In a rapidly changing intellectual environment, two developments have affected the work of the historical biographer over the past two decades. First, digitisation has made it possible to read vast swaths of printed matter online, including obscure sermons and newspaper articles, and even some manuscripts, without leaving the study. Second, with privacy under erasure, biographers are empowered to go where their predecessors feared to tread with regard to the body and its functions. Both developments are evident in the making of This Dark Night, a book that demonstrates what can be achieved when a scholar-critic of Lutz’s stature applies her empathic imagination to the hidden life and writing practices of her elusive subject.Lutz has a particular interest in the materials that writers used in the Victorian age, the subject of a previous study. In the preface to her new book, she writes; “Keeping slips of paper and a pencil nub nearby, Brontë mastered a peripatetic kind of creativity, interwoven with household work, daydreaming, and exploring her native landscape.” Out on the moors by day and under the stars by night, she scribbled poems on scraps of paper and later transcribed them in drafts written in ink. Lutz argues that “the page worked for her as a sort of frame or foundation on which to build the poem. Similar to those samplers she made as a girl, the letters, words, and lines accumulated like cross-stich across and down the sheet.” Signs of digging her quill pen into the paper while writing remain legible, we are told.As Emily and her sisters prepared their poetry and fiction for publication, they acquired notebooks with thin leather covers the colour of oxblood. When opened, they would easily lie flat. Lutz’s close readings of the texts convince us of the power of a poetic vision inspired by nature and the elements. Her treatment of Emily’s writing materials reminds us that creation is work. (Dr Michael Wheeler)
Forget hot girl summer — for readers, it's decidedly a classics girl summer. According to data from Google Trends, interest in books you might not have read or even thought about since high school English class is way up. This includes some of the standard books you'd find on Rory Gilmore's reading list, like "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë and "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, but some titles surging in popularity are unusual picks for the book girlies. (Amanda Manen)
Andrés Muedano: What are you working on next?Tara Menon: I am working on both a second academic book and a second novel. My academic book is an exploration of anger and the novel. I have noticed that readers often label books “angry”—they might say, for instance, “Jane Eyre is a furious book” or “Naipaul’s novels seethe with rage,” but it’s never been clear exactly how they make those determinations. In my book, I ask: what does it mean for anger to be embedded in a novel, rather than simply expressed by one of its characters? What are the formal characteristics of anger in fiction?
But Morton doesn’t believe in bogging herself down in research, not since starring in a British TV production of “Jane Eyre” when she was 19 and carried around a heavily highlighted copy of the Charlotte Brontë book, despairing whenever the adaptation deviated from the novel. From that point on, she stuck to the script and her own imagination. (...)Morton first came to New York as a teen to do press for “Emma,” returned a year later to promote “Jane Eyre” and then couldn’t bring herself to leave, “sofa-surfing” at friends’ apartments so she could immerse herself in the city.“New York stole my heart,” Morton says. It’s where she first got into literature, devouring Charles Bukowski, roaming the aisles at the St. Mark’s Bookshop, checking out movies from Kim’s Video and gobbling hash browns and eggs over easy at the Waverly Diner. (Glenn Whipp)
Sometimes the right project is simply too good to turn down. Wuthering Heights was a fantastic job – I loved every minute of it, and Margot and Jacob and everyone on that production were lovely. I’m lucky that I still get offered work that interests me. The moment it stops being enjoyable, I’ll stop doing it. (Claire Bowman)
" spawned a worldwide annual tradition of red-dress flash mobs, with two taking place in France this year: at the Bon-Repos abbey on July 25 and in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris on July 26, 2026.Sa reconnaissance viendra bien plus tard. Au cours du XXe siècle, Les Hauts de Hurlevent s'impose progressivement comme un classique de la littérature mondiale grâce à ses nombreuses adaptations au cinéma, à la télévision et au théâtre. Kate Bush participera, elle aussi, à cette redécouverte. Car, contrairement au roman dont elle est inspirée, sa chanson connaît un triomphe immédiat. Sortie en pleine période où s'affrontent le punk et le disco, à rebours des tendances dominantes, elle s'impose en tête des classements britanniques et détrône même le groupe ABBA. Du jamais vu pour un premier titre et une artiste inconnue.Lorsque Kate Bush découvre ce récit gothique, ce n'est pas en ouvrant le roman d'Emily Brontë, mais en regardant une adaptation télévisée diffusée par la BBC. Elle n'a alors que 16 ans. Fascinée par l'atmosphère sombre du récit et la puissance tragique de ses personnages, elle finit par lire le livre et se sent particulièrement proche de son héroïne, Catherine, surnommée Cathy, dont elle partage le prénom. Elle décide alors de transposer l'histoire dans le langage de la pop.À l'âge de 18 ans, elle compose Wuthering Heights en une seule soirée, au piano. Sa chanson s'inspire d'une scène emblématique du roman : celle où le fantôme de Cathy apparaît à la fenêtre de Heathcliff et tente de le convaincre de la laisser entrer. Kate Bush prête alors sa voix à l'héroïne disparue : « Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home, I'm so cold, let me in-a-your window... » ("Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy. Je suis revenue. J'ai si froid. Laisse-moi entrer par ta fenêtre..."). En quatre minutes de musique, la chanteuse parvient ainsi à condenser toute la passion, la mélancolie et le mystère qui font encore aujourd'hui la force du roman d'Emily Brontë. (...)Si Wuthering Heights est devenue une chanson culte, c'est autant grâce à la voix singulière de Kate Bush qu'à l'univers visuel qu'elle a construit autour du morceau. Son timbre aigu, presque irréel, se mêle à des sonorités éthérées pour donner vie à un personnage fantomatique directement inspiré de Cathy Earnshaw. Mais c'est surtout le clip qui va marquer durablement les esprits.Conçue avec le chorégraphe Lindsay Kemp, célèbre pour avoir notamment formé David Bowie à l'art du mime, la chorégraphie contribue à l'atmosphère hypnotique du morceau. Dans une première version du clip, Kate Bush apparaît sous les traits du fantôme de Cathy, vêtue d'une longue robe blanche vaporeuse. Filmée au ralenti, évoluant parmi des effets visuels qui accentuent l'étrangeté de la scène, elle semble flotter entre le monde des vivants et celui des morts.Une seconde vidéo est ensuite réalisée pour le marché américain. Le décor change, mais pas la chorégraphie. Cette fois, la chanteuse danse au milieu de la campagne anglaise dans une robe rouge flamboyante qui deviendra sa tenue emblématique. Plus épurée et plus facilement identifiable, cette version va peu à peu s'imposer dans l'imaginaire collectif et devenir l'une des images les plus célèbres de la culture pop britannique.C'est d'ailleurs ce clip qui est à l'origine de The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. Chaque année, à l'occasion de l'anniversaire de Kate Bush - et d’Emily Brontë, née un 30 juillet, elle-aussi - des milliers de fans à travers le monde enfilent la fameuse robe rouge et reproduisent les gestes envoûtants de la chanteuse. De Londres à Melbourne, en passant par Paris, cette chorégraphie née à la fin des années 1970 continue ainsi de rassembler. L'archive ci-dessous nous entraîne dans l'événement organisé en Bretagne en 2024. (Florence Dartois) (Translation)
Final Jeopardy today was in the category “AUTHORS“The clue: “She sometimes signed letters “Charles Thunder”The answer: “Who is Charlotte Brontë?” (Lizzy Buczak in Parade)
The album was recorded across Iceland, New York, and Berlin, and draws inspiration from poetry, literature and visual art. de Oliveira weaves in mythology with references to Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of John Keats, Emily Brontë and Anne Sexton. (Kayla Sandiford)
En esto se gastan los jóvenes lucenses su Bono Cultural: «El "GTA VI" y "Cumbres Borrascosas" son los grandes éxitos de este 2026» (...) Cuentan que esta ayuda cultural es más usada por las chicas que por los chicos, aunque esto no significa que estos últimos no acudan a comprar obras literarias al establecimiento. «Ellas vienen, principalmente, en busca de novelas románticas. Cumbres borrascosas vendió muchos ejemplares por el estreno de la adaptación en cines». (Andrés Quintán) (Translation)
An AI includes Jane Eyre in a list of great stories never getting old on Bookclub. The Brussels Brontë Blog recounts a guided day trip through lesser-known Brontë sites in Lancashire and West Yorkshire — Cowan Bridge, Leck, Tunstall Church, Kirkby Lonsdale, and Wycoller — checking off several long-sought locations tied to the sisters' lives and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.
