I was worried that Jordi Mand’s Brontë: The World Without (Rating: ✭✭✭✭) might not suit an al fresco production at Scarborough’s Guild Festival Theatre. After all, it’s pretty much entirely set in the West Yorkshire house that the literary sisters Brontë — Charlotte (Laura Del Papa), Emily (Hilary Scott) and Anne (Lara Lucia) — shared in the 1800s.But director Helen Juvonen’s sensitive staging, a trio of passionate performances and the solid classical columns of the GFT stage give the production a grandeur and airiness it lacked in its rather cramped premiere eight years ago at Stratford’s Studio Theatre. (...)I think I was a little harsh on Mand’s play when it premiered in 2018. It doesn’t want to show where the Brontë’s works came from — how could you begin to depict the genesis of Emily’s impassioned, unusual Wuthering Heights? But it does capture the sacrifice and hard work that goes into artistic creation, especially when, as a woman, you’re expected to do so much else. It also nicely illustrates the bond that connects the three sisters, who are each so different and intimately know each other’s insecurities. (Glenn Sumi)
Nu Sass Productions cordially invites you to the house party of the season, hosted by none other than the Brontë Sisters—Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, the famous writers of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall respectively. The Brontë Sisters are stuck in purgatory, suffering through party after party in an endless time loop, until they throw the best house party and reach The Point of Celebratory Reverence. For them, hosting is truly hell.Nu Sass presents Brontë Sister House Party, written by Courtney Bailey, which premiered at the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival in 2021 for the Confluence Regional Writers' Project, and was awarded the 2022 St. Louis Theatre Circle Award.
Elsewhere, death serves as an explicit expression of moral or religious purity. Think Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. (Claire Allfree)
I’ll never forget when, after reading and loving Jane Eyre, I read Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. If you’ve never read it, it focuses on Bertha Rochester before becoming Bertha Rochester. Rhys’ book not only gives her a different name, but an entirely full and rich history. In fact, Rhys was so furious about Bertha simply being the madwoman in the attic, she set out to write her a life. And I loved Wide Sargasso Sea for itself and for its intertextuality—how it existed on its own and in conversation with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Another author, Amy Chozick, also chooses Wide Sargasso Sea as one of her favourite novels on Debutiful.
Between Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, Emerald Fennell has proven that her films are water-cooler conversation starters. This year, she took on Emily Brontë’s iconic gothic novel Wuthering Heights, with Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Fennell faced controversy, with some fans accusing the director of whitewashing Heathcliff and oversexualizing the source material. Still, it's a feast for the eyes—and who can resist a score by Charli xcx? (Abby Monteil Contributions by Sadie Bell)
The Book: "I finished Eve Babitz's Sex and Rage while in LA and am about halfway through Wuthering Heights, so that will be coming with me to the UK and France."The Reasoning: "I’ve been really into pre-gaming my vacations by reading novels based on my next destination. I started it last year when I happened to read Patti Smith’s Devotion before going to Paris, and it made the anticipation of sitting at a Parisian cafe so much sweeter. A few months ago I picked up Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living during a trip to London, and will be returning to the city with Wuthering Heights. I can’t say it’s a particularly relaxing read, but I am looking forward to being haunted by gothic literature while in London." (Tina Zhang)
Set in Sydney, Time Travel For Beginners centres on characters Anna, Jade and Teddy, each searching for answers in complicated lives, a quest that brings them to a nondescript shop called the Time Travel Agency. Here, customers are offered travel to wherever they wish in the past without altering the future in any way.Does meeting Charlotte Brontë walking on the moors sound interesting? Or seeing the construction of Stonehenge? Would revisiting their teenage self be intriguing? What moment in people’s lives would they travel to? And, how would it help them understand the present? (Lenny Ann Low)
The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in Newcastle Live.
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (1847)Charlotte Brontë presented an independent heroine who refused to submit to social constraints, a bold proposition at the time. Despite initial criticism, the novel later became one of the most prominent and influential English novels.Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (1847)The novel caused widespread shock due to its complex characters and gloomy atmosphere, but over time it has become one of the greatest romantic and psychological novels in world literature. (Medhat Elsheikh)
Calderdale Energy Park: Brontë Parsonage 'totally opposed' to wind farm proposalThe director of Yorkshire’s Brontë Parsonage has said the group behind the museum is “totally opposed” to plans for the Calderdale Energy Park development.Located in Haworth and previously home to the prolific family of writers, the Brontë Parsonage Museum is one of the region’s most well known attractions for tourists.But according to the museum’s director, the proposed Calderdale Energy Park wind farm scheme could put tourist numbers at risk of dropping. The project would see the creation of around 34 wind turbines between Haworth and Hebden Bridge, standing at a maximum height of 200m.In a statement given to The Yorkshire Post, Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “The Brontë Society is totally opposed to Calderdale Energy Park.“The location is environmentally sensitive, and we believe the development would have a significant and detrimental impact on an iconic local viewpoint and world-renowned landscape.“People walk the moorland between Haworth and Hebden Bridge for reflection, inspiration and to understand how the natural surroundings influenced the Brontes’ work; it’s a unique place which allows the literary tourist to physically travel through the landscapes of the Brontës’ imaginations and the worlds of their novels and poetry.“The Museum welcomes over 75,000 visitors each year and for many of them, the walk to Top Withins from Haworth is a form of pilgrimage: the connection between the landscape and literature cannot be ignored.” (Michael Crossland)
The vampire saved the show from imminent cancelation, prompting a spike in ratings and a new direction away from a moody Jane Eyre-like gothic romance style to outright supernatural (if unintentionally campy) horror. (Greg Evans)
Elizabeth Heffernan: What is one book that changed your life?Shady Cosgrove: I can’t limit it to one! My life was transformed by Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.
