It’s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I’m drinking a pint of Emily Brontë beer in The Kings Arms. Other Brontës are on tap – Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte an IPA, Branwell a porter – but the barman says Emily, an amber ale with a “malty biscuit flavour”, is the most popular. It’s the obvious choice today, anyway: in a few hours, Oscar-winning film-maker Emerald Fennell will be at the Brontë women’s writing festival in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily’s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.
The film, to be released just before Valentine’s Day next year, is already scandal-ridden. It all started with Fennell’s casting of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (“Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Barbie”) Robbie causing uproar. [...]
“I sometimes feel, in the morning, that I could just walk around the corner and the sisters would be there talking to each other,” Diane Park tells me over a coffee in Wave of Nostalgia, her award-winning feminist bookshop. “They are still so alive here in this village.” Park’s shop sits near the top of the hill, on a road lined with terraced stone houses and quirky independent businesses. Seconds away is a lane leading to the church where the Brontës’ father Patrick was reverend. Behind it is a cluttered graveyard and the Brontë parsonage, where the family lived.
When Park moved here more than a decade ago, she had only read Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. Today, she reads one of Emily’s poems to me on the shopfloor: “Hope, whose whisper would have given / Balm to all my frenzied pain …” How did she feel when she first read Wuthering Heights? “I was blown away by Emily’s insight into the soul.”
The world was scandalised when Emily published it, under a male pseudonym, in 1847. It is the story of fiery Catherine Earnshaw and her relationship with outcast orphan Heathcliff, in whom she finds her match as they roam the Yorkshire moors: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
When Catherine marries Edgar Linton and dies, it sets haunted Heathcliff on a path of vengeance, as the second half of the novel becomes a story of control, abuse and digging up graves. While some critics admired its unique strangeness, many echoed one review that said: “The reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate.”
This didn’t stop Wuthering Heights from becoming a classic. It was made into a silent movie in 1920, with locals crowding around the shoot in Haworth and playing extras. The story later moved to a Hollywood studio and enjoyed the romanticised Golden Age treatment with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, minus that more problematic second act. And at least 15 big and small screen adaptations have followed, from Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1988 retelling in medieval Japan, to Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version with James Howson as the first black actor to play Heathcliff. (The main criticism levelled against the casting of Elordi is that Heathcliff is widely considered not white in the book.)
It was the BBC’s full-story 1967 series, starring Ian McShane as a brooding Heathcliff, that inspired Kate Bush to write her otherworldly hit, which brought Wuthering Heights into every home. “I just managed to catch the very last few minutes, where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass,” she has said, admitting she wrote the song before reading the book.
So why does this story of passion-ravaged lovers on rain-ravaged moors have such a hold? “I think Wuthering Heights endures because the relationships between Cathy, Heathcliff and Edgar aren’t easy to quantify,” says author Juno Dawson, who grew up in Bingley and calls the Brontës “the pride of Yorkshire”. Dawson was inspired by Wuthering Heights to write a short story for an anthology called I Am Heathcliff. “They don’t fit into traditional notions of a romance novel or a ghost story,” she continues. “And each character is frustrating, unfathomable. If there’s something I take from it, it’s that ambiguity can be as satisfying as neat resolution.”
I stroll over to where the Brontës lived, mingling with fellow visitors – mostly solo women whom I later spot at Fennell’s talk. “People have always come to make a pilgrimage,” says Rebecca Yorke, director of the parsonage and the Brontë Society, which opened in 1928. “If you look at the visitors book, there’ll be a mixture of UK, USA, Australia, Japan and Europe. About a third of our visitors are from overseas.” There are famous signatures too, from Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith.
This is actually my third visit, or pilgrimage, to the parsonage with my mum. It just keeps pulling us back. Today we learn that the trees in the garden separating it from the graveyard only grew after the Brontës’ time here. So the family would have had views of death on one side and endless moors on the other. The rooms are quite claustrophobic and downstairs is where they wrote their novels, on a table that has an “E” etched on it. In the corner is the sofa on which Emily died, most likely of tuberculosis, aged just 30. The life expectancy in Haworth was a mere 24, partly due to the overcrowded graveyard contaminating the drinking water. Such details from this place’s past still feel compelling in the present, especially when it comes to the author of Wuthering Heights.
