'It's, like, primal, sexual'

BBC News has an article on the Brontë Women's Writing Festival event which featured Emerald Fennell.

Emerald Fennell spoke about her adaptation for the first time on Friday in author Emily Brontë's home town of Haworth, West Yorkshire. [...]

Fennell said: "I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it's an emotional response to something. It's, like, primal, sexual." [...]

Fennell told the Brontë Women's Writing Festival on Friday that she felt a "profound connection" with the book when she first read it at the age of 14. "It cracked me open," she said.

Emily Brontë's story of turbulent and tragic romance, written in 1847, is "difficult, it's complicated, it's just not like anything else", she said.

"It's completely singular. It's so sexy. It's so horrible. It's so devastating." [...]

When it came to making the film, Fennell, 39, said: "I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14."

She suggested that some of her risqué additions are things she thought she had remembered from reading the book as a teenager – but weren't actually in there when she returned to it.

"It's where I filled in the gaps aged 14," she said with a smile, adding that making the film had allowed her to "see what it would feel like to fulfil my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad".

Fennell had always wanted to adapt the novel throughout her career, she told the audience in Haworth, and was "extremely lucky" that after Saltburn she had the freedom to choose what she did next.

Wuthering Heights was the thing she wanted to do "most desperately", the writer and director said.

"I've been obsessed. I've been driven mad by this book," she said. "And of course now I'm even madder than I was before because I've thought of little else now for two years."

Adapting it is "a terror as well, of course, because it's a huge responsibility", she added. "Because I know that if somebody else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think."

It has also felt like "an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you", she explained. "I've actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.

"There's an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There's a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published].

"But it's been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can't love me back, and I have to live with that. So it's been troubling, but I think in a really useful way."

Speaking about Australian actor Elordi, Fennell said that she asked him to play Heathcliff after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day and he "looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read".

"And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.

"I had been thinking about making it [Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing... he's a very surprising actor."

Robbie, meanwhile, is "not like anyone I've ever met - ever - and I think that's what I felt like with Cathy".

The Barbie actress, also from Australia, is "so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything", Fennell said.

"I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind,” the director joked. “And that is who Cathy is to me. Cathy is somebody who just pushes to see how far she can go.

"So it needed somebody like Margot, who's a star, not just an incredible actress – which she is – but somebody who has a power, an otherworldly power, a Godlike power, that means people lose their minds."

Despite taking some liberties, Fennell said she had retained much of Brontë's original dialogue.

"I was really determined to preserve as much of her dialogue [as possible] because her dialogue is the best dialogue ever," she said. "I couldn't better it, and who could?" (Ian Youngs)

Telva (Spain) lists the film among other book-to-screen adaptations to come.

The i Paper has writer Elizabeth Day pick the 'five best novels about outsiders', and one of them is

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

“I first read this book when I was visiting the Caribbean island of Dominica where it is set. It’s a deeply atmospheric place, punctuated by active volcanoes and sulphuric hot springs. I had incredibly vivid dreams while there and Rhys’s novel adeptly conveys the intensity of the location while reimagining the story of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In Rhys’s hands, she is Antoinette, a Creole heiress in colonial Jamaica – too white to be accepted by the Black community, yet too Caribbean to be fully embraced by the British elites.

“Her outsider status is both cultural and psychological, intensified when she is married off to an Englishman who seeks to erase her identity. The novel powerfully interrogates race, gender, and empire, showing how outsiders are not merely marginalised but actively silenced by dominant structures.” (Anna Bonet)

Varsity discusses the literary canon.

Pride and Prejudice. David Copperfield. Jane Eyre. When you think of classic literature, these are just a few of the many titles that spring to mind. You most likely read them in school, or picked one off of a ‘100 books you have to read before you die’ list in a bookshop. But have you ever stopped to ask why? (Emma Gower)

New York Family recommends '6 Must-Reads by Local Authors' from Queens, including

Re Jane by Patricia Park

Re Jane is a witty, big-hearted story about love, resilience, and choosing a life that’s yours—not just one shaped by obligation. Crossing Queens, Brooklyn, and Seoul, it’s a fresh contemporary reimagining of Jane Eyre. Jane Re, a half-Korean, half-American orphan from Flushing, works as a nanny for Brooklyn professors Beth Mazer and Ed Farley. She’s begins a complicated relationship with Ed—until a family death sends her to Seoul. There, reconnecting with relatives and modern Korea, she rethinks her relationship with him and begins to focus on what she truly wants in life. Returning to Queens, Jane strives to balance two cultures and claim her own identity.

Patricia Park is an author and a tenured professor of creative writing at American University. She is from Flushing, Queens. (Adrienne Farr)

Lancashire Telegraph features Wycoller village.

Wycoller Hall ruins can be seen in the village and it’s thought that the 16th-century hall inspired Ferndean Manor, which features in Charlotte Brontë’s book Jane Eyre.

It adds: “The Brontes lived at Haworth, not far from Wycoller, and Charlotte would have passed through here on her way to Gawthorpe Hall when she went to stay with the Kay-Shuttleworths.

“Charlotte’s description of Ferndean Manor when approached from the old coach road fits Wycoller Hall perfectly.”

Lancashire County Council adds that other nearby landmarks were referred to by the Brontë sisters in their books, including Wuthering Heights. (Katie Collier)

A contributor to Ordinary Times writes about reading the poetry of Emily Brontë.