Si vives tu amor en plan Heathcliff y Catherine en 'Cumbres Borrascosas', como una tormenta de arrebatos emocionales y montándote una película mental 24/7 y conviertes un 'crush' platónico en 'ups & downs' anímicos para que tu objeto de deseo te corresponda, toca pararse a reflexionar sobre dónde está la línea entre una relación sana y una obsesiva. (Rosa Alvares)
Britain’s Favourite Railway Stations (C4, 5pm)The rerun More4 series chugs along, with Siddy Holloway taking a trip on West Yorkshire’s “Brontë line”, as seen in The Railway Children. Si King experiences the Snowdon Mountain Railway, and Damion Burrows extols the architecture of Wemyss Bay station. (John Dugdale)
Some more articles about The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in Dublin and other places: The Irish Times, The Journal, DPA Inernational...
Livejournal user drush1891 reviews Wuthering Heights 1992.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRhys’ “chilling, dreamlike” prequel to “Jane Eyre” explores another side to Charlotte Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic”, said Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire. We meet the white Creole heiress, Antoinette Cosway, in Jamaica years before the events of Thornfield Hall. Isolated and lonely, she is soon “driven to despair” by the cruelty of her new husband Edward Rochester. Rhys’ book is just 176 pages long; packed with “gorgeous imagery and turbulent emotions”, it will roll over you like a “hazy island fever dream”. (Irenie Forshaw)
Under the direction of Achilleas Grammatikopoulos, Emily Brontë’s timeless tale of passion and revenge, Wuthering Heights, will arrive at Thoc’s Main Stage this autumn alongside a third Main Stage production which is yet to be announced.
“Carrie” – No, not the Sissy Spacek shocker, but William Wyler’s deeply affecting and little known 1952 adaption of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie.” As the wealthy married man whom Carrie, the small-town girl played by Jennifer Jones, falls for, Laurence Olivier gives perhaps his best unheralded performance. Olivier always credited Wyler, who starred him as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” years before, with teaching him how to act for the screen. (Peter Rainer)
Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new. Frankenstein resonates with those of us concerned by the inflated egos of any given tech bro. Critics tend to focus on the philosophy of the novel, the vitalism, the social contract of it all, but Mary Shelley writes with prose that feels sharp enough to perform surgery. Or turn to Wuthering Heights, a novel that reinvented the novel several times over, a book that speaks to contemporary narratives of class and race. [...]Good reading begets better reading. In The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading. You’ll start to appreciate how novels speak to each other. Connections will often appear obvious, as Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Jane Eyre.
15. Jean Rhys published her acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial response to Jane Eyre.
It seemed to me that the origins of writing could be found in episodes from childhood. It also seemed that recounting this episode, which caused me lasting shame and guilt, might provide a key. That last sentence shows that this attempt failed. In truth, I spent my entire childhood making up stories—of which I was the heroine—inspired by the ones I read in books. But those weren’t frightening. I transported myself to distant lands, into aristocratic circles, or into the past, to the time of horse-drawn carriages, or even to the first humans. I imagined that I was Scarlett O’Hara or Jane Eyre, wandering in the desert, on the streets of Calcutta, living in a cabin in Alaska. . . . When I actually started writing, it wasn’t to invent stories, or to project myself into fiction—which I’d always wanted to do. On the contrary, it was to interrogate reality. I wasn’t trying to move or horrify readers, only to uncover a hidden truth. In this story, I shed light on a form of cruelty in which I was involved. (Deborah Treisman)
From the minute the spirited and energetic cast clatter onto the stage in their proper Yorkshire boots, we are transported to the wild moors of West Yorkshire. The cold, austere atmosphere of the parsonage in Haworth is filled with the edgy, excitable spirit of the Brontë family.The play follows the efforts of the sisters to become published authors and is an intriguing recreation of their journey to success focussing on the part Anne played. It is humorous and poignant and has a remarkable gift to make these incredible writers come to life in front of our eyes. The modern interpretation - first produced at The National Theatre in 2024 - goes behind closed doors to reveal the dreams, fears and aspirations of this most talented of families. (Linda Shaw)
Emily Brontë, who died, aged 30, in 1848, is a source of perennial fascination – and potentially a biographer’s nightmare. Her single novel, Wuthering Heights, has long been recognised as one of the greatest in the English canon, yet it remains a strange anomaly, seemingly unmoored from the wider history of Victorian fiction. Her haunting poems – of which there are 70-odd – can make you catch your breath. Meanwhile, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, the most inscrutable of the Brontë sisters seems to appear only to disappear.This is primarily – but perhaps not entirely – down to the prosaic fact that so few of her personal papers survive, which is not the case with most Victorian writers, including her older sister Charlotte. None of Emily’s letters are extant, save for two brief, unrevealing notes. The manuscript of Wuthering Heights has gone missing, as, more intriguingly, has that of her second novel, title and subject unknown.Also lost are the multi-volume prose narratives that she wrote in partnership with her younger sister Anne about ‘Gondal’, the imaginary kingdom they invented together as children and which went on to occupy their imaginations – especially Emily’s – into adulthood. Her surviving poetry is often written in the voices of Gondal characters, including a passionate, imperious queen who seems like a rehearsal for Cathy, though the full saga remains unclear. Without the Gondal prose, we can’t trace the development of the storytelling skill that