Bonnie Greer. In Memoriam

Bonnie Greer, the American-born British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster, died on 15 September 2026, aged 77. For Brontëblog readers, Greer will be remembered for serving as President of the Brontë Society in 2011, a position she held until June 2015. She had already been involved with the Society's activities in Haworth, and her appointment reflected her longstanding admiration for the Brontës. She later said that she had accepted the presidency because  

One of the reasons that I accepted the Presidency is not only because I love the work of the Brontës, but because both the members and the Council have been welcoming and supportive. And because of Yorkshire - the people and the region. (Brontë Parsonage Blog, November 2014)

Her particular interest was Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights. At the 2011 Ilkley Literature Festival, she discussed Emily's language and its musical quality, as well as Heathcliff, race and abolitionism. In 2012, during a Brontë Society Annual weekend, Greer participated in a discussion of Wuthering Heights (A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights, with Terry Eagleton and Caryl Phillips) and revealed that she was writing a screenplay based on the speculation that Emily Brontë had met Frederick Douglass in Leeds in 1847¹.

The connection between Emily Brontë and Douglass remained important to Greer. In 2015, in a Brussels Brontë Group weekend talk, she was still discussing possible Brontë links with the abolitionist, while also working to make the Brontës more accessible to younger and more diverse audiences. Also in 2015 she led, with Judith Watts, a Jane Eyre fan-fiction workshop at The Trouble Club in London.

Greer resigned as president in June 2015 in a particularly agitated Brontë Society moment. Her Jimmy Choo moment at that year's AGM has become something almost legendary:

According to witnesses, the meeting saw Bonnie Greer, the writer and President of the Society, keep order using her Jimmy Choo heel on the top table, as critics from both sides waiting to hear how the Brontë name should best be preserved. (The Telegraph, June 2015)

Not any Jimmy Choo, though:

Greer said she took a high-heeled shoe to Saturday's meeting as a light-hearted prop to use to keep order.

"I brought my shoe because it's been, for some of us, so grim, that I thought, I'm going to make this funny," she told BBC Radio 4's The World At One.

"So I brought out the shoe, made for me by Jimmy Choo himself, and said, 'I'm going to bang this if it gets out of control'." (BBC News, June 2015)

Her association with the Brontës nevertheless continued. In 2018 she participated in a Liverpool panel discussion connected with Lily Cole's short film Balls, an Emily Brontë bicentenary project inspired partly by Wuthering Heights.

There was also a Brontë connection in Greer's own creative writing. Her 2021 play Douglass, commissioned by The Faction and performed by Jude Owusu, explored the life and inner world of Frederick Douglass. A contemporary review noted that Greer's text incorporated quotations from Shakespeare, Emily Brontë and Douglass himself. 

1. Something that was explored a bit later by Deborah Denenholz Morse in "The House of Trauma": The Influence of Frederick Douglass on Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Number 140, Winter 2021, pp. 164-177. ^↩