As 2025 drew to a close, the feeling of living through end times intensified. We witnessed how the banality of evil—so eloquently described by Hannah Arendt during Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem— migrated from perpetrators to victims, becoming state doctrine to rationalize the systematic elimination of enemies. Vengeance and cruelty emerged as new standards of conduct, applauded by America and met with the acquiescence of much of the Western democratic world.
We’ve watched the post–World War II global order collapse, with Russia slowly but irreversibly sliding back toward tsarist grandeur and the suppression of dissent, while the United States threw out the rulebook, stared into the totalitarian abyss, and embraced its reflection in accelerating isolationism. The serpent’s egg, slowly incubated since the 2007 crisis, has now hatched worldwide—in Argentina, Hungary, Italy, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Poland, Slovakia, India... Only a miracle could prevent the next electoral cycle from bringing to power in Germany, the UK, France, or Spain the very groups eager to dismantle everything it took decades to build during the twentieth century.
These populist movements, backed (and hacked) by techno-feudal lords inheriting the post-capitalist era, will complete what the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberals and progressives handed them on a silver platter: the reshaping of the welfare state into the dystopia of AI dictatorship. Think of it as a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, but without the proletariat (now replaced by social media users), and without Marx, but with Bezos or Musk instead.
The left never saw it coming, too busy waging Byzantine battles over pronouns and chromosomes. Some remain trapped there still, oblivious to the revisionist hurricane now engulfing everything, unaware that the grassroots supporters who once sustained progressive discourse were long ago expelled from the paradise of political correctness by the very people now lamenting the rise of populism.
The barbarians have reached our shores, and as we lick our wounds, we’d do well to remember Martin Niemöller’s words: ”First they came for the you-know-who, and I did not speak out, because I was not a you-know-who.” Exaggerated? It’s enough to read what one of the gurus of the transition to technofeudalism thinks: Peter Thiel, probably one of the most powerful people you’ve never heard of and one of the biggest donors to the MAGA golden boy J.D. Vance. Without mincing words: ”I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
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The Last Wolf of Thornfield (April) by Polly J. Mordant where Jane Eyre is retold as a werewolf story and a detective time travel story with a Bronté twist: The Haunting of a Brontë (June) by Amelia Blackwell, completes the literary panorama.On the stage, the Brontë season begins with a revisitation of Gin & Gothic: A Brontë rocktale (first premiered in Denver in 2024), now in Boulder (January). Several productions of different Jane Eyre adaptations will be performed: In Kenilworth, the Catherine Prout adaptation (February); the Polly Teale adaptation will be performed in Stamford (March), Brighton (May), and Birmingham (July). A new adaptation by Emma Watson will be performed in Coffs Harbour (Australia) (March), and another by Erin Shields will be premiered in Ottawa in October, and the This is My Theatre company will tour England with their own adaptation. The Gordon & Caird musical will appear in Arlington, Cleburne, or Widnes, but the big event will be the Manhattan Concert Productions concert at Lincoln Center in New York (February). Polly Teale's Brontë will be produced in Whitfield (May) and in Wigan (October). Another (very different) take on the Brontë biography is Sarah Gordon's Underdog. The Other Other Bronté Sister,%20(1).jpg)
which premiered at the National Theatre in 2024 and is now being taken to regional stages: in Chorley (February), Northwich (April), Banbury (June), and Coventry (September). Jodi Mand's Brontë: A World Without continues to be performed in Canada, now in Scarborough, ON (July). The Lucy Gough adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall will be performed in Aberystwyth (March). Meanwhile, the Bos Theaterproducties company will continue touring the Netherlands with their musical farce De onverwoeste zusters van Hoogezand-Sappemeer (January-February).
At the time of writing this, the Brontë Parsonage Museum has not announced what this year's exhibition will be. We do know, though, that the Brontë Birthplace will have an exhibition of pictures by the photographer Garret Wilde.
As we always say, this is what we know. And we know that we don’t know many things that will pop up throughout the year. All of these, the ones we know and the ones we don’t, will surely make 2026 a very Brontë year.
