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‘A hot July day’: Editorial Introduction
pp 211-213 Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire
Research Articles
Rediscovering Anne Carus Wilson
pp. 214-229 Author: Burstein, Moriam Elizabeth
Abstract:
This article recovers the work of Anne Carus Wilson (1787–1859), who was the wife of William Carus Wilson (1791–1859), the model for Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (1847). Anne Carus Wilson has been ignored in accounts of the Brontës, despite her known involvement in the Clergy Daughters’ School. Now virtually forgotten, Carus Wilson was a successful children’s author in her own right, whose output during the 1820s and 1830s included short fiction, a novel, multiple devotional works, periodical articles and a children’s biblical card game. This article argues that analysing her surviving work clarifies how she and her husband may have disseminated their Evangelical Calvinism to students at their various schools, even as she sought to model forms of Christian activism for British children in general.
‘Let me try to wait His will in silence’: Silence and Faith in Jane Eyre
pp. 230-244 Author: Lewis, Ariadne
Abstract:
Silence in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is often unfavourably contrasted with the power of speech and ‘telling the story’. However, the novel’s silences are much more complex than simple signs of oppression or roadblocks to self-expression. Silences in Jane Eyre reveal Jane’s spiritual growth and a narrative of transformation in her relationship with God and Rochester. Jane initially reads God as silent in response to her prayers, which reading shapes her understanding of divine providence and plan for her life. She sees a similar sort of silence reflected in her earthly relationships, and these experiences of silence shape how she uses silence towards those around her. However, when the ‘mysterious summons’ breaks God’s silence, Jane comes to believe that there is a providential purpose behind the silence of God, allowing her to redeem and repurpose silence in her relationships.
‘Amusing you with an old world story’: Relating to the Past in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
pp. 245-257 Author: Walters, Elijah
Abstract:
This essay revisits the topic of narrative structure in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by exploring similarities between Helen’s diary and John Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680). As Brontë’s novel shifts from the Gilbert frame narrative to Helen’s Gothic diary, she introduces her topics of reform through an interpolation of Bunyan’s seventeenth-century fiction. Brontë’s careful interaction with Bunyan’s text makes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not simply a commentary on Victorian society but also a transformative engagement with literature from the past.Why Trees Matter in Wuthering Heights
pp. 258-275 Author: Defant, Ivonne
Abstract:
Trees are not a remarkable feature of the Brontë moors—trees are indeed rare–yet their very dearth is rife with significance in terms of both gender and ecology. This article proposes that the trans-corporeal interplay between trees and Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter, Cathy, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) foregrounds ideas of transformation, connection and preservation. The episode of the fir tree in Lockwood’s dream introduces the reader to Catherine’s past and therein the past of the moorland: ancient forests that once blanketed the landscape participating in its formation. Drawing upon an intersection between matrilineality and the ecological history of the landscape centred on the arboreal, this article demonstrates how Brontë interweaves the identity of the moorland with the identities of mother and daughter. While Catherine’s arboreal embodiment allows Cathy to retrieve the spirit of the mother and of the place, trees enroot the self of Catherine, Cathy and the land, interconnecting and enriching them.The ‘Pets’ of Edward Fairfax Rochester
pp. 276-288 Author: Pope, Liam George
Abstract:
In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Rochester’s dog, Pilot, introduces Jane and Rochester, essentially setting into motion the main plot of the novel. To use Ivan Kreilkamp’s term, Pilot eventually becomes something of an anthroprosthetic seeing eye dog for his owner when he is partially blinded following the fire at Thornfield Hall. Anthroprosthesis refers to an anthropomorphic being that fits the role of a living ‘prosthesis’ for an injured or otherwise disabled human character. This article argues that Jane, upon returning to find Rochester at Ferndean Manor, willingly replaces Pilot in his capcity as Rochester’s ‘guide dog’, becoming an anthroprosthetic human guide dog parallel.The Earliest American Reactions to Wuthering Heights: Some New FindingsSpecial Interst Article
pp. 289-297 Author: Evans, Robert C.
Abstract:
This Special Interest Article describes and quotes from over thirty ‘new’ responses to Wuthering Heights that were published in the United States immediately after the novel was first printed there in 1848 and in several later decades of the nineteenth century. These newly collected responses indicate that the book was at first strongly criticised, whereas other reviews offered occasional positive comments, although even these were often mixed with censure. In the decades following the novel’s initial American appearance, it was still sometimes described negatively; however, by the 1870s, opinion had clearly shifted, with Emily Brontë praised for her bold genius. Taken together, these reviews illustrate the vagaries of literary interpretation and the ways in which some books, initially condemned by their earliest reviewers, can eventually be fully accepted into the canon of great literature.
Book ReviewsAnne Brontë and Lord Byron: Lost Echoes of Influence
pp. 298-300 Reviewed by Cook, Peter
Violence and the Brontës: Language, Reception, Afterlives
pp. 301-303 Reviewed by Curzon, Rachel
“Wuthering Heights”, a Film Directed by Emerald Fennell, Warner Bros., 2026
pp. 304-306 Reviewed by Seijo-Richart, Maria
The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts
pp. 307-309 Reviewed by Stoneman, Patsy
The High Flight: 50 Poems Inspired by Emily Brontë’s Hawk
pp. 310-312 Reviewed by Van Der Meer, Carolyne
The Bronte Society’s response was given to the recent statutory consultation CEP held on the proposals.The society said while they have a commitment to environmental sustainability and renewable energy, they “are strongly opposed to this development” with concerns about the Preliminary Environmental Information Report (PEIR) – a key document in the consultation on the impact of the development on moorland.Reporting details of objections on the Parsonage Museum’s social media, they said: “The PEIR does not contain the baseline evidence for any assessment of the effect on Bronte heritage of the proposal and simply claims that ‘effects on the Bronte-related landscape are minor and not significant.’“We strongly dispute this claim: the moorland between Haworth and Hebden Bridge allows the literary tourist to physically travel through the landscapes of the Brontes’ imaginations and the worlds of their novels and poetry.“This link between the Bronte texts and the surrounding landscape was noted by Virginia Woolf when she visited Haworth in 1904:” ‘I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys.“‘It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea.“‘The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books.“This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.'”“Woolf, along with the 70,000 visitors who visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum from across the world each year, clearly understood the inseparable connection between the local landscape and the Brontës, a connection which cannot be dismissed,” said the society. (John Greenwood)
'The Last of Us' Meets 'Wuthering Heights' in This Near-Perfect Gothic Book. (...)Gothic novels will always be popular. Some of literature's all-time greatest efforts belong to the Gothic genre, from the seminal horror of Dracula to the timeless romance of Jane Eyre. (...)As the title implies, Mexican Gothic borrows from the rich tradition of Gothic stories to a T. There's a large, tetric manor, High Place, haunted by the ghosts of generations past and very much modeled after the genre's best-known mansions: think of Wuthering Heights, Thornfield Hall, or Manderley. (...)The Gothic genre has always dealt with themes of class and status. In classics like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, class plays a major role in the central romances between Heathcliff and Cathy and Jane and Mr. Rochester. The differences in standing, background, and prospects complicate the relationship between these couples, allowing the Brontë sisters to provide some very sharp observations that remain relevant almost two centuries later. (David Caballero)
Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëEmily Bronte made a very interesting choice when choosing the narrators of this novel and it has always felt like one of the most important aspects of the story to me. Cathy’s servant Nelly Dean tells the story, but it is written down by Mr Lockwood who is renting the house where Cathy once lived. Both arrive with their own biases, Nelly because she was once from the same class as Cathy and then became her servant, and Lockwood, who feels outside the long established families who rule this part of the Yorkshire moors.The layers of unreliability run throughout, Nelly often not hearing or knowing everything that happened between Cathy and Heathcliffe and Lockwood often interpreting. And the brilliance of this lies in the fact that Wuthering Heights is a novel about being an outsider, so who better to tell it than two outsiders with their own scores to settle, just like Heathcliff.