Bradford City have announced their new mascot, Brontë Bantam, in an announcement video that links to world-renowned authors Charlotte and Emily Brontë.The club have now created a sibling duo of mascots that truly represent the community and family atmosphere that surrounds the club.But they have also done it by bringing in the local area, specifically highlighting Haworth and the Brontë sisters, a beloved part of the West Yorkshire area and its history. (Sophie Bates)
How do you approach reading classics? I find it hard to get past the older language.Donaldson: I think the main challenge is attuning your ear to the unfamiliar language and pacing. But what feels awkward on page five often starts to feel natural by page fifty.Start with classics that are genuine page-turners: Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Count of Monte Cristo and virtually anything by Austen or Dickens all have strong narrative momentum, making the language easier to settle into than, say, behemoths like Moby-Dick, Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov.And do not feel obligated to slog through every book you try. Some became classics because they changed literature, not because they’re rollicking yarns. I also don’t think the goal shouldn’t be to check titles off a list – it’s to find the books that have earned their reputation because they still have the power to move/grab us.
Hardy and Free has been created by award-winning Yorkshire photographer Carolyn Mendelsohn and takes its name from a line in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free...”It was originally commissioned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth in 2023 as part of its contemporary arts programme and then a new series of large-scale portraits with audio from the women involved, was created for Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture and adorned Kirkgate Shopping Centre.The photographs, which are three metres by two metres each are hung in a huge barn where they used to show the pigeons on the Yorkshire Show Ground.Hardy and Free explores the relationship between 12 contemporary women and the natural world, all sharing a profound emotional link with the landscapes that shape them. (Catherine Scott)
Widely considered one of the finest novels ever written, this timeless tale follows a young woman who, after being orphaned at a young age, is sent to a brutal boarding school. 10 years later, she accepts a job as a governess for a young girl, the ward of the enigmatic and brutish master of Thornfield Hall.Slowly but surely, she begins to fall for her erratic employer whilst she also starts uncovering his dark secrets.Directed by Robert Stevenson, best known for helming Disney’s beloved film Mary Poppins, this underrated Gothic romance from the classic Hollywood era stars Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Mr Rochester.Many film fans have claimed over the years that it’s one of the best adaptations of Brontë’s novel to ever be produced. It’s certainly a must-watch for viewers who have devoured recent period romances such as Wuthering Heights and The Other Bennet Sister or can’t wait for the upcoming iterations of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.One 10/10 review from an IMDb user claimed that, while other versions of Jane Eyre are just as breathtaking, fans should “see this to be fully satisfied". (Lucas Hill-Paul)
The film will be on BBC Four next Thursday, July 9, at 23:50 (GMT).
Best Actress - Margot RobbieBest Supporting Actress - Alison Oliver
Sue Ryder is inviting people from across West Yorkshire to take part in the first ever Brontë Pub Walk, a brand‑new event set in the stunning countryside that inspired the world‑famous Brontë sisters.Sponsored by Bulloughs Cleaning Services, the event - taking place on Saturday August 15 at 11am - offers a choice of five or ten‑mile routes, each featuring a series of charming refreshment stops.Walkers will take in Stanbury, Ponden and the outskirts of Oakworth before finishing on the iconic Haworth Main Street. (Hannah Britton)With eight refreshment points on the full route and six on the shorter route, the Brontë Pub Walk is designed to be a relaxed, social day out, perfect for families, groups of friends and workplace teams.
Isn't Iconic probably the most overused and misused word in the English language?
If you’re the type to imagine that literary genius might seep into the stones and the woodwork, England has book-loads of places to go. Jane Austen, the Brontës, Rudyard Kipling, William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens ... you can visit the homes of them all. (...)From York, take a spin (or the train) to Harrogate for a touch of 18th century spa town elegance, or to Haworth to see the Parsonage home of the Brontë sisters and the moors backdrop that famously inspired Emily’s Wuthering Heights. (Gemma Tipton & Úna McCaffrey)
Anne Brontë.org celebrates the 200th anniversary of Patrick Brontë's gift of twelve wooden soldiers to Branwell in 1826.
A first edition of Wuthering Heights together with Agnes Grey has sold at Christie’s London for £1,206,500 in its live The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures auction setting a new world auction record by Emily Brontë.The set is one of the finest examples in private hands, and no textually complete copy has appeared at auction in publisher’s cloth since 1908. It survives in its original 1847 publisher’s cloth binding and retains the distinctive textual and printing irregularities of the first edition. It is also the highest price ever achieved for 19th century literature and for any printed book by a woman.Only 250 copies of the first edition of Wuthering Heights were printed and examples in their original full-cloth binding are scarce with only five other examples known (The Blavatnik-Honresfield copy at Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; University of Oxford; British Library; Charlotte Brontë's annotated copy with pages missing sold at Christie’s New York in 2009; and Anne Brontë's annotated copy at Princeton University Library).This copy bound in diagonally ribbed green-grey cloth with floral patterns and arabesques stamped on the cover has been kept in the same historic house library in England since just after its publication in 1847.
‘The Brontës’ by Juliet Barker (1994)A giant, door stopping account of an entire literary family, Barker’s book is a monumental achievement. But it is also riveting and tragic, telling of the passions, failures, and early deaths of the four Brontë siblings, with a specific focus on Emily and Charlotte, the authors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
7 "Wuthering Heights" by Kate BushInspired by 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily BrontëEmily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" follows the turbulent romance between the orphan Heathcliff and the affluent Catherine Earnshaw. Having been adopted by the Earnshaw family, Heathcliff develops a close bond with Catherine — only to have his heart broken when she marries the wealthy Edgar Linton. Years later, Heathcliff returns to society, this time as a man of status and eager to exact revenge.Kate Bush puts the novel to music with "Wuthering Heights," written from Catherine's perspective after her death. From direct references to the Yorkshire moors — "Out on the wily, windy moors" — to self-confessional lyrics reflecting the couple's passionate yet emotionally draining romance, "Wuthering Heights" reflects the same volatile nature of Brontë's seminal work. (Dyah Ayu Larasati)
A rare first edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, together with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, sold earlier this evening in The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures for £1,206,500, setting a new world auction record for Emily Brontë.The result marks the highest price ever achieved at auction for any printed book by a woman, as well as the highest price for any work of 19th-century literature.Regarded as one of the finest surviving examples in private hands, the set remains in its original 1847 publisher’s cloth binding. No other textually complete copy of Wuthering Heights in publisher’s cloth has appeared at auction since 1908.Mark Wiltshire, Specialist, Books & Manuscripts, Christie’s commented, “This is exactly the kind of book collectors dream about but almost never see. A first edition of Wuthering Heights in original cloth is extraordinarily rare. It’s a true survival – and a landmark result for Brontë collecting. It is an honour to have been entrusted with such an exceptional work.”