The Brontë sisters and Branwell in the shadows have gathered around their Christmas tree - which is a tradition which started about their time - to join us in wishing all of you a very happy Christmas (or your holiday of choice)!The Trump-Musk alliance threatens to completely redefine the values, pacts, and agreements that maintained stability and prosperity—as precarious as one might consider it, but still the most lasting in human history—of the world as we know it. And it will not be pretty.
So we'll take refuge in our hobbies, in the things that make us happy and that we like to share, while we still can. Because sooner or later, as Niemöller would say, the barbarians will also reach our shores.
So we wrote in the new year's message on BrontëBlog. Well, the barbarians are already on our shores. Megan Marshall writes in The Boston Globe about the termination of the grant received by Deborah Lutz, professor at the University of Louisville and author of the quite extraordinary book The Brontë Cabinet. The grant was connected to a new biography of Emily Brontë.
The words that chilled us the most in the terse, accusatory letter Deborah Lutz received by email from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on April 3, terminating her Public Scholar grant for a biography of Emily Brontë “to safeguard the interests of the federal government,” were those of Executive Order 14168: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The alleged violation of EO 14168 was one of “several reasonable causes” cited by NEH acting chairman Michael McDonald as grounds for cutting off Lutz’s funding midstream — and, by a wide stretch of the imagination, the one most closely related to Lutz’s and our own ongoing work.
We were three women biographers meeting for lunch on a Friday to discuss our projects: Heather Clark, a 2018 Public Scholar fellow for her biography of Sylvia Plath, “Red Comet,” a Pulitzer finalist, at work now on a book about Anne Sexton; Abigail Santamaria, recipient of a 2022 Public Scholar grant for her biography-in-progress of Madeleine L’Engle; and me, a veteran biographer in quest of a new subject. But conversation stalled as we kept returning to the text of the letter Lutz had posted on Instagram that morning: “Defending women”? Isn’t that what we do? Isn’t that what the NEH had done for us and our subjects by funding our books? (...)
After the weekend passed, I phoned Lutz to ask how she was handling her loss of funds and the rude letter, so unlike the initial good news email from the old NEH. She thanked me, then brightened. By coincidence, the day she received the termination email was the date her final NEH lump sum payment of $20,000 was due to be released for direct deposit to her bank account. The termination email had not come from the secure “.gov” address from which all financial communications were meant to be issued. She guessed the new admins had failed to successfully navigate the secure system of payment set up by their predecessors. And lo, the $20,000 appeared in her bank account Monday morning. She quickly transferred the sum to a different account, having heard from another NEH fellow that their own “pending” lump sum payment had disappeared.
Lutz is back at work on her biography, set for publication in 2026. By then, presumably, American women will have been secured against the threat posed by the likes of Emily Brontë, the Alcott and Blackwell sisters, Hannah Crafts, Sojourner Truth, and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Welcome to dystopian and very dark times.
2024 has not been a good year. Just as 2023 wasn't, and as all signs indicate, neither will 2025 and the years to come. Dark times approach and it will not be pretty. The successive economic crises, COVID-19, regional wars, and uncontrolled inflation have only brought to the forefront what the prosperity of the last third of the 20th century had swept under the rug: the very fragile foundations upon which the capitalist model is built, and how the myth of infinite growth and Western democracy are wobbling under the Lampedusian pressure that everything must change so that nothing changes.