Old men may remember what Charlotte Brontë wrote: “I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” (Devendra Saksena)
Haworth, West YorkshireOver in Bradford, Haworth is a beauty spot best-known as the home of the Brontë sisters. The Yorkshire Moors that surround the village can be seen both in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. (Jennifer Cartwright)
‘Between her and the world’: Legacies, Interpretations, Adaptations
pp 97-99 Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire
Research Articles
No Atom Rendered Void: The Aerial and Alchemical Enchantment of Wuthering Heights
pp. 100-117 Author: Duell, Meg
Abstract:
This article maps how elemental and meteorological metaphysics function in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), arguing that the novel’s complex recursive structure is facilitated through an alchemical process by which the collision of air and materiality—the transcendent elements embodied by Catherine and Heathcliff—activates psychic, spatial, mortal and temporal ‘wandering’. These points of elemental friction, defined here as ‘portals of enchantment’, connect their subjects with past and future iterations of themselves and others. Additionally, it explores how the novel’s elemental ‘portals’ extend beyond spatial thresholds into aerial and avian touchstones, allowing Brontë to infuse the novel with folkloric subtext..
This Rustic Muse: Developing a Political Voice in the Poetry of Patrick Brontë
pp. 118-134 Author: Avery, Simon
Abstract:
This article examines a range of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s poetry—a much neglected body of work in Brontë criticism—and argues that it was here that Brontë was able to develop a political voice and a sense of literature as a vehicle for political exploration and debate. In considering Brontë’s two collections, Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813), in the contexts of war abroad and industrial, economic and social unrest at home, this article explores what the poetry tells us about Brontë’s political thinking, his relationship with political structures and hierarchies, and his anxieties about political cohesion and security. What emerges is a poet whose work, written under the guise of his ‘rustic muse’, offers fascinating interventions into contemporaneous political debates regarding poverty, industrialisation, the city, community, the place of religion in society, nation-state formation and the nature of liberty and equality more generally.
Reading Jane Eyre as a Hagiographic Romance
pp. 28-43 Author: Schiavone, Matteo
Abstract:
This article uses queer medievalism as a critical method to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), reading it as a hagiographic romance, a hybrid text that blurs clear-cut generic boundaries. As the fictionalised autobiography of a character who finds the strength of self-belief through mystical experiences and the Christian doctrine of endurance, the narrative is akin to medieval hagiographic and visionary literature, which the comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430s) demonstrates. At the same time, however, similar to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, it follows the pattern of a chivalric quest romance, as Jane physically moves outwards and goes through several stages of development before being ready to marry Mr Rochester. Ultimately, queered genres create a space where Jane can develop a queer gender identity beyond stifling societal expectations.‘To give the passage quite a contrary turn’: Female Religious Authority and Subversive Hermeneutics in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
pp. 132-152 Author: Wiegand, Holly
Abstract:
This article argues for a reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) as a historiography of women’s challenges to androcentric Anglican structures of authority and measures of biblical interpretation. Shirley stages the possibility and precarity of women’s public religious authority amid socio-religious discourses, underscoring the relationship between Shirley and Caroline as a space for proto-feminist theological and interpretive revisions. Attending to Brontë’s heroine’s push against religious exclusivism foregrounds Caroline’s often-overlooked hermeneutic turns in her dispute with mill overseer Joe Scott, Brontë’s mouthpiece for inherited anti-woman Anglican interpretations. This article contends that class and gender inflect the act and reception of biblical interpretation for Brontë, playing out historical debates about women’s preaching and discussions about working-class Dissenting groups that supported women’s ministries, such as Methodism. It nuances Brontë’s views on the role of women in religion as she too is pulled between traditional dogma and radical woman-centred hermeneutics along class lines.‘Are you not a little severe?’: Lucy’s Wit in Her Narrative Voice in Villette
pp. 153-166 Author: Zhang, Zhiying
Abstract:
This article provides a new perspective on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), analysing the function of wit through the lens of psychoanalytic and comic theories. Primarily based on Freud’s theory of wit, the analysis examines various wit-making techniques, exploring how Lucy employs these methods as a means of self-expression and critique. The use of wit breaks the serious narrative tone, creating a comic effect that allows readers to enjoy the story and empathise with Lucy’s painful experiences. It also allows Lucy to release her suppressed emotional pain and struggles within her narrative. By demonstrating how wit is integral to Lucy’s journey of self-discovery and self-expression, this article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation about comic elements in Brontë’s writing.Heathcliff, Harry and Hardin: After as a New Layer to Wuthering Heights
pp. 167-183 Author: de Beus, Emma
Abstract:
This article considers Anna Todd’s After series (2013–2015) as a new adaptive layer to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). It explores the relationship between the two works by considering the adaptive history and context of Wuthering Heights before moving onto an analysis of After, examining its multiple points of origin. The analysis includes fanfiction, the boy band One Direction and other influences on After, both classical and contemporary. The article then undertakes close readings of Wuthering Heights and After to establish clear points of connection and overarching parallels, arguing that a reading of After exposes it as a hitherto unrecognised adaptation of Wuthering Heights. By shedding light on this relationship, it is possible to better understand how Emily Brontë’s novel has found an increasingly varied afterlife in the twenty-first century—one that both speaks to the contemporary climate and reflects new understandings of the novel itself.Book ReviewsA Brontë Reading List: 2023
pp. 184-195 Reviewed by Pearson, Sara L. & Cook, Peter
Abstract:
This reading list is an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2023. We have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of resources by consulting the MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, and the Brontë Blog (http://bronteblog.blogspot.com). Book chapters and scholarly articles on the Brontës are included except those articles published in Brontë Studies. Entire books on the Brontës are in the reviews section of this journal. The author’s initials in brackets are provided after each annotation.
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery
pp. 195-198 Reviewed by Ayrton, Tricia
Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, 26–28 September 2025
pp. 198-200 Reviewed by Dawn Gant, Rose
A Vain Talent? The Question of Female Artistry in the Life and Work of Anne Brontë
pp. 200-202 Reviewed by Sanders, Valerie
Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel. Injured Minds, Ruined Lives
pp. 202-204 Reviewed by Seijo-Richart, María
The Banagher Brontë Group Festival, Ireland, 15–18 August 2025
pp. 205-207 Reviewed by Wilcock, Joanne
AnnouncementBrontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize 2026
pp. 208-209 by O'Callagahn, Claire
Bradford has a rich literary history shaped by women writers who made women the centre of their storytelling. From the Brontë sisters whose female protagonists were independent, fearless and revolutionary, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Anne Brontë’s Helen Graham, to Times bestselling author Saima Mir, whose lead character Jia Khan of The Khan trilogy dismantles the deeply-rooted patriarchal institution of Bradford’s baradari, women writers from Bradford are gifted in their ability to tell powerful, eye-opening stories about women, offering both nuanced critiques of societal conditions and challenging norms. [...]It was while living in Bradford that I penned by own book, Hijab and Red Lipstick, which was recently released as a second edition. While my book is not set in Bradford, the city certainly nurtured my writing. From long hours spent writing at Waterstones café, whose staff diligently kept me fuelled with coffees and teas, to the advice and support I found at the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing in Haworth, and the opportunities I have had as both an attendee and speaker at Bradford Literature Festival, the city really has a lot to offer for women writers like me. (Yousra Samir Imran)
One of 2026’s most buzzed-about historical novels is heading straight into the heart of old Hollywood glamour with a tinge of darkness.Bestselling author Natasha Lester is set to release her latest, The Chateau on Sunset, on June 2, 2026, and the novel is already being described as one not to miss thanks to its bold premise: a feminist reimagining of Jane Eyre set inside the infamous Chateau Marmont during Hollywood’s Golden Age. (Nina Derwin)
To her credit, Fennell understands that it’s more fun to smash a dollhouse than to construct one meticulously. Her sledgehammer approach to party scenes in her previous films is rivaled by Wuthering Heights’s opening sequence of a public hanging. Though we are supposed to be in the late 18th century, the mood is more medieval. After a few moments of the hanged man’s dying gasps, a Charli xcx song floods the soundtrack (the truly terrifying track “House,” which she recorded with John Cale), and the crowd erupts in a carnal frenzy. People roar, some start fucking, a nun closes her eyes, and parents pull away their children. The scene does not exist in Brontë’s novel, but it’s somehow closest to the monstrous vitality of that world, a place where the dead refuse to die. Too bad that Fennell never gives her characters the chance to live. (Genevieve Yue)
ARTICLES
Welcome by Sharon Wright, Editor.