Sarah West, a volunteer at the site who met the Queen at the time, said: “One of the joys of volunteering at the Brontë Birthplace is meeting fascinating people from all over the world who come to discover where the Brontë story began.“Having the opportunity to meet Her Majesty during her visit was a wonderful experience, and it is fantastic news that she has chosen to become our royal patron.”A group of people stand and watch as the Queen lifts a cloth covering a memorial plaque mounted on an easel in front of the buildingCathy Boyden, the chairman of Brontë Birthplace, said it was an “incredible honour” that the Queen had become its royal patron.She said: “Our first year has been a remarkable journey, made possible by the dedication of volunteers, supporters, members, funders and visitors who believed in the vision of bringing this historic building back to life.“Her Majesty’s patronage is a wonderful endorsement of what has been achieved so far, and gives us great encouragement as we look towards the future.” (Tom McArdle in The Telegraph)
Also on Museums+Heritage.
For 26 years now, local heritage champion Steven Stanworth has been celebrating the area’s Brontë legacy. Since the turn of the millennium, the now 70-year-old has dedicated countless hours of his time to restoring and promoting the Bell Chapel and, with fellow Bradfordian the broadcaster Christa Ackroyd, also created a Brontë exhibition at St James’ Church in the village, which includes the font at which five of the Brontë children were baptised.Formerly involved in both the Brontë Birthplace Trust and Brontë Birthplace Ltd, Stanworth has also helped to shape a lasting celebration of Thornton’s place in the Brontë story at what was once the family home on Market Street.Next month, he’ll give a talk there about his Brontë journey, one of a number of Bradford-born or based speakers taking centre stage at this year’s Bradford Literature Festival to reflect the city’s rich literary and cultural landscape. (...)Stanworth’s involvement with the Brontë story began in 2000, whilst a church warden for Thornton’s St James’ Church, opposite the ruin of the Bell Chapel. After spotting two people tending to graves in what was its rather overgrown graveyard at the time, he got together a working group to tidy the place up and clear it from weeds and brambles.“I didn't realise how big the site was, or what its historical significance was at the time,” he reflects. “But people kept turning up and saying ‘you do realise this is where Patrick Brontë was the minister and five of the six children were christened in this place?’ I didn't at that time but I started to research it...And lo and behold there we are with this unique selling point for Thornton that had been left to go to rack and ruin.“So I really wanted to set about making this place known to people. Brontë fans come from all over the world to Haworth but they very rarely came to Thornton. This seemed wrong, you know, this is the birthplace of the children. These are three of the world's greatest, well-known authors and they should be celebrated in the place where they were born. I thought it's time to put Thornton on the map.”Fast-forward to 2012 and Stanworth took a leading role in The Brontë Birthplace Trust, which was established to raise funds to purchase the house where the family previously lived. “But unfortunately we didn't have enough time to get the money together and buy it,” he recalls.It was a lot of work and Stanworth, who retired as an engineer for Northern Powergrid six years ago, was reluctant at first to get involved in a second opportunity a decade later.But he did in fact become a key part of a group of heritage campaigners who stepped in to buy the Grade II-Listed house and convert it into a visitor attraction. After being lovingly restored to reflect both its historic character and contemporary charm, the building opened to the public as Brontë Birthplace last year and was paid a royal visit by Queen Camilla.More than £650,000 was raised to bring the site back to life, with money from more than 700 individual investors, together with grants from Bradford City of Culture 2025, the Community Ownership Fund, National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Rural England Prosperity Fund, contributing to the purchase. The house now runs as a museum, cafe and education centre with facilities for overnight stays."I think you have to celebrate people where they were born,” reflects Stanworth, who last year released the book Birthplace of Dreams, with photographer Mark Davis, to champion the Brontë heritage in Thornton. “Famous people from your town inspire other people. I want children in particular to be inspired because these girls lived in a humble terrace house and they became world famous and are still famous 200 years later. That’s aspirational.” (Laura Reid)
What would happen if Georgiana, younger sister of Pride and Prejudice’s swoonworthy hero Fitzwilliam Darcy, met Branwell, the troubled only brother of the famous Brontë sisters, shining stars of the 19th century literary firmament? (...)Georgiana finds herself in 1845, only forty-six years in the future, and at gloomy Thorp Green Hall in Yorkshire. It’s the home of the ageing Reverend Robinson and his decades younger wife… and also the place where Branwell and Anne Brontë are employed as the children’s tutor and governess.Mistaken for the eldest and troublesome daughter Lydia’s ‘special companion,’ Georgiana settles in but anticipates she has been drawn to Thorp Green Hall for a reason… to investigate another murder. However, even before she discovers the cook’s father dead on a chopping block, Georgiana finds herself entangled in a web of passion, deception, and danger centred on the eccentric, haunted Branwell.It seems Branwell is engaged in a perilous affair with Mrs Robinson and experiencing a series of sinister omens and terrifying encounters. As Georgiana uncovers the secrets of the house, and learns more about the origins of her time-travelling, she must find the killer and save the Brontë siblings from an evil plot… thus preventing, of course, a most terrible loss to future readers everywhere.Blackwell’s ingenious blend of crime, time travel, all things Austen-esque, and now the Brontë siblings, delivers an atmospheric murder mystery while allowing readers a fresh and fun perspective on much-loved fictional Austen characters, and a glimpse into the real lives of characters like Anne, youngest of the famous sisters, and the tragic Branwell whose turbulent, alcohol-addicted life ended at the early age of 31. (Pam Norfolk)
What makes Jane Eyre still relevant today? That was a question very much on my mind when I was writing my own Jane Eyre reimagining, 4 Janes, which traces the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection and a place to belong.For a character self-described as small, plain and poor, Jane remains larger than life. Is it because of her independence, her intelligence, her endurance, her moral courage? These are admirable traits, but perhaps what makes Jane most relatable is her desire for more, for a bigger life. Jane wants love — who doesn’t — but she will not compromise herself for it. No wonder readers can’t get enough of Jane Eyre.The roundup below brings together new and earlier reimaginings of Jane’s story. Each uniquely picks up and elaborates upon an important theme in Jane Eyre. Altogether, these retellings are a testament to Jane Eyre as an enduring source of inspiration for both readers and writers.
As previously announced, Charlie Burn (Mean Girls, Savoy Theatre, Les Misérables, UK and Ireland tour) will take on the title role opposite Ashley Gilmour (Miss Saigon, West End/UK and international tour, Evita, Curve) as Rochester.They will be joined by Claire Greenway (Abbot/Grace Poole), Melad Hamidi (St John/Lord Ingram), Connor Wood (John Reed/Vicar), Jonathan Andrew Hume (Brocklehurst/Mason), Izzi Levine (Agnes/Leah/Jane’s Mother/Mary Ingram), Hannah Lindsey (Scatcherd/Bertha Mason), Isabelle Methven (Helen Burns/Bessie), Gemma Page (Reed/Fairfax), Eve Shanu-Wilson (Blanche/Sophie), Poppy Jason (Young Jane/Adele) and Emily-Rose Samuel (Young Jane/Adele).Co-directed by RSC and National Theatre director John Caird (Les Misérables, Spirited Away) and Broadway star Megan McGinnis (Beauty and the Beast, Little Women, Beetlejuice), Caird and Paul Gordon’s musical reimagining of the classic novel will play a strictly limited season at the south London venue from 28 August to 24 October.Commenting on the London premiere of the musical which was first seen in Canada in 1996, Caird said: “I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to explore a new version of Jane Eyre in the beautifully intimate Southwark Playhouse Elephant. It’s always a pleasure to work on this timeless romance but all the more exciting to be collaborating with the brilliant and innovative Megan McGinnis as co-director.”Co-creator Gordon added: “I’m beyond thrilled to finally bring the musical of Jane Eyre to the UK. Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece is not only a landmark portrayal of a strong female protagonist, but a story that sends audiences out of the theatre feeling better about their own lives than when they walked in.” (Angela Thomas)
It seems Emerald Fennell is at it again, riding on the high from her very successful Saltburn, she has reprised her trusty Jacob Elordi to take a stab at adapting Wuthering Heights into a glossy, shock-value-heavy, erotic reimagining.When the trailer for her adaptation dropped, it seemed she had a very different vision to the gothic classic than people were expecting. A vision of a whitewashed Heathcliff with a horrendous Yorkshire accent, a bleach blonde Catherine Earnshaw sticking her fingers into Elordi’s mouth and a Charlie XCX soundtrack thundering across the windy moors.To put it simply, she has taken a classic story rooted in racism, classism and generational trauma and reduced it to a ‘dark erotic romance’ created simply for aesthetics.The most glaring controversy of Fennel’s adaptation is her casting choice, once again she has casted Jacob Elordi as her main lead. Talk about beating a dead horse. This casting choice has not only made the film terribly unexciting and overdone but has also stripped away the core plot of the entire novel. (Kate Koles)
Fennell’s storytelling style and directorial instinct tend towards overstatement and hyperbole which in some sense is appropriate for a story that has such huge emotional highs and lows. Robbie and Elordi are equal to those and portray them well enough, but it is a shame that as empathetic and nuanced actors they are not given much of an opportunity to develop or explore their characters and the dynamic between them beyond the two-dimensional. Where the film scores highly is in the beautiful cinematography from Linus Sandgren and the luminous depiction of the Yorkshire landscape, the soundtrack featuring specially written songs from Charli XCX and the stunning production design and costumes. It is undoubtedly a visual feast. (Yvette Huddlestone)
Haworth - Nestled within West Yorkshire's Worth Valley, Haworth is closely associated with the literary legacy of the Brontë sisters. Their novels remain deeply linked to the surrounding moorland landscapes and the village where much of their lives unfolded.The steep main street climbs through the centre of Haworth, passing stone-built shops, tearooms and historic buildings. The atmosphere feels distinctly different from larger market towns, with much of the village retaining its nineteenth-century appearance.Literary visitors often head to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, housed within the family's former home. Nearby, St Michael and All Angels Church remains an important part of the village's history and contains the Brontë family vault.
