'I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, /my lonely life around me like a moor'

SHE

She lives on a moor in the north.

She lives alone.

Spring opens like a blade there.

I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books—

some for my mother, some for me

including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë.

This is my favourite author.

Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.

Whenever I visit my mother

I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,

my lonely life around me like a moor,

my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation

that dies when I come in the kitchen door.

What meat is it, Emily, we need?

Our congratulations to Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. 'The Glass Essay' is full of references to Emily Brontë like the above.

CBC has a 'crash course in Anne Carson' which mentions 'The Glass Essay':

Glass, Irony and God, Carson's 1995 book, features the celebrated poem The Glass Essay, which is more than 30 pages long and tells the story of a love affair coming to an end through a reading of Emily Brontë's poetry.

In the Nobel Prize ceremony, it was praised by the Swedish Academy for demonstrating "the potential of the long poem where genre boundaries are seen to blur." (Talia Kliot)

We wish this contributor to The New York Times would have used the proper spelling of Brontë:

Glass, Irony & God (1995)

This collection of three narrative poems contains “The Glass Essay,” a 36-page epic that interweaves the end of a romantic relationship with musings on Emily Brönte, whom Carson describes as a perpetual “whacher” — a deliberate misspelling — who constantly observes the English moors that inspired her novel “Wuthering Heights.” In Brönte, Carson finds kinship and a means of verbalizing her heartbreak. The author Anthony Doerr has referred to “The Glass Essay” as his favorite poem, writing that “it feels to me like a thousand floodlights switching on.” (Ash Wu)

From Open:

The 1990s brought some of her most celebrated work. "The Glass Essay," from Glass, Irony, and God (1995), shows what the long poem can do when genre lines blur. It is a verse narrative about grief and unrequited love.

A woman abandoned by her husband travels to see her lonely mother on the moors, carrying the works of her favourite writer, Emily Brontë. Brontë's moorland and inner life are woven through the text, and the poem becomes at once a reading of Brontë and an essay on abandonment.

From DW:

"You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?"

This quote is from the long, lyrical poem "The Glass Essay" published in Anne Carson's 1995 collection "Glass, Irony and God" — an entry point into the works of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate.

In the poem, the narrator explores the burden of memory and obsessive desire after a failed love affair, all while regularly reflecting on Emily Brontë — an author renowned for her intense literary depiction of destructive and passionate love in "Wuthering Heights." (Elizabeth Grenier)

WAPT quotes what Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Literature Committee, had to say about her work:

Carson's wide-ranging influences, from the ancient Greeks to John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte, lead "to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and art forms," Olsson said. (Pontus Lundahl)

From The National:

Among the works highlighted by the Nobel Committee was The Glass Essay (1995), a long poem about a woman recovering from a failed relationship who visits her mother in the moorlands, bringing with her the writings of Emily Bronte.

Olsson said the work demonstrated Carson's ability to combine poetry, storytelling and literary criticism, with the narrator's experiences becoming entwined with those of her mother and Bronte.

“The poetry needs the story, and the story is in turn given energy by the leaps and scene shifts of poetry,” he said. (William Mullally)

La Gaceta (Argentina) highlights some translated poems of hers, including the one with which we began this post.

The Economist comments on the fact that Jane Eyre is now a mandatory read for teenagers in China.

“Reader, I married him,” opens the last chapter of “Jane Eyre”. That famous line is music to Chinese officials’ ears. Since September the Victorian-era Bildungsroman by Charlotte Brontë has become compulsory reading for every Chinese student in secondary school. The government happens to be keen to boost marriage rates and babymaking, and worries about women’s rising demand for divorces. The independent-minded heroine, Ms Eyre, who rejects two proposals before ultimately marrying and bearing a son, has a thing or two to teach young Chinese, the Communist Party thinks.