Letter from the Chair. Lucy Powrie. Chair of the Brontë Society Board of TrusteesGazette Serial: Through the West Lane keyholeThe March of the Brontës by Gillian Murphy, Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship at the LSE LibraryPart 2: The Brontës and the shoemakers by Linda Pierson
Report from the red carpet by Mia Ferullo
Close-up on the Collection: A fashion for mourning by Murray TremellenMembership Matters: Membership reminders / Members'Area update / Getting in Touch / Dates for Your Diary by Hayley Pink, Development OfficerA Mary Taylor Adventure by Catherine RaynerDirectors' Diary by Rebecca Yorke AMA Director, Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage MuseumThe Slandering of Charlotte Brontë by Graham WatsonThe Brontë Bookshelf: ‘The hawk, like Emily, stands outside of time’. Preface of The High Flight: 50 Poems Inspiredby Emily Brontë’s Hawk by Emma Conally-Barklem
Once home to the famous literary siblings – who drew inspiration for their classic works from the neighbouring moorland – it attracts visitors from across the world, keen to see where the sisters wrote and how they lived.But whilst the past is central to any museum, parsonage bosses are also keen to look to the future.And the team's ambitious plans were outlined to Keighley MP Robbie Moore during a visit to the site.He met up with museum director Rebecca Yorke, who showed him around a historic building – bought by the Brontë Society last year – in the village's West Lane.The three derelict adjoining properties were acquired shortly before they were due to be sold at auction.They include the former studio of photographer Fred Smith, who was caretaker of the original Brontë Museum when it was situated above the Yorkshire Penny Bank in the early 1900s.Many of Smith's photographs, which document the Haworth of that time, are now in the Brontë Society archive and it's hoped some will be displayed in the building once renovations are complete.The premises will also provide additional space for the society's growing archive and team, and offer opportunities for closer engagement with residents and visitors.Following the release of the latest movie version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, visitor numbers to the museum have enjoyed a boost.Mr Moore says: "It was fantastic to meet with Rebecca and hear about the society's exciting plans for the future."The Brontë Parsonage is one of the most important literary sites in the country and it was great to hear about the continued success of the museum – particularly following the recent Wuthering Heights film."A huge 'thank you' to Rebecca and the team for the update, and tour of the newly-acquired buildings in West Lane which have massive potential. I’m looking forward to seeing the plans progress."Rebecca says: "We were very happy to welcome Robbie to the museum and have the opportunity to update him on our recent successes and share our aims and ambitions for the future."We take our responsibilities as custodians of the Brontës' legacy and as a world-renowned visitor attraction very seriously, and are pleased to have our contribution to the area's cultural offer and economy recognised by our MP." (Alistair Shand)
Pick of the weekWuthering HeightsEmerald Fennell has done a grand job dialling up the scandal over her new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s windswept novel. But aside from the casting of a white actor (Jacob Elordi) as the arguably non-white Heathcliff – and an unexpected S&M subplot – this is the bodice-ripping historical romance most fans would wish for. Margot Robbie plays Cathy as a frustrated social climber torn between a life of luxury with Shazad Latif’s Edgar and the earthy lust offered by the uncouth Heathcliff. For its look, Fennell goes full gothic, à la Guillermo del Toro, with stormy skies, unbridled sex on the moors, ludicrous costumes and often bizarre interior design, as the love story comes to a boil.Friday 1 May, 8.25am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere (Simon Wardell)
For many years, Malouf divided his time between Sydney and Tuscany. Later, he returned to Queensland and lived in an apartment tower overlooking the beach at Surfers Paradise, where he first read Jane Eyre as a 12-year-old on summer holidays. (Nicola Heath)
For those unfamiliar with the premise of Jane Eyre, the 1847 novel was written by Charlotte Brontë. (Yes, she was Emily Brontë's older sister.) The story follows the eponymous orphaned character as she enters into service as a governess at Thornfield Hall. There, she presides over the education of an orphaned French girl, Adèle Varens. Adele is the ward of Thornfield Hall's master, Edward Rochester. Despite Rochester's surly demeanor, he and Jane eventually fall in love. He proposes, she accepts—and then a haunting secret from Rochester's past emerges.The Chateau on Sunset borrows the major storyline and transplants it into the Golden Age of Hollywood. The backdrop is none other than the famed Chateau Marmont, whose history is just as tumultuous as the lives of the rich and famous who have sequestered behind its walls. In Lester's retelling, Jane becomes Aria Jones, an orphan sent from New York to live with her aunt, the mysterious former Hollywood legend Miss Devine Ray, at the Chateau. There, Aria makes it her business to blend in, hiding herself from her aunt's drug- and alcohol- induced stupors and evading the preying, powerful men who walk the halls. Her two closest friends are up-and-coming actresses Flitter Reeve and Calliope Burns. Aria wants one thing: To escape on her 18th birthday and live by the ocean. But all that is thrown to the wind when the hotel is purchased by brooding rockstar Theo Winchester, who promptly moves into the penthouse with his daughter, Adele.Lester captures the opulence, corruption, glamour, power, success and fear that coursed through the waning days of Hollywood's golden age, transposing characters from Jane Eyre so that the plot is familiar but the story wholly original.Aria is a compelling character, but not just because she's a sketch of one of my favorite heroines. In the author's note, Lester made the interesting observation that one of the sticking points of Jane Eyre is Rochester and his wife, Bertha. Bertha famously sets fire to Thornfield Hall, which causes Jane to flee and seemingly break up with Rochester. When someone says Jane Eyre, it's usually associated with "crazy wife in the attic." This is where Lester does Aria a good turn.Similarly to actual historical events, Chateau Marmont does indeed go up in flames—but what happens next is a story that puts the girl front and center. Instead of simply running back to Theo, Aria must decide who she is going to become. And, more importantly, who she wants to become. A wallflower content with operating behind the scenes and being invisible must realize that she's worthy of the spotlight. Lester's book is powerful to me because of the fact that Theo and his ex are the afterthought. The events that lead to the conclusion of Aria's story are unexpected, taking her far from the confines of LA and exploring how satisfaction isn't so much falling in love with another person as it is falling in love with herself. (Marissa Wu)
The Bearden theatre has taken on the production of Jane Eyre, a literary staple highlighting the internal struggles of a young woman set in early 19th century England.The play follows Jane as she navigates religious and moral hardships stemming from her relationships and conflicting setting.A towering chestnut tree roots the audience into the set. The tree is commonly interpreted as a symbol of Jane’s suffering due to Rochester’s villainous wife Bertha; however, Bearden theatre added a layer of emotion in the designing process.“In a lot of ways, the tree is also a point of safety for Jane…it’s more of a comforting place for her,” said senior and production manager Addison Pratt. [...]Altering their own production of Jane Eyre from 2005, the set crew believed introducing the tree could augment an already impressive production. Visually, the set piece adds a realistic element to the stage, framing Jane’s relationship with her setting. The chestnut tree will act as one of many interactive elements within the play.“This was a new edition that we added and I think it adds a lot,” Pratt said.The set will go beyond traditional physical props moved on and off the stage. Working closely with the theatre department at UT, the crew was able to utilize projection mapping within the show. This technical feature will allow certain visual effects to be precisely projected onto the set, heightening the emotion of the play.