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me), delivered on all fours with a ribbon-tied ponytail, is an intentional homage to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Isabella, but there are certainly likenesses. (Anna Moloney)
Cime Tempestose, analisi critica e socio-psicologica del potente e immortale capolavoro della scrittrice Emily BrontëL’apparente monoliticità dell'opera nasconde in realtà una struttura mineraliforme di vettori culturali e concettuali, che Brontë edifica per manomettere, dall'interno, i canoni estetici e morali della sua epoca. (Massimo Triolo)
Queen Camilla has accepted an invitation to become Royal Patron of a museum and educational centre at the location where the Brontë sisters were born.The Queen officially opened The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton, Bradford, in May 2025 after it was opened to the public for the first time in its 200-year history following a fundraising campaign.Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, as well as brother Branwell, were all born in the house on Market Street, now under public ownership, between 1816 and 1820.Cathy Boyden, chair of the Brontë Birthplace, said: "Her Majesty's patronage is a wonderful endorsement of what has been achieved so far and gives us great encouragement as we look to the future."Boyden added: "Our first year has been a remarkable journey, made possible by the dedication of volunteers, supporters, members, funders and visitors who believed in the vision of bringing this historic building back to life."A spokesperson for the museum, which also offers overnight stays, said since it had opened, it had welcomed "thousands of visitors from across the UK and around the world".The siblings later went on to write poetry and novels, with the women originally writing under pen names.Some of their most famous works include Emily's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.The Brontë Parsonage Museum, based in the house where the sisters grew up after the family moved to Haworth in 1821, is also now a museum.According to a spokesperson for the Royal Family, having a Royal Patron "provides vital publicity for the work of these organisations, and allows their enormous achievements and contributions to society to be recognised and promoted".
In 2021, Sotheby’s in London announced the sale of a precious literary manuscript, feared lost for so long that it had acquired near-legendary status. A notebook into which Emily Brontë copied 31 of her poems had remained where it was last heard of in the 1930s, within the private literary collection formed by a 19th-century Lancashire industrialist, William Law of Honresfield House.As well as containing the only-known manuscript versions of some of Brontë’s most famous lyrics, the notebook bears pencilled annotations made by her elder sister (and posthumous editor) Charlotte, who, when later recalling the fiercely independent, contrarian will behind Brontë’s reserved outward manner, claimed that “an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world”.Many biographers have welcomed the challenge of standing as “interpreter” to Emily Brontë, but all have had to confront the slight extent of her literary remains. No manuscript or draft material of her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is known to survive. Only a few of her letters and essays have been preserved, while all that is left of her long-running collaboration with her younger sister Anne on the chronicles of their imaginary empire of Gondal are her poems voiced by its impassioned, amoral protagonists.But the American literary scholar Deborah Lutz’s new biography has benefited from the successful fundraising campaign to purchase the “Honresfield Library” for the British nation – including the rediscovered poetry notebook, now preserved in the British Library. Lutz’s insights from accessing this original document, and her expert critical reappraisals of the poems, are among the highlights of this fresh and engaging account of Brontë’s career.The title of This Dark Night, taken from Brontë’s poem opening “The wind I hear it sighing”, announces Lutz’s focus on Brontë as a poet of nocturnal reveries and affinity with nature, who also achieved a sensational innovation in prose with Wuthering Heights, combining a Gothic atmosphere of romance and supernaturalism with grim, confrontational realism in the depiction of madness and violence.While fully honouring Brontë’s genius, Lutz re-examines her domestic and working life with the same human sympathy, and attention to the materiality of 19th-century writing and publication practices, previously displayed in her group biography of the Brontë sisters, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015).All the familiar anecdotes are here, with Brontë again seen abandoning teaching opportunities for managing her clergyman father’s household; studying German while baking bread; cauterising her own wound from a dog bite; rescuing her laudanum-addicted brother Branwell after he set fire to his bed, and stoically enduring, aged 30, her own consumptive death agony in 1848.But the standard narrative gains texture from both first-hand and closely researched engagements with the natural phenomena Brontë experienced, in keeping with Lutz’s quotation of Gertrude Stein’s assertion that “anybody is as their land and air is”.A discussion of Brontë’s poetry and artwork inspired by her captive merlin falcon is enlivened by her father’s description of handling a merlin, jotted into his copy of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (another Honresfield treasure).The Brontë family vault in St Michael and All Angels, Haworth, with its frequently necessitated reopenings, becomes a powerful motif in Lutz’s explorations of how Brontë’s preoccupations with mortality and decay grew out of her awareness of the Haworth gravediggers’ activities, and of the corpse-preserving properties of the peat bogs on the Yorkshire moors.Lutz’s project of reconstructing Brontë’s lived experience succeeds best when grounded in direct personal observations of place, or in close readings of extant literary manuscripts and other written records. Less convincing are some speculative commentaries on topics including Brontë’s sexuality, and her process of composing Wuthering Heights, where evidence is sometimes lacking even for conjecture (whether by Lutz, or by earlier scholars whose work she cites).At the same time, important contexts with relevance to Brontë’s geographical and social influences are left unexplored. Considerations of what her father’s Irish heritage might have meant to her, or of how the Romantic-period Methodist movement influenced both her parents’ Anglicanism, and her own unorthodox religious and aesthetic sensibilities, are in particular only fleetingly touched upon.In assessing Brontë’s personality, Lutz wisely avoids any anachronistic, pathologising labelling of her characteristics and behaviours. She also holds back, however, from sustained engagement with the personal, post-Romantic philosophy of individualism that drove Brontë’s struggle for authentic self-determination (and which anticipated aspects of 20th-century existentialism).Ultimately, in This Dark Night, Brontë the woman again resists definition, remaining in somewhat indistinct focus amid an accumulation of social-historical detail. Nevertheless, in her vivid communication of her physical encounters with Brontë’s art and craft in the archives, and her sensitive new readings of familiar texts, Lutz achieves a worthy celebration of the unique, uncompromising author who proclaimed “No coward soul is mine”, and became the creator of Heathcliff. (Jenny McAuley)