By some estimates, China’s population of 1.4bn could be 250m lower by 2050. So the party, having once imposed strict limits on births, is now intensifying efforts to build a “birth-friendly society”. It isn’t doing well. In the first half of 2026 marriage rates fell by 7.5%, while divorce rates climbed by 3.9%. Last year births were at a historic low: less than half the number a decade earlier.

In June the government launched a two-month campaign to crack down on microdramas that promote “money worship” and “distorted marriage values”. The wildly popular short videos often tell absurd or fantastical stories, including the popular genre of badao zongcai which involve domineering CEOs who sweep poor women off their feet (this type particularly appeals to those who think social mobility is becoming much harder in China).

So why promote “Jane Eyre”? Some commenters on social media call it a prototype of badao zongcai. In the book, Ms Eyre, a governess from a poor background, captures the heart of her wealthy employer, Edward Rochester. His imperious, moody air fits that of the short-videos’ stereotype CEO. But a recent column in Beijing Daily, an official newspaper, makes the point clear: “Jane believes that love should be built on spiritual equality rather than social status, wealth or appearance. Only when two people truly love one another can they attain genuine happiness.”

Some parents object to students in their mid-teens having to study a book so centred on love, Beijing Daily admits. But “Jane Eyre” is deeply ingrained in China’s literary consciousness: the first translation appeared in 1917. An adaptation of it was among the first Western films shown in China after the death of Mao in 1976. President Xi Jinping mentioned the book in 2015 during a visit to Britain. A musical version was performed in Beijing this week. Ms Eyre seemed feisty to Victorians. But she is a far cry from feminists in China today whom Mr Xi sees as a threat to procreation.

The writer Kat Dunn recommends some of her favourite retellings in The New York Times:

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress living in 19th-century Jamaica. After Antoinette’s brother dies in a house fire, grief drives their mother mad, and Antoinette is left alone to face a hostile world. An arranged marriage brings her under the control of the cruel and capricious Mr. Rochester who renames her Bertha, isolates her from the outside world and eventually takes her to his native England, where a dark future awaits. Published in 1966, “Wide Sargasso Sea” is a classic in its own right, bringing immense humanity and empathy to the “madwoman in the attic” of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”

Here's how Bright Lights begins a review of A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson.

For as long as film has been around, people have been anxious about what it can do. To understand this anxiety, look to literature: a medium we have been anxious about for a much longer time. In The Republic, Plato cautions that “the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. . . . A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal.” Over two thousand years later, Charlotte Brontë wrote a similar warning beside Shakespeare and Byron’s names on her list of recommended reading for a friend. “Don’t be startled at the names,” she cautioned Ellen Nussey. “You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil.” But should she get waylaid, Brontë discouraged her from reading the comedies. In her own folios, she tore them out.

Notice her precision: read Shakespeare, but skip the comedies. She is familiar with what she critiques. To decide what not to read, one must first know what is in those books – and then, having done so, decide whether or not to put them down. (Iris Chen)

MovieWeb highlights the '7 most divisive movies of 2026' and one of them is

'Wuthering Heights'

The Adaptation Was Accused of Turning a Dark Story Into a Traditional Romance

Why Wuthering Heights Was Divisive: From the second news broke that Jacob Elordi was cast as Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights was accused of whitewashing its lead character. With each new piece of promotional material, it became clear that director Emerald Fennell's take on Wuthering Heights would differ significantly from the original source material, opting for a more straightforward forbidden romance that forgoes the book's traditional ending. This earned the film criticism at release, but Wuthering Heights has so far proved to be the biggest hit of WB's 2026 slate, making a reported profit of $40 million (via Variety).

Why It's Worth Watching: The criticism that Wuthering Heights isn't a faithful adaptation of the book is valid, but no film adaptation has chosen to depict the book's second half, so that fault is not exclusive to the 2026 version. There is something magical about seeing a female filmmaker be given the freedom and budget by a studio to turn a deeply personal passion project into a major studio production. In the end, Wuthering Heights is a gorgeous film in terms of production design and cinematography, with a fantastic set of original songs by Charlie [sic] XCX. (Richard Fink)