“We worked closely with the Clarence Brown Theatre downtown and have borrowed some projectors from them,” senior and set crew member Alex Mair said. “We’ve used some programs to projection map creative elements onto the stage for certain scenes.Added Pratt: “Our team has spent a lot of time really figuring out the different programs that we can use and finding a way to make the projections work really well on our stage, and it looks really cool.”The theatre department will step away from traditional auditorium seating for the show, as on stage seating deepens the audience-cast connection simply from their proximity to the stage. Both cast and crew look forward to the creative elements that will be in high definition for spectators.“While I think that traditional auditorium seating is great for big, flashier shows, you just feel so much more involved with the characters [through on stage seating],” Mair said. “You can see every single movement that’s happening, every single little detail, and it makes the story feel a lot more interactive.”Added Pratt: “It’s definitely a much more intimate experience, which I think is really cool.”Senior Caitlin Stout appreciates the creative liberty given to the crew throughout the production. Stout believes that as a member of set crew, it was her role to not only produce impressive design elements, but to aid the cast in their presentation. What turned into yet another showing of Bearden’s standard for creative set design first began with simple features for the cast to make their own.“We wanted the set to be a canvas for the actors to take on and not have to work around designs within the set,” she said. (Max Mead)
Students from Edgewood High School are presenting “You on the Moors Now” for an upcoming performance.“You on the Moors Now” is about four women from the 19th century novels that turn down marriage proposals.The performance tracks Jo March from “Little Women,” Elizabeth Bennet from “Pride and Prejudice,” Catherine Earnshaw from “Wuthering Heights” and Jane Eyre from “Jane Eyre” and follows them figuring out their romantic ideologies.“It’s really great to bring classic literature back to the stage in a modern retelling of it,” Bella Baldo, who plays Earnshaw, said. “Being able to bring themes from modern culture into classic literature and really they have been there all along.”Along with Baldo, Daphne Conner is casted as March, Ellie O’Day plays Jane Eyre and Ruthie Brenner plays the role of Bennet.“I’m really excited for them to see the battle scene because it’s really chaotic and obscured, but it’s also really funny at the same time,” O’Day said. “We have a lot of cool weapons.” (Calahan Steed)
Charlotte Brontë“One of my favorite books is the British classic ‘Jane Eyre,’ written by Charlotte Brontë and published in 1847. The main character, Jane Eyre, is a penniless, teenage orphan who exemplifies what it means to be true. In this fictional account, a man, Mr. Rochester, loves Miss Eyre but is unable to marry her. Instead, he begs Miss Eyre to live with him without the benefit of marriage. Miss Eyre loves Mr. Rochester as well, and for a moment she is tempted, asking herself, ‘Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?’“Quickly Jane’s conscience answers: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God. … Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this. … If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed. … Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.’“In a desperate moment of temptation, Jane Eyre was true to her beliefs, she trusted in the law given by God, and she planted her foot in resistance to temptation.”— Sister Ann M. Dibb, then the second counselor in the Young Women general presidency, April 2011 general conference, “I Believe in Being Honest and True” (Kaitlyn Bancroft)
ARTICLES
Welcome by Sharon Wright, Editor.
Letter from the Chair. Lucy Powrie. Chair of the Brontë Society Board of Trustees‘They invented colonies and kingdoms’ by Corinne Fowler, Guest Co-Curator of The Colonial Brontës exhibitionGazette Serial: Through the West Lane keyhole by Linda Pierson
A Sense of Belonging by Noor Jahangir, poet
Bradford & The Brontës. Poem by Noor Jahnangir
Gazette Exclusive: ‘Everything good is Brontë-ish’ by Helen Meller who interviews Emerald Fennell
Close-up on the Collection: Pen Heger by Peter Lodge
Irish threads by Maebh O’ReganMembership Matters: Special edition Brontë Studies:Last chapter by Carolyne Van Der Meer
Charlotte Brontë’s Little Book / Members'Area update / Getting in Touch / Dates for Your Diary by Hayley Pink, Development OfficerDirectors' Diary by Rebecca Yorke AMA Director, Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage MuseumThe Brontë Bookshelf: A Huanting Story by Essie Fox, author of CatherineMaking Local History by Tim Neal
Sales of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, as anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s bold and highly anticipated film adaptation, figures from Penguin Classics UK show.In January of this year, 10,670 copies were sold, compared with 1,875 in January 2025, in what Penguin has described as an unusually large boost.Sales of the book increased by 132% after the release of the first teaser trailer for the film last September. Between the trailer’s release and the end of the year, Penguin sold 28,257 copies in the UK, compared with 12,134 over the same period in 2024.Jess Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics, said: “I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book. Wuthering Heights is one of our evergreen bestsellers, but I do think the film is coming out at the perfect moment.“There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories,” Harrison added. “We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged – an extreme book for extreme times.” [...]“I don’t think an adaptation needs to be completely faithful to the book: many of the best ones – like Clueless riffing on [Jane Austen’s] Emma – aren’t,” Harrison said. “But what you hope for is that an adaptation will capture the spirit of the original. With Wuthering Heights, it’s the extreme intensity of emotion that matters the most.” (Emma Loffhagen)
My copy of the book was cheap and flimsy because I preferred spending my hard earned wages from my Saturday job at Topshop on booze. Most importantly, my heart had just been broken for the very first time.It was, of course, the end of the world, in the way that being dumped at 17 has been the end of the world for millions of teenagers since time immemorial. And in between angsty phone calls to friends and cryptic MSN status updates (if you don’t know what MSN was, it was a noughties cross between Facebook and WhatsApp), I found Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.If you haven’t read it, you might be dimly aware of the two main characters, Cathy and Heathcliff. The pair - raised together in the crumbling hall, Wuthering Heights - have a mutual obsession with each other which destroys both their happiness and that of many around them.Aged 17, their doomed romance seemed to me to be the height of what it meant to be a human. What was the point in life if I couldn’t be loved in an all-possessing way, like Heathcliff loved Cathy?When - and I must warn here, despite the book being published while Queen Victoria was on the throne, I’m about to spoil a plot point - Cathy dies, Heathcliff moans in agony. “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I genuinely fantasised about having that quote tattooed on my ankle. Thank god my frontal lobe cortex developed in time to talk myself out of it.From the vantage point of a 17-year-old girl, it was like Emily Brontë had reached her hand through the book to take mine, just as Cathy’s smashes through the windows of Wuthering Heights.I’m not 17 any more, but I still love Wuthering Heights. It is a wild book, in every sense of the word. Far from being a conventional romance, the plot veers from passionate obsession to vengeance. Like the boxed in narrative of the book, it’s complicated. I love it because on every re-read, it takes me back to being that girl, one I remember so fondly even though my age has doubled.But I also love it now because it’s not the uncomplicated love story that it was to me at 17. Now it’s a dizzying exploration of revenge, ownership, anger, servitude, landscape. There’s love, yes, but it’s also a book about hatred.It’s an imperfect book - not nearly as ‘neat’ from a plotting perspective as Jane Eyre, written, of course, by the older Brontë sister Charlotte. I like to imagine that Emily wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but that her pen wrote what she needed it to write in a kind of fever dream.And now it’s set to capture new fans via the film adaptation released later this month. So far, I’m nervous. Director Emerald Fenell’s last film, Saltburn, was perverse and gothic and frankly bonkers, so I think she’ll capture the spirit of the book well. The landscapes