Christie’s June 30 Exceptional Sale in London offers many fine lots, among them, a bespoke cigar humidor of Cuban amboya gifted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill during the war ($25,000-$40,000); a sabre-toothed tiger skull discovered in a Pleistoscene sinkhole in Florida in 2008 ($1,000,000-$1,500,000); and by no means least, a rare first edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published, fascinatingly, as a three-volume set, the first two of which are devoted to that novel, the third of which is her sister Anne’s novel, Agnes Grey. Pictured top, a portrait of the author of Wuthering Heights at about twenty-five, painted by her brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë.The three volume set carries carry a pre-sale estimate range of £400,000-£600,000 ($529,600-$794,220), but for a host of reasons, as the hammer strikes Christie’s lectern sometime after 4:30 British Summer Time (11:30 Eastern) on June 30, the effervescent speculation in the press is that this particular first edition will run higher than that. Some of the more breathless estimates bandied about in the last weeks range up into seven figures.Whatever number the hammer price attains, the intensity of interest that this lot generates is deep and longstanding. Working from the inside of these volumes out to their remarkably well-preserved cloth bindings – more on which, below – the first, main element of value is that it’s Emily Brontë’s enduring and revolutionary literary masterpiece at issue.The significance of her achievement within English and global literature is difficult to overstate. Of the three sisters, Sister Emily’s exquisitely modern gift to literature and to us – via her characters Catherine and Heathcliff and the Earnshaw and Linton families – was to show that we are all conflicted, riven, subject to great swings of emotion and roundly challenged by simply living out our lives in a largely stormy world, whatever quotient of that may be of our own manufacture.Emily Brontë’s telling of this narrative premise was, also, far ahead of its time, unadorned, stripped bare, always in immediate reach of the brutal facts of her characters’ relations and complications with each other. The very dialogue she gives them cuts to the point of those many conflicts – it’s all fire and motion, there’s virtually no digressive froth to the narrative. Neither Emily Brontë nor her famous characters waste a minute outside their conflicts. They lived them. (Guy Martin)
Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Robert Fuest, 1970)Wuthering Heights has gone through many cinematic adaptations, none of which have fully captured the essence of the novel, but the 1970 version directed by Robert Fuest is by far the most dull. It’s a major issue when a film based on one of the subversive, heartbreaking psychological romantic dramas of all time is given a G-rating, as Furst’s Wuthering Heights is afraid to have any edge.By sanding off the film from anything deeper, Timothy Dalton’s Heathcliff seems to be just a tragic figure and a failed romantic lead, and not the abusive, cruel character that emerges in the novel. Wuthering Heights is a complex story of race, class, status, and social hierarchies, and to remove the obsessive emotions from Heathcliff’s fixation on Catherine Earnshaw completely misses the point of what Emily Brontë was trying to say with her only novel. (Liam Gaughan)
There is a long tradition of romantic heroes who are difficult, cold, or cruel—Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, half a century of brooding figures on book covers with artfully unbuttoned shirts—and most of them do not change at all. Rochester is reshaped by circumstance; Heathcliff is consumed by it. What separates Darcy from the parade that followed him is that his arc is genuinely moral, not merely emotional. He is not softened by love. He is corrected by it, and he chooses to be.
Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from 4 Janes by Marian Yee, which releases on June 30th 2026.Jane Eyre is a missionary’s wife.A bookseller in Vietnam.A time traveler.A hero in a modern gothic tale.What if Jane’s story didn’t end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she’s Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…Each thread tells Jane’s story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn’t get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it. (Elise Dumpleton)Chapter OneMarseilles, France, 1851Jane Eyre is dead.The plain gold band on my finger is the sign of her demise.I am Jane Rivers now. Or, more accurately, Mrs. St. John Rivers.Mrs. St. John Rivers. I try on the name like a pair of new calfskin gloves. The syllables glide along my tongue smoothly enough once I get over the little bump at the beginning. Then I study the small hands lying calmly in my lap. They are encased in soft, pale-yellow leather, and like my new name, they seem to belong to somebody else.I have been a missionary’s wife for barely a week.I wait at one of the fashionable coffeehouses on La Canebière, surrounded by wonders: gilding, mirrors, paintings, tapestries, and a large revolving clock in the center that gives the time on three continents. They bring together the charms of this port city as if in miniature. I look about, my senses heightened: The drink served here is not to my liking, but I savor its rich, smoky aroma.For these moments at least, I sit alone. St. John is at the purser’s office, seeing to our cabins and passage. We arrived at this bustling French port last night, and were deposited, along with the English mail that had departed on the London train with us, in a damp heap along the quay. This followed a Channel crossing that was in itself a trial. I spent most of that time huffing short, shallow breaths and moaning miserably into my handkerchief while my stomach roiled. St. John held my hand dutifully while I battled nausea, but I could not entirely dismiss a sense that his patience was forced, that he hid his disapprobation at finding me such a poor traveler before we had even ventured beyond Europe.No matter. Now all is near ready. We have said our goodbyes. I wait with our few belongings, only the baggage we will need on the crossing, hardly enough for a journey of nearly two months. Fortunately, our present needs are few, and the rest of our trunks will be sent along. In our haste to depart we left them to Diana and Mary—his sisters, my cousins—to assemble, to cord, to nail the cards that would direct them to our final destination. They will chase us from port to port until we are reunited—only six weeks from now!—in India. At that point, we will open them with a sense of wonder that such luxuries and extravagances exist; we will puzzle what to do with calfskin gloves and fur muffs in the blazing heat of a sun-drowned continent.As I wait, I return to the book I laid aside and open it to the point where a folded sheet of paper divides the unread pages from the finished ones. The paper is nothing more, or less, than the very letter that started me off on this journey, having arrived for Mary two months ago from a friend in ⸺shire. As Mary shared its contents with Diana and me, one set of ears heard, with distant concern and casual curiosity, the misfortune of others that did not touch upon itself, while another set heard the end of the world.It was news of a devastating fire at Thornfield: The entire estate had been burned to the ground, and no one there had survived the destruction. No one. God forgive me, there was only one who mattered in that moment, only one whose death meant my own. I could barely bring myself to whisper his name. Edward. I recall Mary’s voice droning on, then pausing; Diana’s sharp oh dear. Was it for the news or at my fainting dead away? I was told afterward that I had collapsed in a wordless heap.I have no recollection of those hours, those days (five, they told me) immediately following, when I drifted in a haze of blankness. Feeling fled me; I was disembodied, perceiving only strange scraps. A slight stirring in the current of air let into the sickroom. Fragments of hushed speech floating in and out of range. Gradually, shadowy forms constellated into people coming in and going out, though one body remained the longest, hovering near my orbit like a constant moon. As the boundaries of my vision drew in, the blurred edges slowly sharpened into clear features: twin orbs of blue that floated, then settled upon a finely boned visage.“Jane.” The eyes probed my face. “You know me.”“Yes, St. John.”He heaved a sigh. “You have been gone a long time.”“I have been right here,” I said, bewildered. “In this bed. I have not moved.” Indeed, I felt stiff all over, for I had been practicing the pose of a corpse.“Stay,” he gently implored.“I am right here,” I repeated.“Nay, you were drifting again, Jane. To that place you have been these past five days, five years, it seemed. Sorrow’s shores. Come back to the living, Jane.”And then I remembered.