created Wuthering Heights, which, as a result, seems to burst mysteriously upon the world fully formed.Julian Barnes once compared a biography to a net: a series of holes tied together with string. How to construct a convincing life out of scraps is a more pressing problem in Emily’s case than in most, especially given the quiet and insular external existence she appears to have led. She is not known to have made a single friend outside her family, and was resistant to going out into the world, preferring to stay at home in Haworth on the edge of her beloved Yorkshire moors.Over the past century, the lack of data has often invited wild biographical speculation, based on the unfounded assumption that the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff must have been inspired by some secret real-life love affair, though no clinching evidence has ever been found. (The 2022 biopic Emily has her engaging in ludicrously unlikely bodice-ripping sex with a local curate.). So it’s a relief that Deborah Lutz politely refuses to go any distance down that particular rabbit hole. She is well aware – as Emily’s serious biographers have always been – that the more interesting truth is to be found in the few but precious personal documents that do survive, and the glimpses they give us into her idiosyncratic mind.Emily’s four so-called ‘diary papers’ (two others were written jointly with Anne), produced over the years, demonstrate how at ease she was at living in two parallel worlds at once. Her fantasy life bleeds into the workaday reality of the laundrywoman when she records, as a teen, that ‘the Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back kitchin’. The slapdash spelling and lack of punctuation says much about her utter uninterest in conforming to convention.Meanwhile, a clutch of French compositions, written in her early twenties when she was studying in Brussels during a rare absence from Haworth, have long since offered critics an opening into what seems like a dark and uncompromising soul. One passage translates as: ‘Nature… exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live.’ Such proto-Darwinian nihilism sums up Emily’s refusenik rejection of Victorian moral sentimentality.Lutz is in a strong position to approach Emily, given that she has been thinking about the Brontës for a long time. Her 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet is an engaging study of physical objects associated with the family, including the brass collar once worn by Emily’s fearsome bulldog, Keeper. That feeling for material culture carries over into this new biography. It’s intriguing, for example, to be reminded that the very earliest surviving text from Emily’s hand is written not in ink but in thread: the sampler that she stitched when she was eight. The biblical verse it features – ‘Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?’ – uncannily presages Wuthering Heights with its cosmic forces. So, too, does the extreme neatness of the needlework. Emily’s novel may deal with uncontrollable emotions and wild weather but it is a masterpiece of literary control.Lutz is right to define her subject as a ‘consummate artist’ and ‘masterful writer’. It might be tempting to see Emily’s lifelong addiction to Gondal as mere arrested development. But it’s more meaningful to view it as symptomatic of a determination to cut out distraction: the place where she disciplined herself in the perfectionist demands of making what would turn out, in her best poems and in her novel, to be world-class, timeless art.The slapdash spelling in the ‘diary papers’ says much about Emily’s uninterest in conforming to conventionFew female writers of her era (perhaps of any) have been able to be so ruthless in protecting their creative space. Yet – unlike her sisters, who took governess jobs so that she could stay at home – Emily was not much interested in feminism as a social movement. She positively enjoyed unpaid housework because its repetitive – even meditative – bodily motions allowed her mind to roam free.Lutz traces how conflicting images of open and confined spaces flow through Emily’s known writings as the twin poles of her ‘world within’. Dungeons and graves fill her poetry, simultaneously attracting and horrifying her, as much as do the unbounded natural landscapes of the moors that she loved. By the time she was seven, she had seen her mother and two eldest sisters interred in the vault of the church opposite the family home. Heathcliff would later dig up Cathy’s corpse.By tracing such leitmotifs through Emily’s writings, Lutz creates a through-thread to connect the fragmentary sources. Elsewhere, she compensates for the absences by drawing more generally on the work of social historians to flesh out her subject’s material environment, informing us about, say, Victorian sanitary towels, the smell of tallow candles, or how cold it was in an early railway carriage.But it’s her interest in Emily’s manuscripts as physical entities that shines out, inspiring her to reconstruct her subject’s working practices. She has the alertness of a true bibliophile when it comes to the quirks of the original paper and ink of Emily’s poetry manuscripts. Lutz draws on the work of the late great Brontë scholar Tom Winnifrith to explain the probable process of Wuthering Heights’s composition. Such textually informed speculation is of a wholly different order to the cautionary tale offered by the biographer who once misread the title of a Gondal poem – in fact ‘Love’s Farewell’ – as ‘Louis Parensell’, and identified the said imaginary Louis as Emily’s lost lover.Occasionally, Lutz indulges in poetic licence, as when she applies the phrase used of the fictional Cathy – ‘a wild, wick slip’ – to Emily herself; or when she tells us that Emily ‘certainly’ role-played Cathy up on the moors. She also wants it both ways when it comes to the controversy – which got Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, into trouble in 1857 – as to just how bad the boarding school fictionalised in Jane Eyre really was. We’re told that the pupils’ meals were nutritious compared to many of their contemporaries’, but also that the Brontës’ eldest sister Maria died from an infection contracted as a result of the ‘poor nutrition’ provided at the school.Those very minor cavils aside, it says much for Lutz’s skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.