are set to be stunning, with filming having taken place across the Yorkshire Dales. I’m also excited for the soundtrack, masterminded by Charli xcx. If ever a book fits her vibe of insouciance mixed with glamour, it’s Wuthering Heights. Cathy Earnshaw is, in my eyes, the original ‘brat.But, famously, adaptations of Wuthering Heights are so hard to get right (though, for my money, Emma Rice’s stage production at York Theatre Royal a few years ago came as close as it gets). It’s too complicated, there’s a death every five pages, and half the characters have virtually identical names. And I feel very rude in saying this, but given I’m the same age as Margot Robbie, who stars in the film, I hope it’s forgivable to point out that she’s almost 20 years older than Cathy’s character in the book, and that matters. Lovestruck teenagers do and say awful things in ways we can forgive, in a way that we can’t of those in their mid-thirties. I should know.But for all my reservations, I’m excited that a new generation might come, via the film, to the book. That they will choose to inhabit Emily’s strange, twisted world. That she will, like she did for me, reach out from 1847 and grab their hands to give them permission to be wild, and passionate, and angry. That maybe, like I’ve done so many times since, they’ll decide to visit Haworth to see for themselves the landscape that inspired such a poetic tale.I don’t think I could have loved Wuthering Heights half so much now if I hadn’t read it for the first time then, and I’m so jealous of anyone who gets to experience it for their first time. The best literature not only reflects the way we think, it shows a mirror up to the way we feel. And if any of its new readers come to it heartbroken by the ends of their first loves, as I did all those years ago, so much the better. (Victoria Finan)
Emily Brontë’s genius was not for self-promotion. She hid her true identity under a pseudonym and agreed to pay £50 – more than the annual salary of a governess at the time – to get Wuthering Heights published in 1847. In contrast, the pre-publicity for Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation, due for release on Valentine’s Day, has reached carnivalesque levels rare even in Hollywood. Few have so far seen it. But the trailer alone has already generated a babel of online response. Critiques have ranged from objections to anachronistic costumes – Margot Robbie in what looks like an Eighties wedding dress – to complaints that Jacob Elordi is “too white” to play Heathcliff. The film has been compared unfavourably to Andrea Arnold’s gritty, arthouse adaptation of 2011, which cast a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff.But who really is Heathcliff? Emily Brontë’s original text does indeed make it clear that his racial identity is supposed to be different from that of the Yorkshire-born characters. Picked up as a foundling on the streets of Liverpool, he’s brought to Wuthering Heights by old Mr Earnshaw, who tells his family to “take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark as the devil” in a seeming allusion to the child’s skin colour. That neuter pronoun “it” suggests that Heathcliff is already being othered at the moment of his adoption.And yet no one in the novel ever discovers his origins. Edgar Linton thinks he might be either a “Lascar” – a term usually applied at the time to seamen from the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia – or “an American or Spanish castaway”. Perhaps, proposes the housekeeper Nelly Dean, his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. Elsewhere, he is described as “a dark-skinned gipsy”; and yet in one scene his face is depicted as being “as white as the wall behind him”.Andrea Arnold’s film recast Heathcliff as a survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, for which Liverpool was indeed a hub in the 18th century period in which the novel, though written in the 1840s, is set. She turned that imagined backstory into an eloquent portrayal of cycles of abuse. Yet there’s nothing in the text to suggest Heathcliff is black African. On the contrary, Nelly Dean specifically implies that he is not, when she tells him (with a casual racism that will make the modern reader flinch) that “a good heart will help you to a bonny face” even “if you were a regular black”.The success of Arnold’s film comes not from its slavish “respect” for the text but from its openness to treating it as an imaginative springboard. Over the years, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for stage and screen countless times, with spin-offs ranging from a now lost silent film to the unlikely Cliff Richard vehicle, Heathcliff: the Musical. And yet the truth about the original book is that much of what makes it a literary masterpiece is unfilmable. It’s an inscrutable text, probably intentionally so, that baffled critics when it first came out and continues to baffle scholars, not least because so few personal writings by Emily Brontë survive to explain what she intended, though the book itself hints at its literary context.That Heathcliff’s race and origins are left purposely ambiguous reflects the destabilising techniques, clearly drawn from the gothic tradition, on which the novel relies for its uncanny effects. Another is the frame narrative: the way it’s told as a tale within a tale, sometimes within another tale. We’re held at a strange distance, while paradoxically, the vivid descriptive writing makes us feel as though we’re only inches from the action.This is a tale of the supernatural – it’s a ghost story after all – couched in the language of naturalism. Domestic interiors offer themselves up with all the detailed solidness of their oak furniture. But even the realism over-reaches itself in the novel’s famous scenes of physical violence, which are so graphic as to teeter – perhaps intentionally – on the Tarentinoesque edge of parody. If you realistically filmed a grown man forcibly rubbing a child’s wrist to and fro over a broken windowpane until the blood ran down, it would be unwatchable.Wuthering Heights remains a completely uncategorisable novel, whose unique voice can’t be assimilated to the norms of Victorian fiction. And yet both it and Heathcliff do have literary forebears. Behind his character lies the Byronic anti-hero “linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes”, to quote Byron’s own Corsair.If the constancy of Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is his “one virtue”, it comes with overtones of sibling incest as the two have been brought up together as brother and sister. That too channels Lord Byron, refracting the transgressive love at the heart of his gothic tragedy Manfred, and also his notorious real-life affair with his own half-sister. Even the famous scene in which Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly that it would degrade her to marry him echoes a similar scene in Thomas Moore’s 1830 Life of Byron (a copy of which the Brontës owned) in which the teenage future poet overhears his first love tell her maid that she could never care for that “lame boy”.If Emily Brontë took these Byronic hints, she transmogrified them into something that was – and still feels – totally new and strange. Popular culture has since conventionalised Wuthering Heights into the archetypal world’s “greatest love story”, but it is far from that. No film version so far has fully represented the extent to which Heathcliff becomes a manipulative psychopath. And, despite the Byronic connections, one of the oddest things about the novel is the almost complete lack of sex. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s works, which pulsate with frustrated sensual desire, it is often physical but never erotic.Early reports have, in contrast, called Emerald Fennell’s version “a whole other level of hot”. Judging from the trailer, its sexy, operatic production values and pounding soundtrack couldn’t be more different from Andrea Arnold’s downbeat version, which was filmed without music or make-up and seemingly with a handheld camera. I admired Arnold’s take, but I’m looking forward to Fennell’s. I’ll be judging it not on literal fidelity to the text – which is impossible – but on whether it creates its own convincing world.I’d also like – perhaps mischievously – to refer the Instagram costume cavillers to Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights, in which the young Cathy returns from Thrushcross Grange newly and smartly dressed. According to the timeline of the book, it is 1777. However, her outfit is the obviously early Victorian combo of tartan and pantaloons: a “plaid silk frock” with “white trousers”. Emily Brontë wouldn’t have cared about fashion anachronism. But she would have been amazed to discover how many people care about Wuthering Heights.