As a university literature professor, I often recommend Charlotte Brontë’s *Jane Eyre* to students who find classics daunting. It is relatively accessible among so-called classics and, above all, unexpectedly entertaining. However, Hélène, the protagonist of Fanny Britt’s graphic novel *Jane, the Fox, and Me* (illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, 2013), reads *Jane Eyre* for a different reason.Bullied at school, Hélène pulls out her book on the bus. *Jane Eyre* is her sole escape. At an age when emotions run raw, the wounds inflicted by classmates are sharp enough to drain the color from a teenager’s world—gray corridors, ashen faces. Arsenault renders Hélène’s world in drab black and white, while the scenes Hélène imagines from *Jane Eyre* bloom in cheerful pastel watercolors. Jane, an orphan, poor, and far from conventionally beautiful, never relinquishes her dignity. But Hélène is not Jane.The girl confesses to the reader: “I am a sausage. Jane Eyre may be an orphan, ugly, abused, lonely, and abandoned, but she was never a sausage. Never was, never will be—a fat sausage.” The pair of sausages drawn on facing book covers, though initially comical, evoke a grotesque imagery reminiscent of Kafka. This is, of course, a visual metaphor for Hélène’s alienation.The climax arrives when Hélène, at a nature camp, is approached by a fox. Its gaze is gentle. Untamed yet unafraid to meet her eyes, the beautiful creature seems to sense her loneliness without a word. Though the fox vanishes like a mirage, this brief encounter grants Hélène a crucial realization. As she acts on it, her world finally blossoms like spring flowers—and swiftly fills with vibrant hues. What exactly Hélène realizes is for readers to discover within the pages. (Shin Seung-han)
The wild Yorkshire moors of northern England feature prominently in the 19th-century novels “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” by Emily and Charlotte Brontë. The sisters spent most of their lives in the village of Haworth, where you can visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which includes their manuscripts and writing desks. To see the landscape that inspired their work, you can take a five-mile roundtrip across Haworth Moor to the Brontë Waterfall. (Jane Green)
The Brontë Sisters UK has a new full-length video on the Brontë diary papers — the scattered journal fragments left by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, covering everyday life at Haworth from the 1830s through the 1840s.
When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, several critics used the word “strange.” As the New York Times’ B.D. McClay points out, one review simply began, “This is a strange book,” while others described the novel as “strangely original” and “a strange, inartistic story.”“Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it,” another observed. “We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.”The novel’s first edition was divided into two volumes, released alongside a third volume containing Agnes Grey, a novel by Emily’s younger sister, Anne. Each one was covered with green-grey cloth, with arabesques and floral patterns decorating the cover. The siblings published under the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton Bell.Of the estimated 250 copies printed, only a few complete copies survive with their full-cloth binding intact. On June 30, Christie’s will sell the first edition’s three volumes in one lot at an auction in London, where the collection is expected to go for between $540,000 and $800,000.“The last time one appeared at auction was in 1908, so no collector alive has had a chance to acquire one,” Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, tells the Art Newspaper’s Maev Kennedy. “Private and public collectors all over the world will want this book.”When Emily and Anne saw the printed editions, they realized that the books contained a numbllings of “Agnes Grey” (“Anges Grey”) and three misspellings of “Heights” (“Heer of errors. Some pages were marked with the wrong numbers, while others contained incorrect or missing punctuation. Perhaps the most egregious mistakes were six misspeghts”).In letters written in the weeks after publication, their sister Charlotte complained that the volumes were full of “errors of the press” that she described as “mortifying.” Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte had published her own debut novel, Jane Eyre, earlier the same year, and it had been an immediate success. She was deeply protective of her younger sisters, and she was disappointed that their publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, had allowed so many mistakes to make it to press. “If Mr. Newby always does business in this way,” she wrote, “few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.”Newby hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Jane Eyre, but Wuthering Heights, which explored darker themes, didn’t enjoy the same level of success. Readers were “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” according to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. North American Review criticized the novel, writing that “Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.”Wuthering Heights follows Catherine Earnshaw, a young girl who lives with her family in northern England, and Heathcliff, an orphan who grows up alongside them. The pair forms an inextricable bond that breeds misery across two generations. The story is set against the dramatic, untamed moors of Yorkshire—which is also where the Brontë siblings grew up. [...]Emily didn’t live to see her novel become so beloved, admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. “The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries,” Woolf wrote in 1925. “She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.” The novel has inspired art, music and film, in addition to literature.“It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere and its psychological intensity,” Wiltshire tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless.Few surviving first-edition copies still have their original binding. Wiltshire has only been able to track down five others: Three are in the university libraries of Leeds, Oxford and Princeton universities, according to a statement, while the fourth is housed at the British Library in London. The fifth, which contains Charlotte’s annotations, is missing several pages, and it sold for $86,500 in 2009. (Ellen Wexler)
largely inspired by the wild beauty and dramatic landscapes of Top Withens and the Yorkshire moors that the Brontës capture in their work. (Laura Reid)
A rare first-edition copy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, complete with its original spelling errors, is poised to go under the hammer for the first time in over a century. The auction comes as the tragic, tempestuous romance continues to captivate new audiences, fueled by a recent big-screen adaptation.Christie’s auction house announced Monday that this particular volume is the first copy of the novel in its publisher’s original cloth binding to be offered at auction since 1908.Only about 250 first editions were initially printed, and this specific book has remained in a private library since shortly after its publication in 1847.Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, underscored the extreme rarity of such an item. "The vast majority of surviving copies were rebound for collectors or libraries, meaning original cloth examples are now extremely scarce," he stated.Being sold along with a copy of sister Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, it’s expected to sell for between 400,000 pounds and 600,000 pounds ($540,000 and $800,000) at a June 30 auction in London. Both books carry the male pen names the sisters adopted to get published: Ellis Bell for Emily and Acton Bell for Anne.Wuthering Heights was rushed to publication after the success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the first edition is notorious for its typographical errors including, Wiltshire noted, the occasional misspelling of the word “heights.”Emerald Fennell ’s recent movie with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as mismatched pair Cathy and Heathcliff is the latest work to be inspired by — and take liberties with — Brontë’s brooding, Gothic tale.The novel shocked some critics when it was published, with one in 1848 decrying its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”Since then, Wiltshire said, it has “moved beyond literature to become a cultural touchstone,” inspiring art, music — notably Kate Bush’s pop-operatic 1978 song — and multiple film adaptations.“It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere, and its psychological intensity, ensuring its place not only in literary history but in wider cultural imagination,” Wiltshire said. (Jill Lawless)
Kinship is likewise revealed in other documents on view: A letter from Charlotte Brontë to her most frequent correspondent, Ellen Nussey, demonstrates their bond. . . (Hannah Benson)
One of my favorite episodes is The Other Brontë Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall from February 24, 2025. The hosts tell us: "With all the fuss and fanfare around Wuthering Heights, we’re worried Emily Bronte is getting more than her fair share of attention. So today we shift the SLOB-light to her younger sister Anne, author of the remarkable The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848. Anne wrote it in a whirlwind after the successes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, determined to prove herself a Bronte in talent and spirit.The hosts continue: "And though Anne is now the least celebrated of the Brontë trio, Tenant at the time of its publication, it was considered the most shocking in the Brontë collective oeuvre. Anne had fearlessly pulled back the veil on marital infidelity, domestic violence, alcoholism, and the systemic torments of Victorian masculinity and marriage laws." (Frank Racioppi)