Trump's return to power is yet another symptom of the collapse of the democratic model based on principles ultimately inherited from the French Revolution, with the nuances that workers' struggles after the Industrial Revolution and World Wars managed to introduce. Western democratic society, built upon what was once called the Welfare State, shows itself incapable of responding to the challenges of the 21st century. The climate crisis and migration crises, above all, are the perfect incubator for the serpent's egg. And it's hatching everywhere, as we can see in Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, England, Spain, Russia... and the United States. But it's in 2025's America where something new is emerging. Something truly disruptive. The rise of techno-feudalism represented by Elon Musk, though not only by him, poses a danger of enormous proportions. Because it comes at a time when AI and its sponsors should be regulated. Are we conspiracy theorists imagining that the world techno-feudalists are preparing for us is one where the only jobs reserved for the new techno-serfs will be manual labor since all those requiring intellectual work—and therefore people who can think for themselves—will be taken over and improved by AIs? What social democracy once represented has handed the fire extinguishers to the arsonists and devoted itself to fighting sterile and byzantine culture wars, abandoning the middle classes who are alienated by the new Churches of Social Networks. Not a new opium of the people, paraphrasing Marx, but the Fentanyl of the now agonizing Nixon's silent majority. The Trump-Musk alliance threatens to completely redefine the values, pacts, and agreements that maintained stability and prosperity—as precarious as one might consider it, but still the most lasting in human history—of the world as we know it. And it will not be pretty.
So we'll take refuge in our hobbies, in the things that make us happy and that we like to share, while we still can. Because sooner or later, as Niemöller would say, the barbarians will also reach our shores. On the Brontë coast, we can say that 2025 seems rather peaceful, even somewhat uneventful.
We will see the shooting of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights film. A film that has been vilified for its casting choices using poor, biased arguments that blindly follow an agenda whose ultimate goal is to limit creators' freedom. We'll see more people making a huge fuss for reasons as futile as they are useless, but since the film apparently will finally be released in 2026, we'll have to wait a bit longer.
We're abandoning Twitter. We're fed up with what it has become: a dump of misinformation and hate that hijacks the flags of freedom of speech only to gradually erode it until it's nothing but a caricature. We know we're losing readers. But we were never here trying to break any records. And when the stench is so strong, not even readers are an excuse to endure it. From now on, our social networks will be BlueSky, Threads and Facebook. See you there.
In 2005, the world also witnessed the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, as well as the tragic July 7th bombings in London. It was a year of both triumph and tragedy, bookended by the landing of the Huygens probe on Titan and the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, ending an 18-year run of uninterrupted Trek on television.
Fast forward to 2024, and the technological landscape is virtually unrecognizable. Artificial intelligence, powered by advanced language models like myself (*) has revolutionized how we interact with technology. Cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive have become ubiquitous, while high-speed internet and 5G wireless have rendered dial-up connections a distant memory.
The entertainment industry has also undergone a seismic shift, with the rise of streaming services revolutionizing how we consume media. Star Trek has returned with a vengeance in plenty of new formats. In the years since BrontëBlog first launched, our cultural landscape has undergone dramatic transformations that would have been almost unimaginable back in 2005. The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of public discourse have given birth to fierce cultural wars, with heated debates raging over issues of representation, social justice, and the boundaries of acceptable speech. The so-called "woke" movement has scored major triumphs, reshaping everything from academia to the arts, while also facing a vocal backlash from those who decry its perceived excesses. The culture of "cancellation" has emerged, with public figures and institutions facing swift consequences for alleged transgressions, institutionalizing what would have simply and plainly been censorship at another time.
Yet, despite these technological and cultural changes, the enduring legacy of the Brontë sisters continues to captivate and inspire people around the world. Every day, their novels, poems, and lives are discussed, analyzed, and celebrated in ways that would have been unimaginable two decades ago. This blog has been a labor of love, daily sharing the latest news, insights, and creative works inspired by these literary icons.
As we reflect on 19 years of BrontëBlog, we're in awe of how the Brontës' timeless brilliance has transcended the technological and entertainment landscape changes that have reshaped our world. We're still here. On a dying platform. Proudly (with that absurd pride of lost causes) blogging when blogs are already a thing of the past. Because we're not TikTokers, nor streamers, nor Instagrammers, nor YouTubers. With our heads held high, until the body (or Google) gives out.
(*) Because, yep. this text has been prompted to an AI. Sure, it's a very guided prompt and has been heavily edited. But you get the point.
2023 came and went, and 2024 begins with strange happenings. While the climate crisis increasingly shows obvious signs that it is nipping at our heels, we inch ever closer to triggering feedback cycles that will be extremely difficult to reverse. Yet even as we play at gathering in the Persian Gulf and squabble over semantic details, we remain incapable of looking beyond our ideological blinders.
