moment in the story that has become a modern internet meme. (Christina Henry)