Ted Hughes memorably labeled Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë the “three weird sisters,” and Emily has typically been seen as the weirdest of the three. Gauche, aloof, and dowdy, she channeled her energies into creating intense, brooding poetry and a famously sui generis novel, Wuthering Heights, seething with storms and otherworldly passion.The loss of almost all of Emily’s papers — thousands of pages of prose and poetry and all but three of her letters — no doubt partially explains the customary view of her as elusive and mysterious. In This Dark Night, Deborah Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Penn State, has attempted to reconstruct Emily’s life using a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including weather reports, the diaries of Emily’s neighbors, and local newspapers, as well as Brontë manuscripts that had been missing for over 100 years.The result is a judicious and accessible biography that interweaves Emily’s quotidian routines and trials in a parsonage on the edge of bleak Yorkshire moorland with an imaginative and creative life that would culminate in the dark drama of Heathcliff and Cathy. [...]Patrick was a curate who hailed from a poor Irish family. His father’s surname was Ó Pronntaigh — anglicized, it would be Prunty, Brunty, Branty, or perhaps Bruntee. Patrick alternately spelled his surname Brontè, Bronté, Brontê, and Brontē. As Lutz says, playing with names was a family obsession. Emily, who was the only one of the Brontë sisters with a middle name, saw herself as Emily Jane as a reminder of the many Janes on her mother’s side.The family had moved to Haworth from Thornton in 1820, and Emily would live there nearly all her life. She had only around a year of formal schooling. Patrick taught her at home, and she read avidly — everything from Aesop’s Fables and Virgil to Walter Scott, Dickens, and probably French novels that, as Lutz says, were thought to be “perverse, ‘unspeakably foul,’ and even dangerous.” Roaming the windswept moors, reading, and writing were her treasured means of escape from household chores.The young siblings began to write stories after Patrick gave Branwell a box of 12 wooden soldiers. The soldiers inspired the imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria. At the age of 12 or 13, Emily began to create the fantasyland of Gondal with her sister Anne, who was her best friend. Gondal would become an enduring obsession.Emily spent three months at Roe Head School in Mirfield, around 20 miles from Haworth, when she was 17. Lutz confirms that Emily didn’t thrive in exile. Forced to follow a strict routine for 12 hours a day, she felt penned in, and she didn’t make friends easily. She eventually fell ill and left for home. According to Charlotte, “Emily loved the moors...Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.”In 1838-39, Emily spent a short spell as an instructor at a girls’ school; in 1842, she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels to study at a boarding school. A student in Brussels who would become Charlotte’s lifelong friend said of Emily, “I simply disliked her from the first, her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure contrasting so strongly with Charlotte’s small, neat, trim person.” On learning of the death of her aunt Elizabeth, Emily returned to Haworth with Charlotte. A later plan by the sisters to open a school at the parsonage failed to get off the ground.Charlotte, Emily, and Anne would go on to publish a volume of poems at their own expense using the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold in the space of a year. Undaunted, Charlotte announced to the sisters’ publisher that they were preparing three novels for publication: The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.Emily took around two years to finish Wuthering Heights — the only novel she left us — which was rejected at least four times before it found a publisher. She had to pay to have it published and, as Lutz confirms, the reviews were on the whole unfavorable. It was thought coarse, strange, savage, and eccentric. Emily would die in the year after it was published.The gaps in our knowledge of Emily’s life have fueled much speculation. Brontë scholars have been intrigued by the question of whether, in her 16th year, she had a romantic entanglement that led her father to suddenly decide to send her away to school. Conclusions have been drawn from her androgyny and boldness — a local described her as being “more like a man than a woman, and very dominant in will” — and from the male nickname (“The Major”) that she was given.Such questions are left open here. Lutz resists making judgments on whether Emily was autistic, dyslexic, asexual, queer, transgender, anti-racist, a feminist, or an environmentalist on the basis that “these twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas and identities don’t import easily into the past.”Notwithstanding Charlotte’s verdict that Emily “had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life,” This Dark Night evidences her domesticity and anchors the account firmly in the everyday. Emily’s hours were filled with running the house — by sewing, baking, and cleaning — and she looked after the sisters’ finances, including their shares in the York and North Midland Railway Company. Her piano playing — she played with “precision and brilliancy” — and her love of animals provided release.Emily also learned how to shoot from her father, who, following an attack on a cloth mill by around 100 Luddites, had the habit of keeping a gun by him and discharging it out of the window each morning. She was unfashionable and extremely reserved, and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She was, as Charlotte suggested, “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.”Emily’s world is hauntingly rendered in This Dark Night. Wuthering weather (“wuthering” means characterized by strong winds) never left Haworth and the moors for long, and the average age of death in the area was 19 by some measures. The local church accommodated two or three funerals a week, so the sight of mourners and of graves being dug would have been familiar to the Brontë siblings. In the autumn, following the ancient English tradition of the bone fire (Lutz points to the likely origin of the word “bonfire” in the term), old bones that had been removed from graves to make way for the newly dead were burned. Small wonder Emily was much possessed by death and inclement weather. (Stuart Kay)
The Hay Festival has launched 'The Pleasure List', a crowd-sourced collection of 39 captivating books chosen by the public to revive the joy of reading across Britain. [...]The campaign has been developed in partnership with the National Year of Reading 2026, serving as a direct response to worrying statistics that suggest fewer and fewer people across the United Kingdom are choosing to read for pleasure in their spare time. (Aimée Walsh)
The film premiered last week Cannes, where early reactions praised its pitch-black humor and savage tone, comparing the movie to a collision between Jane Eyre and American Psycho. (Brad Miska)
'Wuthering Heights' by Emily BrontëMost people have heard of, if not read, Brontë's romantic and rather disturbing novel, first released in 1847 under a pseudonym. Some readers at the time found the tale immoral and its romantic lead, Heathcliff, too wild and cruel. An edited version, released in 1850, garnered more interest, and the harrowing, compelling novel is now considered a masterpiece.The recent Warner Bros. Pictures adaptation has drawn considerable attention. Many loyal Brontë fans were critical of the film, which turned a tale of obsessive love, abuse and revenge into something more palatable and glossy for theatergoers. Despite this, the movie was a huge box-office hit, with some speculating on its potential for an Oscar or two come 2027. (Gillian Harvey)
What’s more, through my reading I began to see that the Gothic is not only the terrain of personal terrors. Historical atrocities live there, too. Even in nineteenth century British classics, the Gothic is used to express the racism, sexism and colonialism we’d rather not see, the painful history—and present—we’d like to keep locked in the attic. Jane Eyre’s Rochester, who makes a fortune from the enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations, has a mad first wife in the attic—a symbol not only of his troubled romantic past, but the corruption and violence at the root of his fortune. [...]Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, her feminist, post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre, after nine years of labor and 27 years of literary silence. It tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young white Creole woman in Dominica whose family is pushed into poverty after the end of slavery. Her opportunistic marriage to Mr. Rochester, meant to save her family from destitution, brings misery to all. He disdains her Creole identity; she mocks how poorly he understands the people and land around him. Rhys’s prose is lush, dark, and gorgeous. By giving literature’s famed “madwoman in the attic” a (new) name and a voice, Rhys showed that behind every fearsome Gothic monster is a wounded child bearing the mark of difference. Wide Sargasso Sea takes the subtle colonial critique of Jane Eyre and makes it explicit.