We ban plastic straws and feel ourselves better about no longer flying on polluting planes. We shift the blame onto the average citizen instead of making courageous decisions: Investing money (lots of money) into research to improve carbon capture technology and develop truly disruptive innovations like nuclear fusion. Meanwhile, we overcome the outdated left's nuclear phobias, a post-Hiroshima syndrome, and invest in nuclear fission that we know works and doesn't contribute to climate change.
And while humanity's future is decided in the background, in the foreground we encounter our unbribable talent for killing each other. After thinking the Ukraine war was reenacting World War II and would lead to World War III, we find it has now regressed to World War I-style trench warfare. As for the war in Gaza, better not even speak about it. Whatever we say, we'll be judged and flayed by the online justice warriors. If we criticize Israel for its tactics of collective punishment (nothing more than the old tactic of punishing the entire class when someone misbehaves, but with death and disregard for human rights), we become complicit with a fundamentalist terrorist organization like Hamas. And if we criticize those fanatics whose actions have caused not only innocent deaths in Israel but terrible suffering among Gaza's civilian population, we'll immediately be labeled as complicit with the Zionist state.
Beyond wars and the climate crisis, we have the emergence of AI that goes far beyond anecdotal language predictors like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude. This is a genuine revolution on much deeper levels than we can predict right now. Whether it represents a revolution comparable to how smartphones and social media have changed our society in recent decades, or how electricity radically altered our species at the turn of the last century, we'll know in a few years. Not decades. Years.
We are rather sure, not totally though, that no AI could have brought us anything comparable to what the Brontës did. Sure, they will (or maybe they already can) deliver a Brontë-like novel or poem. But, one thing is to create something in the style of, and another, very different one, is to create something from scratch. Being truly original is something that no AI can (will?) do.
The Brontë Girl (March) by Miriam Halahmy is arguably more child-oriented. It follows the life of Kate, a 15-year-old girl who works as a cleaner at the Parsonage, the home of the Brontë family. Kate dreams of being a writer but faces many obstacles due to poverty and gender. She befriends Charlotte Brontë, who encourages her to pursue her passion for books and writing.
The Everyone Can Be a Reader series, which aims to make classic literature engaging and readable for a wide range of readers featuring dyslexia-friendly fonts, paper tones, and formatting, will publish both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (April) rewritten by Tanya Landman. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre are both novels that will be published on April 2, 2024.
Another biographical account about the whole Brontë family, but through their dogs (in real life and in fiction) will be published in April, Grasper, Keeper and Flossy. The Brontë Family Dogs in Fact and in Fiction by Jane Sunderland. This year Eleanor Houghton may publish her research in Material Witness: Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes (June?) And who knows, maybe even Ann Dinsdale & Sharon Wright will publish their most intriguing The Brontës in Brick and Mortar.
As compared with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights stage adaptations will be much rarer this year. In Köln (May), Germany a new production will be performed, written by Maria Strauch. The Langajà-Groupement presents a work in progress known as De Hurlevent à Marie-Galante (February).
this play is an irreverent retelling of the life and legend of the Brontë sisters, and the story of the sibling power dynamics that shaped their uneven rise to fame. This is not a story about well-behaved women. This is a story about the power of words. It’s about sisters and sisterhood, love and jealousy, support and competition.
In the film world, the same rumours that we already commented on last year continue without substantiation: an AMC Wuthering Heights project in which Rolin Jones is in the works (or maybe not), and an Italian project written by Martina Badiluzzi.
At the moment of writing this post, nothing is known about the new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, but the recent announcement of the funding of the Brontë Birthplace in Thornton gives us hope that sooner rather than later we will see common projects between the two institutions. A little bit of consolation after knowing that the Red House in Kirklees will no longer be in public hands.
Well, this is what we know. We know something about what we don't know. And, of course, we don't know really how much we don't know. It's in all these unknowns (and in the few knowns) that we will hope that this year, as all of the previous ones, will be a very Brontë year.
