2026. A Brontë Year

As 2025 drew to a close, the feeling of living through end times intensified. We witnessed how the banality of evil—so eloquently described by Hannah Arendt during Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem— migrated from perpetrators to victims, becoming state doctrine to rationalize the systematic elimination of enemies. Vengeance and cruelty emerged as new standards of conduct, applauded by America and met with the acquiescence of much of the Western democratic world.

We’ve watched the post–World War II global order collapse, with Russia slowly but irreversibly sliding back toward tsarist grandeur and the suppression of dissent, while the United States threw out the rulebook, stared into the totalitarian abyss, and embraced its reflection in accelerating isolationism. The serpent’s egg, slowly incubated since the 2007 crisis, has now hatched worldwide—in Argentina, Hungary, Italy, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Poland, Slovakia, India... Only a miracle could prevent the next electoral cycle from bringing to power in Germany, the UK, France, or Spain the very groups eager to dismantle everything it took decades to build during the twentieth century.

These populist movements, backed (and hacked) by techno-feudal lords inheriting the post-capitalist era, will complete what the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberals and progressives handed them on a silver platter: the reshaping of the welfare state into the dystopia of AI dictatorship. Think of it as a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, but without the proletariat (now replaced by social media users), and without Marx, but with Bezos or Musk instead.

The left never saw it coming, too busy waging Byzantine battles over pronouns and chromosomes. Some remain trapped there still, oblivious to the revisionist hurricane now engulfing everything, unaware that the grassroots supporters who once sustained progressive discourse were long ago expelled from the paradise of political correctness by the very people now lamenting the rise of populism.

The barbarians have reached our shores, and as we lick our wounds, we’d do well to remember Martin Niemöller’s words: ”First they came for the you-know-who, and I did not speak out, because I was not a you-know-who.” Exaggerated? It’s enough to read what one of the gurus of the transition to technofeudalism thinks: Peter Thiel, probably one of the most powerful people you’ve never heard of  and one of the biggest donors to the MAGA golden boy J.D. Vance. Without mincing words: ”I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

On the Brontë front, 2026 will be, no doubt about it, the year of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights film adaptation. It opens, as you all know, on February 13 and will monopolize, for good, bad, and everything in between, the conversation for months. There’s no need to repeat here all that has been said about the trailer, the actors, or the nymphomaniac nuns... As far as we know, there are no plans to present the film at festivals (only Sundance could fit the timings; the Berlinale could only host a special presentation but not include it in the main competition). The companion album score by Charli XCX will also be released in February, and we are pretty sure it will become a hit. Another film that will travel through a very different distribution channel is Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned, an independent horror film premiering in 2026, likely hoping to profit from some of its big brother's momentum. Exactly the same effect that the dramatized audiobook Heathcliff (February) will try to do, revisiting Heathcliff's missing years.

In the publishing arena, the main competitors (among the ones we know) for the Brontë crown of the year will be Eleanor Houghton's most-anticipated Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes (February) and, as the publicity says, "The first full-length biography in over twenty years of Emily Jane Brontë"; Deborah Lutz's This Dark Night. Emily Brontë. A Life (May). Curiously, another "only new biography of Emily to be published in the last twenty years", the one by Claire O'Callaghan, Emily Brontë Reappraised will be reissued in a new expanded and revised edition". Susan Dunne will also publish Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell: Their Lives, Friendship and Writings (March), where she promises to "shed new light on the enduring impact of a friendship that helped shape our understanding of one of literature’s most beloved figures." A couple of Brontë retellings: Catherine (February) by Essie Fox where Catherine becomes the narrator of her own story and  The Last Wolf of Thornfield (April) by Polly J. Mordant where Jane Eyre is retold as a werewolf story and a detective time travel story with a Bronté twist: The Haunting of a Brontë  (June) by Amelia Blackwell, completes the literary panorama.

On the stage, the Brontë season begins with a revisitation of Gin & Gothic: A Brontë rocktale (first premiered in Denver in 2024), now in Boulder (January). Several productions of different Jane Eyre adaptations will be performed: In Kenilworth, the Catherine Prout adaptation (February); the Polly Teale adaptation will be performed in Stamford (March), Brighton (May), and Birmingham (July). A new adaptation by Emma Watson will be performed in Coffs Harbour (Australia) (March), and another by Erin Shields will be premiered in Ottawa in October, and the This is My Theatre company will tour England with their own adaptation. The Gordon & Caird musical will appear in Arlington, Cleburne, or Widnes, but the big event will be the Manhattan Concert Productions concert at Lincoln Center in New York (February). Polly Teale's Brontë will be produced in Whitfield (May) and in Wigan (October). Another (very different) take on the Brontë biography is Sarah Gordon's Underdog. The Other Other Bronté Sister, which premiered at the National Theatre in 2024 and is now being taken to regional stages: in Chorley (February), Northwich (April), Banbury (June), and Coventry (September). Jodi Mand's Brontë: A World Without continues to be performed in Canada, now in Scarborough, ON (July). The Lucy Gough adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall will be performed in Aberystwyth (March).  Meanwhile, the Bos Theaterproducties company will continue touring the Netherlands with their musical farce De onverwoeste zusters van Hoogezand-Sappemeer (January-February).

At the time of writing this, the Brontë Parsonage Museum has not announced what this year's exhibition will be. We do know, though, that the Brontë Birthplace will have an exhibition of pictures by the photographer Garret Wilde.

As we always say, this is what we know. And we know that we don’t know many things that will pop up throughout the year. All of these, the ones we know and the ones we don’t, will surely make 2026 a very Brontë year.