Oh, and yes, much to Sarah's relief, we made it to the Brontë Parsonage before they closed the door for the day. While Sarah was poring over one of the very desk boxes that the sisters wrote their manuscripts on, I struck up a conversation with a guide, who, after I explained why we arrived so late, told me about a 'classic mounting block' at nearby Ponden Hall."The hall is an historic 17th-century manor heavily associated with the Brontë family and often considered the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights," she divulged."It's got five steps on either side, leading to a small platform atop, you'd absolutely love it," she said.No prizes for guessing where I took Sarah bright and early the next day. (Tim the Yowie Man)
“She should have been a man — a great navigator,” was the opinion of one of her teachers. “She was in the strictest sense a law onto herself,” a childhood friend remarked, with a hint of archness. “I have never seen her parallel in anything,” her sister Charlotte said, sounding half-admiring, half-exasperated.Among a family of weird, wild talents, Emily Brontë was the weirdest and wildest. Brought up in the semi-seclusion of a remote north Yorkshire parsonage, all the Brontës — Maria and Elizabeth, who died in childhood, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who lived long enough to write books, plus poor, spoilt, opium-addled brother Branwell — were shy, but it was Emily, the “tall, long-armed girl” with “liquid… dark blue” eyes whom visitors singled out as particularly reserved or rude.It was Emily who loved the moors so intensely that being away from her Haworth home seemed to make her physically ill and it was Emily whose first “electric” novel (as another Emily — Dickinson — described it) was a love story so painfully strange and addictive that, 179 years later, it’s still making bank for Hollywood. This year, thanks to a bump from Emerald Fennell’s wickedly provocative film, Wuthering Heights has sold 123,265 copies in the UK. In a world where no one reads any more, nearly 1,000 people a day are still buying Emily’s book.Elusive Emily is also the Brontë sister who left the fewest traces — almost all of her letters and thousands of pages of her prose and poetry are missing, probably destroyed. This might explain why This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, is “the first comprehensive biography” of Emily in more than two decades, as its publisher rather grandly proclaims.The Brontës weren’t really native Yorkshire, but the children of transplants. Their spectacularly driven father, Patrick, born in a two-room cottage in Co Down, got himself to the University of Cambridge, published a book of poetry and later displayed an unusual if patchy interest in educating his daughters. Their mother, Maria, also a writer, came from a well-to-do family in Penzance and married down with Patrick, something Cathy, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, refuses to do despite being madly in love with Heathcliff. Was this perhaps a sign of Emily heeding her mother’s cautionary tale? After having six children in quick succession, Maria died from cancer in 1821 when Emily was three, in “more agonising pain than I ever saw anyone endure”, according to her husband.Death and trauma hang over Emily’s early years: aged six, she joined her sisters at Cowan Bridge — the school whose tough regimen would inspire nightmarish Lowood in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre — where snow soaked into the pupils’ shoes as they walked to church, condemning them to chilblains. “Much worse happened in schools of the time,” Lutz says bracingly, which I’m sure is true, but perhaps wouldn’t have been much consolation to Emily when her two oldest sisters developed consumption and died, aged eleven and ten.Such experiences shaped her gothic imagination: mother and daughters were buried in the family vault beneath the stone floor of Haworth church (a privilege accorded the parson), so that three times as a very young child, Emily saw a crypt open and her loved ones disappear inside it. Tombs haunt her work, as Lutz points out. Twice in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff digs up his beloved Cathy’s grave.After this almost unimaginably grim start, Emily’s childhood improved. Their father took the girls out of school — to lose two daughters may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose any more would have looked like carelessness — and their mother’s sister arrived from Cornwall to look after them. In a Brontë novel she would have been a wicked stepmother figure, like Jane Eyre’s Mrs Reed, but Aunt Branwell, though strict, was adored by the children. After lessons from their father — Emily showed an unladylike aptitude for geometry and geography and later, rather delightfully, managed the family’s railway investments — their aunt would read aloud to them from newspapers and Walter Scott histories as they sat sewing by the fire.Of the three surviving sisters, it was Emily who had the pleasantest life. Charlotte and Anne both endured long, unhappy stints away from home as schoolteachers and governesses (the “asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs”, Charlotte complained of her pupils. She was perhaps not temperamentally suited to moulding young minds) whereas Emily, after a brief teaching stint aged 20, was mostly allowed to remain at home.Why the special treatment? The family seemed to consider her too headstrong for regular employment (“This is slavery I fear she will never stand,” Charlotte said). She certainly sounds like a fearsome creature, striding round the countryside with her dogs Grasper and Keeper, whom she sketched with great tenderness and beat when they misbehaved, bringing home wild geese and feral cats.She ran the household, gardening, ironing and baking, always with a pencil at her side. She was first and foremost a poet: by the age of 22 she had written about 72 poems, mostly on tiny scraps of paper she kept in her copious detachable pockets. Many of the preoccupations of Wuthering Heights appear in them, particularly her love affair with the moors by moonlight: “It seems strange that aught can lie/ Beyond its zone