The Brontë sisters and Branwell in the shadows have gathered around their Christmas tree - which is a tradition which started about their time - to join us in wishing all of you a very happy Christmas (or your holiday of choice)!2022 has been quite a year. Not many times History (with a capital H) happens in our lifetime. The death of Queen Elizabeth II was not only the death of a monarch but the end of an era. We experienced how a man with serious delusions of grandeur didn't hesitate to invade another country and trigger a spiral of violence and an economical earthquake with huge consequences all over the world (yes, we are not naive and we get that the West is not an innocent witness in what happens in Ukraine... but the one shelling and killing civil population is the one in the Kremlin). We have seen prime ministers come and go at neck-breaking speed. At the same time, the social fabric of the country (yes, that one that Thatcherism tried to deny the existence of) is being severely wounded by the runaway inflation that good old Vladimir helped to unleash, but whose seed was already planted when the COVID crisis clearly revealed the flimsy foundations of Western civilization. COVID is over (we'd like to imagine that China is now only trying to hide its shame in its blatant clumsiness when it came to handling the disease and not something worse)... but the climate crisis has only just begun. The economic elites are discussing tenths of degree conference after conference and the environmentalists are transitioning into a religion competing for the purest version. None of them looks for an honest, plausible solution to the imminent crisis. While in Iran women fight with their lives for their freedom to exist, in the Western world we are fighting for the use of pronouns. Everything matters. But when everything matters the same, nothing matters anymore.
Anne and Emily Brontë have had their books accepted for publication, while Charlotte’s has been rejected everywhere, creating a strained atmosphere at the parsonage.At the same time, a shocking court case has recently concluded, acquitting a workhouse master of murdering his wife by poison. Everyone thinks this famously odious and abusive man is guilty. However, he insists he is many bad things but not a murderer. When an attempt is made on his life, he believes it to be the same person who killed his wife and applies to the detecting sisters for their help.Despite reservations, they decide that perhaps, as before, it is only they who can get to the truth and prove him innocent – or guilty – without a shadow of doubt.
Reimagines the lives of the Brontë siblings-Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and brother Branwell-from their precocious childhoods, to the writing of their great novels, to their early deaths.
This powerful reimagining of Jane Eyre, set in a modern-day law firm, is full of romance and hope as it follows the echoing heartbeats of the classic story.
Includes the complete literary works of Emily
Brontë, fully annotated and introduced.A presentation of Emily Brontë's work as she was first known, rather than Charlotte Brontë's versions of her.Offers a new account of her reception in the nineteenth century, in both verse and prose.With an extensive introduction, including a sustained analysis of Emily Brontë's relationship with the imagined world of Gondal. (Note: The website says Gondor... which is a delicious Tolkienish blunder)
Channelling Emily Brontë’s piercing wit and fierce emotion, Inspector Sands presents a retelling of this classic story of obsessive love and revenge in their boldly humorous and humane style. Their thrilling new version for our times, draws out themes of intergenerational trauma, radicalisation, and social exclusion…confronting audiences with urgent questions and home truths.
You’ve never met a heroine like Lucy Snow. Suddenly bereft of family, friends, and funds, young Lucy journeys unaccompanied to France an unfamiliar land as a vain debutante, quarrelsome teacher, and mysterious ghost draw her into a complicated maze. Will tenacious Lucy, and her wry wit, emerge intact?
Highlights of this fascinating new exhibition include the Brontë family copy of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, poetry manuscripts by Emily and Charlotte, early printed works by Patrick Brontë, copies from Bewick by Emily and Charlotte, plus two wood blocks on loan from the Wordsworth Trust.Our displays will also include items from the 2022 film Emily including a signed copy of the screenplay.
draw on the theme of the natural world, providing opportunities to engage with issues and ideas around climate change and environmental sustainability.
That is what we know. And, paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, there is plenty of things that we know we don't know. Even some that we don't know we don't know. But known or unknown, there will be plenty of them for 2023 being considered a very Brontë year.
Unless explicitly said
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