“Emily is quite enigmatic,” says Yorke. “We don’t know as much about her as we do about Charlotte. And Wuthering Heights was her only novel – but it’s one of the best-known in the English language.” How, then, to square this woman described as peculiar, introverted and nonconformist, with the literary genius who created a novel so haunting, dark and poetic that it still fires people up today? As Charlotte said of her sister: “An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.” So much so that Charlotte made efforts to “correct” Emily’s reputation after her death, further adding to the mystery.
The siblings have proven almost as popular as subjects for drama as their works, from Christopher Fry’s 1973 ITV series The Brontës of Haworth to Sally Wainwright’s 2016 To Walk Invisible for the BBC. In 2022, Emily got a somewhat reimagined biopic, with a passionate portrayal by Emma Mackey, and a raunchy affair with a curate. With each new film or TV series, fresh hordes of tourists have flocked in to Haworth.
Down the hill, a record shop with a “Never Mind the Brontë” poster is just one of many nods to the local celebrities. Other windows boast a lampshade made from book pages and paintings of the moors. Authors live locally, or come to stay for writing retreats, says Park: “There’s that creative feeling in Haworth.” But does the Brontë effect have any impact on local culture in ways beyond the obvious? It runs deeper, says Park, with things such as the nature sculptures at nearby Penistone Hill Country Park, part of Bradford’s year as City of Culture. “It feels like Emily is in the heather and the trees. You just breathe the air. Wuthering refers to weather and I just feel she’s left her print here.”
It’s not just about tourism. Take last month’s Wandering Imaginations project, which saw two young authors from Bradford and two from Ghana writing stories inspired by the Brontë siblings’ fictitious African kingdom Angria. “We’re here for the people that live here,” says Yorke. The society has just acquired a new building on the main street, where it will focus on “opportunities for local people to get closer to their heritage”. She hopes to further “instil that sense of pride in something on your doorstep, something people across the world think is worth visiting.”
The event that ticks all the Brontë boxes, though, is the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, held on 27 July each year. Hundreds of people dressed in floaty red dresses come together in spots around the nation to sing and dance to the Kate Bush song. This summer, at Penistone Hill, it also doubled as a campaign to protect Top Withens – thought to be the inspiration for the fictional windswept farmhouse that gives the novel its name – from a planned windfarm development.
Of course, the beautiful Brontë country isn’t just for literary nerds. This has always been a rugged paradise for hikers and fell runners. The Tour de France pedalled through here in 2014, and inspired the Tour de Yorkshire. A moody walkway behind the parsonage leads to a waterfall named after the sisters, as they were said to spend time there. That magical feeling just gets stronger as you stomp around, retracing their tiny footsteps. “These heather-laden moors,” says Park, “call to you as much as they did to Emily, who roamed as free as Cathy.”
Night falls in Haworth and I head to the packed church. The young woman sitting next to me is visiting from New York, staying in an inn for the whole festival weekend, which includes a writing workshop out on the moors the next day. Fennell walks out wearing a T-shirt with “The Brontë Sisters” stamped on it in gothic lettering, heavy-metal style.
The book, she says, “cracked me open” after first reading it aged 14. She drew on that “primal, sexual” initial reaction for her film. What chimes most in the room, though, is how Fennell talks of Wuthering Heights speaking to her differently at various stages in her life. I recently read it again for the first time in 15 years and could not believe that I used to consider it at all sexy.
Many others agree. “If you read it as a teenager,” says Yorke, “you might just think, ‘Oh my goodness, to experience a love and passion like that would just be amazing.’ And then, as you get older, you might think, ‘Actually, this isn’t very … healthy.’” Fennell goes further: “It’s so bonkers.”
Perhaps that’s why she also “did the dirty” with the book’s second half, dropping it and sticking to the love story. This may have been a missed opportunity to explore Heathcliff with more nuance – although it’s impossible to say at this point. But there is a call for more exploration of the novel’s highly debated and complicated relationship with race.
Emily, who was well read, wrote it in the years after the abolition of slavery in the UK, and Heathcliff is found with no “owner” in Liverpool. Still, the film is Fennell’s version. “It’s very personal for everyone,” she says. “But I can’t make something for everyone: no one is in agreement about any element of it.”
Fennell certainly isn’t scared to shock, but Dawson is unconcerned. “If anyone’s going to do it, I’m glad it’s Fennell,” says the author. “She’s a director who isn’t afraid to actually adapt, rather than photocopy from book to screen.”
As I walk to my car in the dark , silence now enveloping the village and the moors, I remember something Park told me about Emily. “Her poetry gets so deep into your soul, into your heart,” she said. “I can’t express how alive it makes me feel.” (Hollie Richardson)
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