Ever since it was announced, Emerald Fennell's version of the torrid Brontë classic has been the subject of furious online discourse over everything from its casting to its costumes.The most controversial film of the year? Usually that accolade is reserved for an edgy political thriller or a taboo-busting horror movie. But the film that is currently prompting the most "discourse" – to use a polite term for it – is an adaptation of a 19th-Century novel. Ever since Emerald Fennell declared that she was following Promising Young Woman and Saltburn with her own take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, commentators have not been short of opinions – mostly negative ones."Fennell has channelled her creative instincts into a disturbing exercise in pointless destruction," wrote Lara Brown in The Spectator – and that was five months before the film's release date next week.Everything about the film has been pilloried, from its casting to its costumes, from the actors' accents to the inverted commas around the title: it's "Wuthering Heights", not Wuthering Heights, to emphasise that this is Fennell's own interpretation of the book, rather than the book itself. The hostility has been relentless. But could the reasons for this hostility go beyond some scepticism about a dodgy-looking period drama? [...]But these quibbles raise some big questions, the first one being: So what? Why shouldn't Fennell come up with her own out-there, sexed-up version of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in 1990s California, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet can do the same with Shakespeare, why should we be fussing about dress design?There are two obvious answers, one of them suggested by the fact that, in the trailer, Robbie's Cathy sounded posher than any screen character since, well, the toffs in Saltburn.Fennell's last film, Saltburn, was set in a stately home, and one of the best things about it was that the writer-director seemed to know her upper-class characters intimately. There is no mystery as to how she managed it: as the daughter of celebrated jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To quote Patrick Sproull in Dazed, "Not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting." In short, Fennell is posh. Indeed, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now better known as Queen Camilla – she didn't have to sound any grander than she does in ordinary life.This hasn't endeared her to everyone. As popular as Saltburn was, some reviews argued that it was too forgiving of its posh characters because Fennell was so posh herself. "It's a satire that never bares its claws, never lifts a finger to criticise these people," said Sproull. Other people have grumbled that Fennell's connections and advantages gave her directing career an unfair head start. This meant that many commentators were primed to dislike "Wuthering Heights" from the very beginning. The antipathy had as much to do with their feelings about Fennell as their feelings about the film.But the main reason behind all the rancour is this: people who love Brontë's novel really love Brontë's novel. They're not just fond of it, they're fixated on it. As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a BBC article, "Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we're wildly impressionable." Many of the book's fans go on to view it as part of their identity – and, for that matter, as part of their love lives. "I remain convinced that the precedent for chasing toxic love stories was one set out for me as a teenager, by Heathcliff," confessed Olivia Petter in British Vogue. And she's not alone. Considering how devoted the novel's aficionados are, it was inevitable that any film which diverged from the text would be taken by some as a personal attack.The irony is that Fennell professes to adore the book as much as anyone. At the Brontë Women's Writing Festival last September, she said that she had been "obsessed" and "driven mad" by Wuthering Heights since she read it as a 14-year-old. "I know that if somebody else made [the film], I'd be furious."She's probably not too worried, then, that other people are furious about her. In fact, she may be quite pleased. Every time new information about the film emerges, there are thousands of impassioned words written about it, and while they aren't all flattering, they have undoubtedly helped to raise awareness and build anticipation.Could "Wuthering Heights" really be as over-the-top as the trailers suggest, we asked. Could it be so-bad-it's-good? Or could it even be… good? Certainly, social media reactions from an early screening have been strong, with one film writer even moved to declare it a "god-tier new classic"."I personally cannot wait to watch Fennell's Wuthering Heights," wrote Olivia Petter in Vogue. "I'll admit, as a dedicated fan of the book, I was sceptical at first. But now, I no longer care about accuracy."The old saying about there being no such thing as bad publicity has never been more true. (Nicholas Barber)
Last night at the London premiere of “Wuthering Heights” Oscar-nominated actress and producer Margot Robbie walked the red carpet in Leicester Square wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu inspired by a bracelet that belonged to Charlotte Brontë.The intricate, delicate bracelet features hair from two people, believed to be her sisters, Emily and Anne. During the Victorian era hair jewellery was fashionable and widely worn and it was common practice to make mourning jewellery incorporating the hair of a deceased relative. The bracelet is made of a wide band of braided hair with a gold clasp set with garnets and has been owned by the Museum since 1923.The original bracelet is currently on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum alongside other examples of mourning jewellery.Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum said: “The museum holds the world’s largest collections of Brontë manuscripts, clothing and personal possessions and we take our responsibility as custodians extremely seriously.“This event has offered us an unprecedented opportunity to share an item from our collection and tell its story with a global and contemporary audience, and we are thrilled that, thanks to director Emerald Fennell, Margot Robbie and everyone involved with the film, Emily Brontë and her masterpiece continue to be part of popular culture almost 200 years after her death.”Rebecca continued: “We were delighted to work in partnership with Wyedean Weaving, based in Haworth, to create a faithful and high quality replica bracelet which Margot Robbie wore on the red carpet, and to facilitate visits from Dilara’s team to view the original bracelet.”
I’m here to see it for myself. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve long dreamed of making, and I begin in York, the city where Emily Brontë’s sisters, Charlotte and Anne, rested overnight en route to seeking a sea cure for the tuberculosis that would eventually take Anne’s life (a small plaque marks the site of the long since demolished inn on Coney Street). Then I travel to the village of Haworth, where the Brontës spent the majority of their too-short lives.“People have a very strong idea of the landscape when they think of the Brontës,” says Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “They conjure up images of wild, rugged moorland scenery, and of course, that applies mainly to Wuthering Heights.”She’s exactly right about these romantic notions, I think, as I explore the rooms where these writers lived—the small couch upon which Emily died, the narrow windows from which the sisters saw their world, the tiny books they created in childhood with handwriting so minuscule a magnifying glass is needed to read the words. I’m among those who have romanticized the world of the Brontës, as though I’ve created my own movie version of their landscape in my head.Certainly, Emerald Fennell must have been aware of how strongly readers like me feel about the world of the Brontës when she set out to make her film. I learn that to find the ideal locations, her team tapped Aurelia Thomas, a veteran of British film and television, to be the supervising location manager of Wuthering Heights.“It was very much the thing from the outset, how important the landscape was to this film,” Thomas tells me. “So much of the story, and how Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so doomed and bleak in a lot of ways, comes from the setting and this feeling of desolation. The landscapes they walk in almost have a personality of their own. So it was a very important thing to find and to get right.”Thomas and her team scoured the peat and heather moors of Yorkshire, looking specifically for open, wild land far off the beaten path (and often far from road accessibility). They deliberately sought filming locations that had not been used in previous adaptations of the story, instead spending months searching for places that would, as Thomas says, “feel different and epic.” They passed on anything too flat or too close to a village road, or anything that felt too idyllic or pretty.Interestingly, this meant refraining from filming in Haworth itself, the village where Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights and the landscape where she would have freely roamed. Dinsdale notes that while Haworth has become “this rather haunting, kind of romantic place” nowadays, the Haworth of the Brontës’ time wasn’t entirely remote or untouched. Rather, it was an industrious, albeit very small, village.The parsonage where the sisters lived and penned their works was perched at the edge of the moors and the edge of the village, straddled between two worlds. I feel that intensely. The front door of the parsonage looks out onto the graveyard, with enormous, moss-covered tombstones. The back looks out onto the edge of the moor. It’s haunting and eerily beautiful, yet also quite popular, both with tourists and those walking the many paths leading from the village into the countryside.Instead, Fennell’s crew turned to remote stretches of moorland, specifically Booze Moor and Reeth Moor in North Yorkshire and Bridestones Moor in West Yorkshire, as well as Arkengarthdale Moor and Reeth Estate, two vast expanses of land. The result is a scene that feels otherworldly, epic, and wildly dramatic.Yet it also feels somehow within reach. “The goings-on in Wuthering Heights are so Gothic and over the top. But the action isn’t happening in a castle in Transylvania—it’s in a Yorkshire farmhouse,” Dinsdale says. The places they filmed feel like real places, because they are. They are places of wildness that I can step into, landscapes I can inhabit.The great 20th-century literary critic and author Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the moors provide the isolation, the loneliness, and the removal that are essential to [Wuthering Heights].” I’d argue they also provide the central spirit of the story. The eternally restless and wounded feelings aren’t just emotions that Brontë wrote about in her novel or that Fennell depicts in her film. (Madeline Weinfield)
