Happy 208th Birthday, Emily Brontë

Two hundred and eight years since Emily was born in Thornton, and she's had the kind of year we don't usually get: a box-office hit and an auction record, back to back, both loud enough that you didn't need to be a Brontëite to notice.

On screen. Emerald Fennell's adaptation opened in February to the kind of divided reception this novel seems to specialise in provoking — a middling critical consensus, a lukewarm CinemaScore, and audiences who showed up anyway. It topped the box office on debut and kept climbing, eventually closing out around $242 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest releases of the year regardless of what anyone thought of Margot Robbie's Cathy or the liberties taken with the source. Whatever your verdict on the film itself, it did the one thing adaptations rarely manage: it got people who hadn't opened the book since school arguing about it again.

Under the hammer. Then, on 30 June, Christie's put the record to rest on a question that's lingered for a while: what is a first edition of Wuthering Heights actually worth now? The three-volume 1847 set — bound with Anne's Agnes Grey, still in its original publisher's cloth, one of only a handful of surviving copies in that condition since a copy last came to auction in 1908 — sold for £1,206,500. That's not just a record for Emily; Christie's confirmed it as the highest price ever paid at auction for a printed book by a woman, and the most expensive piece of 19th-century literature to change hands, full stop. The Ellis Bell pseudonym on the title page suddenly reads very differently against that number.

Oh, the irony. A book published under a man's name because nobody in 1847 believed a woman could write something this unruly just set the price record for any book by a woman, ever. Emily never saw a second printing, never mind a seven-figure hammer price. She'd probably have found both the film and the auction faintly ridiculous — but she'd have taken the money.