of silver sky.”The summer of 1845, when all three sisters reunited at Haworth, was their collective annus mirabilis: in a fantastically fertile-sounding workshop atmosphere, reading bits aloud to each other each evening, Charlotte (aged 29) wrote The Professor and Jane Eyre, Emily (aged 27) wrote Wuthering Heights and Anne (aged 25) wrote Agnes Grey. It’s a shame, to my mind, that the books were initially rejected by multiple publishers because this gave Emily time to revise her manuscript, adding the grindingly repetitive second half of the novel.But the Brontës were ambitious and kept pushing: eventually in 1847, three of the books appeared at the parsonage, bound in plum-coloured cloth with gold lettering along the spines. The reviews of Wuthering Heights were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly bad, although one critic praised its “savage grandeur” and Charlotte thought that in its “electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning”.Lutz has a nice, if slightly lush turn of phrase (Emily had to learn “to harness her devilish ferocity”) and is particularly good on weather, landscape and conjuring up sensory experiences. From newspaper records, she gives us a sense of the deadly snowstorms (“a mail-coach drove into a snowdrift, killing the coachman, guard and three horses”) and violent winds (“spray from the ocean over 70 miles away deposited a saline encrustation on windows”) that seeped into Emily’s imagination.As a biographer, however, Lutz has an occasional fondness for anachronistic scolding: Charlotte betrays “internalised misogyny” (well, it was 1840). She also shies away from addressing head on the central mystery of Emily’s life, which makes This Dark Night an informative but slightly stodgy read.With the exception of a year in a Brussels boarding school, which was hardly a den of iniquity, Emily lived a sheltered life at home, possibly without any romantic experiences at all. Where on earth did Wuthering Heights, which is not just any but the English novel of undying erotic obsession, come from? As Muriel Spark, whose short 1960 book on the subject is pungent and stylish (worth seeking out too is Winifred Gerin’s excellent 1971 biography), puts it: “Theories about Emily Brontë are, perhaps, only exceeded in number by theories about Shakespeare.”All that early trauma certainly had something to do with it, plus the unruly atmosphere of the moors and a rich diet in Byron’s poetry. Then there are the famously bizarre and intricate fantasy worlds that Emily and Anne continued to write and act out well into their twenties. Gondal sounds a bit Game of Thrones-y with its exotically named characters (Julius Brenzaida, Augusta G Almeda), battles, murders and extravagant lovesickness. Today, the shy teenage Brontës might have got very into internet fan fiction, but as it was, they had to build their own worlds from scratch, training from which Emily emerged with an extraordinarily muscular imagination.She died just before Christmas 1848, aged 30, possibly from tuberculosis, followed only five months later by heartbroken Anne. What else might Emily have written had she lived long enough for that wild imagination to mature? She was working on a second novel, which disappeared along with the rest of her papers, although in a pleasing flight of fancy Lutz imagines it could still exist somewhere, “stashed behind wall panels” or buried on the moors by its secretive, solitary writer.“You said I killed you — haunt me then!” Heathcliff rages, in desperate search of Cathy’s ghost. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë gave us one of the great ghost stories. Nice to think she’s out on those moors somewhere, dog by her side, pencil in hand. (Susie Goldsbrough)
50 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys1966This postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre takes up the story of the first Mrs Rochester. Swapping Charlotte Brontë’s cold, dark gothic for the oppressive sunshine of the Caribbean, Dominica-born Rhys reimagines Brontë’s notorious “madwoman in the attic” as a Creole heiress called Antoinette Cosway. After decades of obscurity, its critical success propelled Rhys back into the spotlight at the age of 76, with Angela Carter hailing the novel as “a complete reimagining of what literature can do”.First sentence“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”
20 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë1847Emerald Fennell’s maximalist, sexed-up film divided opinions on its release in February. The source text – Brontë’s only novel – was published under the pen name Ellis Bell, and was similarly polarising among its Victorian audience for its depiction of the destructive relationship of its antiheroes, Heathcliff and Cathy, and its moral ambivalence. Set on the blustery Yorkshire moors, it is considered a classic of gothic literature.First sentence“1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”
8 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë1847The tale of poor governess Jane, her unlikely love affair with Mr Rochester, and the madwoman in his attic was a bestseller on publication. (Her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights came out two months later.) Published under the pen name Currer Bell, its innovative first-person narrative, gothic and erotic themes thrilled contemporary readers.First sentence“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Eliot herself is a wise and gracious voice in the novel, breaking the fourth wall to remind us to look or think more carefully. For her, shifting point of view was not so much a literary technique as a moral obligation. Empathy is an overused word today, but for Eliot it was almost a religion. She had lost her faith, but showed that divinity can be found through true fellow feeling.This moral seriousness is sometimes mistaken for moralising, and Eliot as dull and preachy. Although admired, she is not held with the same affection as Austen or Dickens; her novels don’t lend themselves so readily to TV or film. They are not embedded in the public imagination like those of the Brontës. Neither Kate Bush nor Charli xcx felt moved to write pop songs about Middlemarch.
Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”. Virginia Woolf famously declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. OK, it is not as obviously passionate as Wuthering Heights (it is never going to have a soundtrack by Charli xcx), at No 20 on our list, or as fun as Pride and Prejudice (at nine). But all human life is here. (Lisa Allardice)
On the other hand, there is the failure of which “Wuthering Heights” is accused by audience members aplenty – a departure from the source material so pronounced that the overlap between the works would not suffice to draw a Venn diagram from.Harsh? I would say so. The focal point of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation is the tumultuous relationship between characters Catherine and Heathcliff, the very same placed at centre stage by many readers – and most film-length adaptations – since the book’s publication. Given the popularity of this romance as a focal point, I think that to base a criticism of Emerald Fennell’s film on her making the “emotional subtext [of the book] as explicit and viscous as possible” is to miss the nub of the actual problem. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is viscous, and it is explicit – and there is nothing wrong with that. The writing and direction embrace the emboldening title of a re-imagining from start to finish; the film’s costuming and set design are lavish, flirtatious with anachronisms, dream-like at times, and, when viewed altogether, very camp. From its very title, Fennell indicates that this is her intention, and from scouring the web for production interviews, I found next to nothing indicating otherwise. I would even suggest that viscosity and explicitness are two of Fennell’s strengths. [...]Why on earth is Fennell’s choice of material to treat derivatively so limited?Make no mistake. This is not a criticism of falling into the valley of redundancy – at least not in the sense usually applied to adaptations. It is a criticism of the limited scope of Fennell’s signature style of deviance. Fennell’s films bring into awe-inspiring and uncomfortably focal excess the latent sensuality of a setting that contains or is associated with repression. My main point of comparison here is Saltburn, which bounces between the innocent, sexless, honey-coloured spires of Oxford, and the cushioned walls of a wealthy family’s estate. All the while, jealous, obsessive, and often obscene idol-worship emerges slowly from its initial disguise of college romance. “Wuthering Heights”, for as much of it is brought on-screen, takes advantage of the modern audience’s advanced palate for sex to push the boundaries of public display to a new extreme. Voyeuristic masturbation, in real-time, is the audience’s first taste of Catherine and Heathcliff’s adult relationship. Once again, Fennell joins obsession with romance in a very telling way. That much is creditable – that is where the film is made, unmistakably, her own. But that is where the making stops.If my criticism were purely scope-based, I admit that it should apply just as much to other adaptations of the novel. Emily Brontë’s intricate expansion of the web in the second half of Wuthering Heights proper, creating a second generation of Earnshaws, Heathcliffs, Lintons, and everyone in between, is scarcely dealt with in popular culture, leaving stock images of the ill-fated, tragic soulmates Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff to occupy the cultural psyche. My edition of Wuthering Heights has 316 pages – in my notes, I write that “halfway thru (sic) the book at 167 and we’ve finished the movie”. This in itself, I want to emphasise, is not my criticism. I could not snub “Wuthering Heights” for being a mise en abyme if no previous adaptation has truly escaped said abyme either. Enclosing her title in scare quotes is about as explicit a disclaimer Fennell could have given – as openly acknowledged in her interview with Claire Valentine McCartney, the film is an attempt to “make sense” of just one “tiny piece” of the novel’s vastness. If she wants to make the most of a small part of the book for a contemporary audience, more power to her.What I shall criticise Fennell for is that her style of abyme-escapism would be so well-suited to the remainder of the text, and this neglect makes the entire film lacklustre in context. It is a sexy and stylish film, but from Fennell I would expect more than sex and style – I hoped, I think fairly, for innovation. A director whose signature is extracting and drawing out from her source the taboo topic of sex, and demonstrating with discomfitting proximity that we the audience are perhaps not as comfortable with the subject as we like to think, could have taken the opportunity presented by such a thematically rich text to bypass what Rahul Menon of ScriptMag dubs “[terror] of [her] own source material”. She could have put to the audience’s scrutiny – and tested our postmodern, non-censorial sensibilities – an equally frank handling of the topics of abuse, of familial incest in physical, mental, and figurative forms, of perversion of nature and its optionality and of sadism. New and demanding ground? Yes. But Fennell is a capable director, so why not make the demand? Instead, as Rahul notes, Fennell’s take skirts even the more contemporarily common social subjects of racism or classism, both included just as explicitly by Brontë as the less “popular” social subjects.What a fabulously subversive film we might have had – and, in terms of the qualities unique to an adaptation, what a great addition of value to the film canon – if Fennell had brought her proven capability and eye for subtlety to the tapestry of interwoven taboos that is the novel Heights. But, returning to the question of whether the quality of an adaptation affects its quality as a standalone film – although I should say, once and for all, that I think not – I am afraid that sex is the only live bird in Fennell’s film. Her nest is otherwise, to quote the novel, “full of little skeletons.” (T. Sehgal)
Fine detail and contrast are as dialed-in as expected, with color representation leaving a huge impression due to the production team's careful choice of specific palettes in regards to paint, fabric, decorations, and other items to heighten the mood and tone in dramatic fashion. Framed at its original ratio of 1.85:1, this the kind of atmospheric picture that immediately holds your attention from start to finish and the 4K disc -- triple-layered, of course -- is thankfully encoded at a supportive bit rate, one that varies greatly depending on the scene but never wavers in its precision. Overall, this is a drop-dead gorgeous presentation of "Wuthering Heights" and one that fans will be happy to own. (...)Optional subtitles, including English (SDH), are included during the film and three featurettes below. A Descriptive Audio track is also on board, which I have not listened to but is probably pretty hilarious in spots.