The Brontës lived in the Haworth Parsonage - eight miles west of Bradford - from 1820 and remained there until the death of the last surviving family member, Patrick Brontë, in 1861.Located on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, their life at the Parsonage had a profound impact on their literary works, particularly felt by Emily Brontë.Charlotte Brontë wrote, “My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was – liberty.”Emily Brontë was inspired by the real-life locations she would regularly come across whilst walking across the “wily, windy moors.”For example, located just under three miles from Haworth Parsonage, the abandoned farmhouse, Top Withens, has a strong connection with the novel and is a popular pilgrimage site for literary tourists.It has been associated with the inspiration for the Earnshaw home, but that has never been confirmed or verified. A commemorative plaque on the farmhouse states: “The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.”Written almost 180 years ago, Wuthering Heights has become an enduring figure in the pop culture zeitgeist with over 15 movie adaptations, many stage productions and a timeless music video from Kate Bush keeping the legacy of the novel alive and kicking.Over the years, film productions have realised that one of the best ways to capture the mood and atmosphere which made Brontë’s novel so effective is to retrace the author’s footsteps and film in Yorkshire.The first adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was directed by A.V. Bramble and filmed in Haworth in 1920. However, the silent movie was considered lost for many years, leading to an appeal by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2005 to trace the film.Speaking with the BBC, the librarian at the time, Ann Dinsdale said: "The film's makers went to a lot of trouble to ensure the accuracy of the film, shooting it on location.”Like many filmmakers before her, Emerald Fennell also saw the value of filming parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in its original setting. It was a big task and “huge responsibility” to bring her vision of Bronte’s novel to life and one she described as “an act of extreme masochism.”Speaking at the Brontë Women's Writing Festival in Haworth, Fennell said: “It's a huge responsibility because I know that if somebody else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think."She added: “It has also felt like an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. I've actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.”To capture the “misty and cold” atmosphere of the novel, Emerald Fennell shot her movie across various locations in Yorkshire, including Swaledale. Whilst in the North Yorkshire valley, filming took place at the ruins of the Old Gang Lead Mines, the Grade II listed Surrender Bridge and Melbecks Moor.The cast and crew also spent time in Arkengarthdale as they filmed on Booze Moor and in Langthwaite Village.Shazad Latif, who plays Edgar Linton in the upcoming adaptation, told the Yorkshire Post about his experiences filming in these dramatic locations.“The set design created by Suzie Davies for the houses was unbelievable. Obviously, the moors were amazing. You can feel the echo of Cathy and Heathcliff’s spirit up there,” said Latif. “It’s a stunning place to be and it evokes the spirit of the story that’s been there for 200 years. And it’s bloody windy!”Providing solace from the long and tiring days filming on the Moors, the cast and crew stayed at Simonstone Hall Hotel - a stately home renovated into an upscale hotel in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.The cast also spent time in local pubs after they finished filming and were seen in The Punch Bowl Inn (Low Row), The CB Inn (Arkengarthdale) and Green Dragon Inn (Hardraw.)“I didn’t have much filming to do [in Yorkshire], so I got to sit in the pub and wait for Jacob and Margot with Alison [Oliver] and Hong [Chau.] We would have drinks and play pool. It was great being stuck in there together. There were peacocks running about and a waterfall where they filmed Robin Hood: 'Prince of Thieves', five minutes across the farm, so it was just an amazing setting to be in.”Over the years, literary tourism has drawn people from all over the world to Yorkshire as they get the opportunity to explore the natural beauty and unique charm of the region. As Wuthering Heights is released in cinemas across the country, there will inevitably be a renewed interest in the beauty and mystery of the Yorkshire Moors, with people hoping to retrace the steps of Emily Brontë, Catherine and Heathcliffe [sic]. (Adam Davidson)
Emerald Fennell isn’t mucking about with Wuthering Heights. “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” roars the trailer for her new film, blasting us with sodden shirts and brutally tight corsets, bloody sunsets and Versailles-worthy interiors. Margot Robbie’s Cathy strides across a moor in a windswept wedding dress and Jacob Elordi’s ripped Heathcliff licks a wall and growls, “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”Damn Emily Brontë too because in the hands of Fennell, the writer-director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this is period drama at its most transgressive and maximalist. [...]Timid this ain’t, and it all starts with Fennell. Richard E Grant, whom the director cast as a haughty aristo in Saltburn, salutes her “fearless, jet-black sense of humour and baroque aesthetic”. Wuthering Heights, he says, is another “story of an outsider wreaking havoc on a hermetically sealed world — class, sexual obsession, doomed romance. I anticipate that her vision will be the polar opposite of polite.”“I like a physical response… and there’s nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights,” Fennell said on the Ruthie’s Table podcast this week. Brontë’s doomed and, yes, kinky romance is “extremely sexy… It makes you cry, it makes you recoil… It makes you question yourself.” Adapting it has been no moorland picnic. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last year. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism [in it]. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published in 1847]. But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back.”If anyone can pull it off it’s Fennell, 40, whose career has been powered by audaciousness, imagination and the marble-chiselled self-belief of the posh. The woman with a name like a Farrow & Ball paint shade started as an actress but moved with impressive briskness from playing Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and an Emmy-nominated turn as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown to directing darkly glamorous, divisive movies. “In our culture now we get the brakes being put on creatively… We’re afraid of embarrassment,” she told Ruthie’s Table. “I don’t mind being embarrassing.” [...]Film, though, is her main event and there she owes a debt to her star Robbie — Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were produced by LuckyChap, a company the Australian actress co-founded that specialises in female-focused projects. Wuthering Heights is the first time Fennell has directed her de facto boss, and some have cocked eyebrows at Robbie, 35, playing a character who is a teenager in the book. Fennell shrugged that off, describing Robbie as “the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind.”She has also drawn flak for casting Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”. That was also smoothly batted away. “You can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell told The Hollywood Reporter. ““There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” She cast Elordi after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day. “He “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. (Ed Potton)
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“I wasn’t always going to be in it. I was thrilled to be the producer, but at some point, we were talking about Cathy, and I decided to throw my hat into the ring,” [...]Robbie continued, “I’ve always wanted to be one of Emerald’s actors and fortunately, she felt the same way. It worked out wonderfully.” [...]“In my opinion, it is one of the greatest love stories of all time and it has a great cast and incredible actors. It’s a great film,” she added. (Latoya Gayle)