In the latest Hollywood adaptation of “‘Wuthering Heights,’” Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are tortured soulmates, the moors are wide and barren, everyone is brooding, and the story is reduced to sex, violence, and revenge. The critical points about class, racial otherness, inheritance, and generational destruction Emily Brontë made in her 1847 novel are pushed aside to create a gothic romance film for a date night.Lately, Hollywood’s approach to classic literature feels less like reinterpretation and more like reduction. From “‘Wuthering Heights’” to “Frankenstein” to “Animal Farm,” film studios keep coming back to classic literature, and in theory, this should be a good thing. Adaptations can reintroduce older pieces of literature to new audiences and expand on the themes that remain prevalent in society today.But this doesn’t always seem to work in practice. Hollywood’s problem is using the ethos of classic literature without doing the work of actually engaging with its content. Adaptations don’t need to transcribe the original text, but they do need to understand what the original source material is actually doing to faithfully interpret it. [...]In recent adaptations, studios rely too much on the marketability of recognizable names, characters, and titles. Instead of considering why the book is important, producers often focus on the parts of the book that can sell the fastest, which is how a complicated, nuanced novel is reduced to a gothic romance with elaborate costumes.Emerald Fennell’s “‘Wuthering Heights’” demonstrates how easily this flattening can happen. Fennell described how the novel captivated her when she was 14 years old and how she wanted her adaptation to capture the “primal and sexual” feelings she had when she first read it. But when an adaptation is based on a first impression instead of a deeper reading, it runs the risk of presenting an inaccurate version of the original text.Devin Garofalo, a professor in UCSD’s literature department, explained in an interview with The Guardian that Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is not just a romance; it is about “the horror of romance.” Treating violence as passion due to a teenager’s misreading of a novel is what Brontë was critiquing in the first place. [...]In other words, bad adaptations don’t just make audiences misunderstand a book — they can make audiences misunderstand history as a whole. They offer what Garofalo called an “amnesic account of the past”: one that airbrushes historical violence from a present-day vantage point and makes the past seem distant and decorative. Classic literature matters because, as Lu explained, the past is always “infiltrating the present.” These texts help readers understand the current world by showing how language can be manipulated, how class and race shape relationships, how violence gets justified, and how these old systems of power still shape the present. When Hollywood trims these texts down to their most marketable hook, it undermines the reason why these stories mattered in the first place.Hollywood does this because these hooks are easier to sell and produce than a complicated, uncomfortable argument. Sex sells. Jacob Elordi sells. Topical references sell. But a serious critique of power, class, race, and gender? Those are often much harder to package and convince viewers to watch.And that’s where the problem becomes bigger than just the adaptation. Lu described how adaptation debates often focus too much on whether a film is a good or bad rendition of the original source. But the better question, she argues, is: “What does it say about us that this is the adaptation?”The answer is not flattering. These recent adaptations suggest that Hollywood thinks audiences want classics in their easiest, most comfortable versions: recognizable enough to market but not complicated or nuanced enough to encourage thought. They keep the title, the aesthetic, and the basic premise while watering down the harder ideas about power, class, race and violence that made these books important in the first place.When Hollywood strips that away, it isn’t keeping the classics alive: It’s just turning them into marketable content. Brontë is probably rolling over in her grave — because if this is Hollywood’s idea of preserving literature, the classics were better off on the shelf. (Anu Venkatesh)
Double Fringe First winners Theatre Caddis are set to bring their comedy, Jane Eyre Convention to Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a run in London earlier this Summer.The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Brontë-aficinados [sic] gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic.In this fast-paced farce, the enthusiasts feel that they gain new insights and a better understanding of the story of Jane Eyre, and potentially one another. The show promises audiences a funny, uplifting and quirky jaunt - with unrealistic violence, bonnets, and minimal raunch! The show has enjoyed sell-out runs at Lambeth Fringe, and recent shows at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London.The show may also appeal to Brontë fans who enjoyed the recent hype around Emerald Fennel's [sic] adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Theatre Caddis is a London-based theatre company known for staging new, eclectic work, showcasing performances that blend humor, literary homage, and character studies.Jane Eyre Convention is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 6th - 28th (not 10th and 18th) August at 12.25pm (60 mins), Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House venue number 288). (Stephi Wild)
Perhaps no artifact captures the intimacy of Victorian hair work quite like a small bracelet housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Composed of six light brown braids belonging to each of the three sisters – Emily, Charlotte, and Anne – it remains one of the most talked-about pieces of hairwork in existence. The bracelet is technically unwearable now; the clasps are open and one of the braids has come loose. Its power lies not in its intricacy, as the braids themselves are simple up close, but in the identity of its owners. The fact that the Brontë sisters belonged to a lower-middle class family only reinforces how universal the practice was.This very bracelet recently found its way back into popular culture. When Margot Robbie attended a London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, she wore a dress adorned with light brown braids inspired by the Brontë piece. Robbie even accessorized her look with a replica of the bracelet itself – a gesture that bridged Victorian sentimentality and contemporary red-carpet fashion in one deliberate styling choice.Hair charms also appear in the literature the Brontës produced. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff removes a lock of Edgar Linton’s hair from Cathy Earnshaw’s corpse’s locket and replaces it with his own, sending a piece of himself and their love off with her spirit. The plan unravels when Nelly, the housemaid and narrator of the novel, entwines Linton’s hair with Heathcliff’s. Scholar Deborah Lutz described this act as opening up the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy between the two men. Though it is the only Brontë novel to directly reference mourning jewelry, the scene underscores how central hair work was to Victorian emotional life.
On this episode of “Read All About It!,” the four hosts give our long-awaited review of the film “Wuthering Heights.”Hosts discuss whether the film is a true adaptation, as many characters were omitted entirely from the movie. (Vanessa Hanna)
The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton is giving free admission to anyone named Charlotte on Saturday, April 25 and Sunday, April 26, in celebration of Charlotte Brontë’s 210th birthday.Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and The Professor, was born at the house on Market Street on April 21.Thomas Haigh, audience development and marketing lead at the Brontë Birthplace, said: "It was here in this very house that Charlotte’s story began, long before Jane Eyre and long before her name became famous across the world."We want to mark this special day by doing something a bit unexpected."We would love to get as many Charlottes as possible to step inside the place where her life began and to be part of a shared, living tribute to her legacy."The house will be open from 11am to 4pm, with visitors invited to explore the museum, bring family members, and enjoy the on-site café.Visitors will also be entered into a prize draw to stay in Charlotte’s room, which is now an Airbnb. (Harry Williams)
One morning in early June, 1850, Charlotte Brontë finally met her literary hero, William Makepeace Thackeray. To do so, the 4ft 8in writer - recently unmasked as Currer Bell, the author of Jane Eyre, published in 1847 - chose to wear her “power gown”, a vibrant blue-and-white floral print dress made in a fine alpaca fabric woven in her native Yorkshire.The meeting took place in the drawing room of her publisher George Smith. Thackeray was impressed, later recalling: “New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own.”From experience, Charlotte knew that appearance and favourable first impressions mattered. She had been stung by criticism when she joined the stylish young ladies of Roe Head School in Mirfield in 1931, told that she was “very ugly” by one pupil, Mary Taylor, who later described her as wearing “very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable”.A surviving drawing by Charlotte, of a young woman wearing a highly fashionable, early 1930s-style puff-sleeved gown, shows how much she had noticed and been influenced by the Roe Head girls.This is highlighted by historian and costume consultant Eleanor Houghton, whose new book, Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes, examines how surviving pieces from the author’s wardrobe give remarkable insight into her experience, her feelings and her work.The book is illustrated by Eleanor’s own beautiful drawings which capture the detail of the dresses, shawls, bonnets, boots, combs, corsets and more.Charlotte made her own clothes, with housekeeper Martha Brown, using fabrics from Yorkshire mills. The gown that later became known as the “Thackeray Dress” was made in a cloth called Alpaca Orleans, a blend of alpaca and cotton, woven by Sir Titus Salt who had mills in Bradford just nine miles from Haworth (Salts Mill in Saltaire opened later in 1953).ir Titus was a fabric pioneer, and managed to transform fine alpaca fleece into a lustrous but hardwearing fabric that quickly became a rival to silk. Printed (probably in Accrington) in a vibrant blue and white pattern of leaves and flowers, Charlotte bought the fabric around 1848 - and the blues retain their bright quality to this day.Charlotte left most of her wardrobe to her husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, and some also to Martha. Pieces were acquired by fans down the years, but many found their way home to the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, which