Since its publication in 1847, the great, canonical novel Wuthering Heights has inspired more than 35 film and television productions, beginning with a silent movie in 1920 and growing louder and louder over the course of a century until reaching its 2026 Emerald Fennell–directed crescendo.In this succession of adaptations, each filmmaker has gradually softened the original form—a dark and twisted story of obsession, generational trauma, and self-destruction—into something that more closely resembles a wild, cinematic love story. These adaptations, more often than not, have given credence to the saying, “Those who don’t create, destroy”—a saying that is also, ironically, the story of Heathcliff. Though Hollywood has continuously sought to portray him onscreen as a sexy, tormented, romantic hero, Heathcliff is really more like an awful boyfriend with a personality disorder who destroys the hearts and lives of innocents.It is a testament to our culture’s tendency to confuse toxicity with the heights of romance that when we read Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, we yearn to be loved so intensely that it might actually kill us. It’s a fantasy—and, moreover, a misunderstanding—that many of us take years to unlearn: In fact, love is not measured in units of suffering. [...]6. Wuthering Heights (1939), directed by William WylerThis film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, is debatably the most romanticized adaptation. It also only covers the first half of the novel, which is the half where none of the haunting takes place.5. Wuthering Heights (1998), BBC Television adaptationDirected by David Skynner, this adaptation may be the most faithful to the novel, although the logline feels like it should really be “a legitimately crazy man takes revenge on a nice guy who did nothing wrong besides care for the woman the crazy man claims to love.” Heathcliff acts like a whiny little baby throughout this film, constantly throwing tantrums, running away, and slamming doors. Simply put, he’s insufferable. And I’ve definitely dated him. Fortunately, Cathy does an amazing job of haunting him later, appearing as a literal ghost he can see on the moors and as a little girl in constant flashbacks.4. Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” music video (Version 1)In the infamous music video for the verified ’80s banger “Wuthering Heights,” camp and pop culture icon Kate Bush whirls her arms around in a white dress, repeating Cathy’s desperate cry to “let me into your window” over and over and over, her huge eyes staring into the camera. (I don’t think she blinks even once.)She translates the gnawing, pining feeling in the novel, setting it to music that repeatedly crescendos, reaching a slightly higher pitch every time—which is sort of how it feels to be in a toxic relationship. Every time I hear it, it gets stuck in my head for at least three days. Come to think of it, becoming a musician might be the ultimate haunting tactic.3. Wuthering Heights (2012), directed by Andrea ArnoldA raw and devastating adaptation—easily my favorite one to date. Arnold’s Heathcliff is much more fully developed as a character, in part due to the more restrained performances and Arnold’s highly sensory style. But the filmmaker also incorporates one of the driving struggles of the original Heathcliff that every other adaptation cuts out: i.e., the racism he faces. By not whitewashing the narrative, Arnold allows for greater pathos to emerge from Heathcliff and Cathy’s entangled backstories.The movie ends almost immediately after Cathy (played by none other than Effy from Skins) dies, so the posthumous haunting is limited, but bonus points for Heathcliff being rendered as a real human rather than a cartoonish villain or heartthrob, which contributes to the melancholy atmosphere of the film that personally haunted me for days after.2. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992), directed by Peter KosminskySure, Heathcliff (played by Ralph Fiennes) is seen giving Cathy (Juliette Binoche) a piece of paper on which he’s written down every day she has spent with the Lintons versus with him, and that’s super toxic, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is that Cathy haunts the shit out of him in the second half of the movie. With Peter Kosminsky using the same actress to play Cathy’s daughter (also named Catherine) after she dies, Heathcliff is forced to lay eyes upon her exact face day after day. Unfortunately, this method of haunting does require you to get pregnant and have a lookalike daughter that lives with your toxic ex while you roam around the moors screaming and disturbing everyone. While that is clearly not advisable, I do admire the commitment.1. Wuthering Heights (2009), ITV miniseriesThis two-episode miniseries stars Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, but you may find yourself getting confused by who Tom Hardy is playing and what movie you’re watching, given he looks nearly identical to both Professor Snape and Edward Scissorhands. The brooding is so over the top you can’t help but laugh every time he slowly appears from behind a pillar. But Cathy (Charlotte Riley) running out of her home, pregnant, in the pouring rain to search for her childhood crush felt relatable. And Cathy and Heathcliff’s chemistry is actually amazing—which makes sense, as the two actors who played them later got married.Best haunting moment: When Heathcliff brings Isabella Linton home and tells her she has to sleep in a separate bedroom. This is because Heathcliff must sleep in his ex’s childhood bedroom, alone, next to a drawing of her. This is ideally how haunted I want my ex to be when he brings home a new girl for the first time. (Cazzie David)
In the almost two centuries since the Yorkshire sisters wrote their passionate and brave novels, the light of Brontë mania has barely dimmed.It’s shining brightly with anticipation now with Emerald Fennell’s ‘racy’ Wuthering Heights film landing in cinemas next week, and a fascinating biography of Charlotte’s life told through her extensive surviving clothing.Dress historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton’s book is as riveting as Charlotte’s iron-busked corset and reveals the story of her ordinary life in Haworth, forbidden love, and fashion choices when fame came calling. Eleanor has worked as a costume consultant for film and TV, including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible and Gentleman Jack, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.“The amazing thing about Charlotte’s clothing is that so much has survived,” says Eleanor, who researched and studied for her PhD, what she calls ‘the surviving witnesses to Charlotte’s life,’ through the gowns, bonnets, shawls, corset and boots that made up her wardrobe, along with letters and documents. Many exist because of a tradition of make-do and hand down.“When Charlotte died, she left everything to her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls and he and her father Patrick and housekeeper Martha Brown treasured many items as keepsakes.” Some items that were dispersed to families and souvenir hunters have migrated home to Haworth with 150 pieces housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.Charlotte’s garments and accessories play a vital part in joining the dots of her history in intimate detail from her birth to her death. “They have been active participants in a remarkable life - one that was both extraordinary, public and private, obscure and famous,” says Eleanor. “Secrets have been found within their very fibres. They challenge a lot of myths and preconceptions that we’ve had about Charlotte and her family.”One such object that still bears signs of Charlotte’s perspiration is a busked corset that she laced excruciatingly tightly like ‘a form of armour that shielded and fortified’ when she was broken-hearted through the unrequited love that she bore for her former teacher Constantin Héger in Brussels. “She’s kind of girding her loins quite literally, giving herself this strength. I think the clothes can tell us so much, very personal detail that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up from a letter.”Charlotte made most of her clothes with Martha, buying textiles from the mills and accessing fashion plates.A Paisley print dress she owned dated to the 1840s was bold and bright, with a pattern inspired by silk shawls imported from central Asia. “One of the most astonishing discoveries was the bright colours of fabrics that we have revealed by examining fragments through a microscope and harnessing modern technology,” says Eleanor. “We imagine drab colours, but they simply weren’t. Globalisation is another insight.”Charlotte owned a pair of beaded, deerskin moccasins made by members of the Mohawk tribe in Canada.When Charlotte published Jane Eyre, she used the pseudonym Currer Bell to disguise her female authorship. When the cat was out of the bag and her secret identity uncovered, she needed to transition from a provincial clergyman’s daughter and governess to celebrated author, with some trepidation and nervousness. That meant wearing a suitable ‘power’ gown when she was invited to attend lunches, dinners, lectures and parties by enthusiasts, influencers and the literati.When she met her literary hero William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, in 1850, she wore a two-year-old Prussian blue dress woven at Salts Mill, from alpaca fibres from South America. The fabric was printed in Lancashire, probably in Accrington. Hand stitching by Charlotte and Martha still exists.“She was in a very nervous state when she went to London for that important meeting in a new environment, a new world and meeting famous people,” Eleanor says. “When we choose clothes, we want to give off the right messages and feel strong, and Charlotte knew that was a potent force. It surprised me how important it was for her to gain strength through her regional identity and wear cloth woven in Yorkshire. She chose to connect to those Yorkshire roots.”Eleanor has drawn an illustration of the Thackeray Dress, and the altered original is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.Poignant items include an ‘ugly’ or wind bonnet - strips of silk were worn over the brim to protect the wearer. They were the height of fashion at the seaside and Charlotte may have worn hers when she was in Scarborough with her sister Anne, who died there during their visit, whilst they were still in mourning for Emily. They had stopped on the way to purchase accessories in York.“Surviving garments are solid witnesses because you can’t always trust portraits and photographs as they are often staged with props, they are not candid,” Eleanor adds. “The real Charlotte emerges as a woman altogether braver, more vulnerable, less isolated, less provincial and more fashion conscious than anyone ever expected.” (Catherine Turnbull)
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