now looks after around 150 items.The Thackeray dress was given to Martha’s niece, who made significant alterations, adding a brown collar and removing fabric from its full skirt.Charlotte’s clothing reveals a woman more body and fashion-conscious than suspected. In Brussels, she bought a corset measuring just 18.5 inches around the waist. It became a staple, and later caused concern to her publisher George Smith. Eleanor Houghton writes: “Nearly forty years after her death, still impacted by what he had seen, Smith told his friend, the novelist George Gissing, that Charlotte was ‘very vain of her narrow waist … and laced herself so tight as to injure herself’.”Pointing out that tight lacing at the time was the practice of a minority of women, Eleanor suggests that Charlotte, always conscious of her perceived lack of beauty, was “deliberately and blatantly exhibiting her femininity”. The corset might also have served as an armour as she sought strength and protection while nursing a heart broken by her unrequited love for M Heger in Brussels.On display now at the Brontë Parsonage is a paisley print dress Charlotte wore in the 1840s, exotic and vibrant in shades of duck egg blue, mint, red and black. One Haworth resident, who recalled seeing them many times in the village, said: “I don’t know that I ever saw them in owt but print - I’ve heard it said they were pinched - but it was a nice print … They looked grand.”Born on April 21, 1816, this Tuesday marks the 210th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë birth. The Brontë Parsonage Museum and the nearby Brontë Birthplace in Thornton are hosting special events, including performances and talks.Eleanor has been a consultant for many TV and film historical dramas including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible, written and directed by Sally Wainwright, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.In 2022, in collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she curated a large exhibition of Charlotte’s surviving wardrobe. “The museum has become a second home. The staff have been endlessly patient and helpful and always willing to clamber to the back of the Bonnell Store or to upend the library in search of a particular garment or record,” she says.“I considered why Charlotte had chosen each piece, what it revealed of her taste, the challenges she faced, and the sartorial conventions and codes of 19th‑century society.”She traced how and where the clothes were worn, how they were changed, and how they shaped Charlotte’s daily experience, studying them alongside letters and diaries, to uncover a rich, complex picture of Charlotte and her ever-changing world.“The village’s surviving mills and weavers’ cottages are reminders, too, that Charlotte lived in a landscape shaped by the Industrial Revolution and by the textile economy that produced so many of the fabrics in her wardrobe.“These gowns, bonnets, bags, and boots have presented to us a very different Charlotte Brontë,” she says. “She is a woman who is more rounded, more three-dimensional and braver, bolder, and yet somehow more vulnerable. She is less isolated and more globalised. She is more fashion-conscious and defies long-held preconceptions.“She shows herself to be very self-critical, but also provocative and tenacious. By hearing the clothes’ testimonies, we encounter Charlotte not simply as a writer but as a real, thinking, feeling, breathing woman.“Yet these clothes reveal more than Charlotte alone. They bring the world she inhabited vividly into view — nineteenth-century Yorkshire, with its rugged moors and sprawling villages; the networks of makers, merchants, and markets; the drive and creativity of industrial innovation; and the global routes that brought fabrics, fibres and influences from France, Peru, Mexico, Canada, and the United States to a little parsonage in the West Riding."They allow us to see how Charlotte navigated her social and material world, balancing expectation, personal comfort, and self-expression — and in doing so, they let us step closer to the woman behind Jane Eyre, behind Lucy Snowe, and to see beyond them to the life she really lived. (Stephanie Smith)
A lost manuscript which had been hidden for more than a century has uncovered a teenage Charlotte Brontë's fascination with "very naughty" Parisian society.The Journal of a Frenchman was the missing part of a series of The Young Men's Magazine, which Brontë edited and wrote aged 14.It belongs to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and has been analysed for the first time by the University of Chester's Professor Deborah Wynne, who said she was honoured to be chosen.On reading the magazine Wynne said she discovered aspects to Charlotte Brontë she "hadn't really encountered before"."It's written as though Charlotte herself is a French young man who's a dandy. He gets drunk and disorderly."So you've got this Yorkshire clergyman's daughter, who seems so respectable, but she seems to know all about being drunk and disorderly in Paris in this journal entry."And you realise she had this sense of humour, which doesn't always come out in quite the same raucous way in her novels."She's more ladylike in the way she writes in her novels, whereas she gave herself this freedom to write as a man and really went to town with that," she said.In 2019, the magazine was discovered and purchased by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the sisters lived and wrote their novels, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.The museum had all other issues of The Young Men's Magazine and bought the September 1830 issue when it appeared in a Parisian auction house.The museum set up a fundraising campaign, which Wynne donated to, and it returned to Haworth where it has now been examined and preserved.Six scholars were invited to analyse the work the results of which were published in The Journal of the Brontë Society last year.Wynne said discovering the manuscript was "fitting together this piece into a jigsaw"."It was an amazing experience to see that manuscript and know it had been hidden away for over a century," she said."To know I was the first person to actually push all of that jigsaw together, as it were, it was really exciting. So it's been one of the best projects I've ever worked on."She said themes in the manuscript reappear in Brontë's later more well-known works, such as Jane Eyre and Villette."She really presents the aristocratic characters in France negatively. And later in her novels, a lot of the aristocratic characters are presented negatively too," she said."So you can sort of see how she's already a little bit disapproving of her Frenchman. And in the end, he loses all of his money and he becomes a tavern keeper. And he says he's much happier drawing pints for the people who come into his tavern."There is this sense that France is a very naughty sort of place. It's a place where things go on that don't in Yorkshire parsonages."Measuring just 3cm by 6cm the magazine is part of a series of works the Brontë children wrote on scraps of paper because of the high cost of paper in the Victorian era.Principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage, Ann Dinsdale, explained the little manuscripts were meant to look like printed books and magazines produced at the time."These tiny little books have got title pages, they've got contents pages, they contain all the kinds of stories, reviews, poetry that you'd expect to find in Blackwood's magazine."Some of them have even got advertisements in the back. So these were the first publications by the Brontës really."She said the children would have created them using quill pens."It would have taken a fair amount of practise to kind of devise this almost sort of italicised style of writing that they developed for the little books," she said."It became like a secret code among the siblings because they must have realised that if their father or their aunt came across any of these tiny manuscripts they wouldn't have been able to read them."Which is probably quite a good thing because some of the content is not the kind of thing you would expect from the minister's children." (Grace Wood)
Alongside the biblical references are literary greats: the figure of Jane Eyre, less straightened than sturdy, as well as the young and handsome Mr Rochester; Orpheus and the maenads, wild and free; Germaine Greer sitting with her knees apart and the soles of her feet together. (Chloë Ashby)
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is weighing in on Jacob Elordi’s rapid rise and questioning whether the actor has yet proven his full range. [...]Almodóvar acknowledged Elordi’s growing star power, saying he believes the Australian actor is “without doubt” on track to become a major star. Still, he admitted he remains uncertain about how to define him, raising the question of whether Elordi is primarily a sex symbol or a performer with deeper dramatic range.“I’ve been wondering whether he’s just a sex symbol or a respected actor,” Almodóvar said, adding that he would need to see Elordi in a role that demands more before reaching a clear conclusion.The director also critiqued some of Elordi’s recent projects, arguing that they do not fully showcase the actor’s abilities. He pointed to “Wuthering Heights” and “Frankenstein,” suggesting the material limits the opportunity for more layered performances. Almodóvar candidly characterized “Wuthering Heights” as “very bad,” while noting that neither Elordi nor his co-star Margot Robbie were to blame. (Kennedy French)
3 Wuthering HeightsWhere? Yorkshire DalesYorkshire’s raw, wild, moody moors are as much a character in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel as Cathy and Heathcliff. So where else could filming for Emerald Fennell’s movie version take place? The production used spots around rippling Swaledale, one of the loveliest and least-touched valleys in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Scenes were shot amid Low Row’s comely stone cottages and in the untamed moors above, around Old Gang Smelt Mill and Surrender Bridge – which, incidentally, also starred in the opening credits of All Creatures Great and Small. There’s great walking country all around. (Sarah Baxter)
Ever watched a movie and wondered what the main character would smell like? [...] Margot Robbie’s Barbie would go for a sugary pink gourmand scent, while her Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights would reek of mud, rain and zero closure. (Kritika Kapoor)
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