Brandon Schreur: Obviously, this movie is based on such an iconic book that so many people grew up reading either in school or just for fun. I know that you’ve worked with Emerald before, but she comes to you and says that adapting Wuthering Heights into a movie is going to be her next project, and she wants you to do the production design for it. What’s going through your head at that point? Is that an exciting challenge to dive into, or is it more of a ‘Uh, how are we going to pull this off?’ kind of feeling?Suzie Davies: It’s a bit of a combination of both. I literally had that exact feeling — like, I cannot wait to read this. How are we going to do it? And, now, I can’t wait to actually make it. Yeah, it was like that whole roller coaster. I think the joy of working with Emerald for the second time was that we already had a sort of dialogue. We already knew each other.She actually spoke to me before I read her screenplay to let me know what her ambitions and desires were. So, I went in and read it already knowing she wanted me to build everything on a sound stage. She said she just wanted to never leave the studio. Everything we see was going to be on the sound stage.Being able to read her script with that in mind, it meant my first thoughts — which are usually your strongest, but they’d already been defined in that direction. So, off I went. It was one of the best scripts that I’ve ever read, as a production designer. Her stage descriptions; there is nothing better than reading, for instance, the skin room. The description of that skin room was just like, ‘Let me at it! Come on!’ But it was, like, everything. I kept going, ‘Hang on a minute, a doll’s house! Oh, it’s raining in Wuthering Heights!’ It just kept going on and on and on. It was brilliant.Totally. There are so many different scenes or different locations in this movie that I loved. As you said, the skin room really stuck out to me. Seeing that in the theater for the first time, that was just, like, something I haven’t seen before.Yeah, it’s exciting. If we could do Smell-O-Vision or Touch-O-Vision. Because you almost want all the other senses to be involved, especially for things like that. None of us could stop touching that wall. There’s something really — you just want to squeeze into it. It was amazing. [...]Getting into some of the specifics, the design and the look for the titular Wuthering Heights estate, I’m so in love with how it conveys feeling without ever actually having to say anything. Just the way it’s filmed, the way it looks — it’s so oppressive and ominous. Can you talk about the process of figuring out how the estate was going to look and how you went about making it feel so gloomy from the visuals alone?I think we knew that every surface, I wanted it to feel wet, sweating, or dripping with water or some sort of bodily fluid. It just needed to feel alive. Whenever you have surfaces that have reflections on them, I think it will give something uneasy — is it breathing, is it moving, what made it happen? There’s something else that’s happening.That was like, across the board, every surface is going to reflect or be able to take water as well. A little bit to what I alluded to before, because we’re on a sound stage and I had a certain size of stage to work with, everything is sort of built within a circle. So we get the horse and carriage in and out without turning around; it’s a circuit, basically, on the sound stage. Once you start getting some things you need to have, you begin to design outwards from those boundaries. Which, it’s really helpful to have boundaries, otherwise you sort of don’t know where you’re going.We were able to put, like, the tiles on the wall, which are sort of high-glass tiles. That’s a little bit of a nod to what’s really used in that part of the UK. They do build houses with big, brick tiles, but not black shiny ones like we had. But the proportions are right. That was enough of a broad brushstroke to say that we’re making a period drama, but it’s going to be in this weird, heightened version of a 14-year-old’s dream or imagination of what she thought when she read this book. It’s great when you have a writer/director to do things like that; to show the concepts of what we’re doing. We made models, and we had loads of different runs of what that color should be and the size of those tiles. Again, the workshops are all there, so Emerald could come and have a look.When you have a director who has also adapted the screenplay, you get the immediate answer of either ‘Yes, that works,’ or ‘No, that doesn’t.’ That just cuts through everything. You don’t have to phone someone up, wait, and go, ‘What do you mean?’ I just take her to the workshop and go, ‘This is what we’re going to put on the wall, does this work?’Then we had a big discussion about why we’re changing it for white in the gothic arch; at one stage, we were going to do it the other way around. But, actually, the house doesn’t look that dirty until we get later [into the movie] when it gets destroyed a little bit. But that also gives the great opportunity to see red splattered on the wall in that wonderful moment.And bouncing off that, you have Wuthering Heights, but then you have Edgar’s mansion, and it’s so different. Like, that’s a house I would actually want to live in, it feels so alive. How did the process of making that one differ from Wuthering Heights? Did you have to basically start from scratch doing that?Yes and no. Again, the brilliant stage description that comes very early in the description of Thrushcross Grange is actually the doll’s house. I did it the other way around — we built and designed the doll’s house, and then built the life-sized version of the doll’s house rather than the other way around. The doll’s house was slightly out of proportion because we knew we wanted that hand to come in with the model of Margot’s character into the shot. That’s where we started, from that little bit of detail. That made the windows [a certain size], which on a real house would then be [another certain size].What’s great, then, is that all of the characters in Thrushcross Grange, for real, are slightly too small. Because our original is slightly out; it’s a quarter-scale model. Which is a good scale, but it’s slightly off what it should be. So, the ceilings are a little bit taller, and the windows are a little bit bigger. So, once you start on that version, doing it that way, it just gives you that slight unease — like, I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s not quite right. That’s the feeling we wanted for the whole film. There’s just something hovering between reality and unreality. (Brandon Schreur)
It’s your second time working with Emerald Fennell and Jacob Elordi (both on Saltburn) and third time working with Margot Robbie (Babylon and Saltburn). Is there anything different in your collaborative experience with them this time around?[...] There were a lot of things from Emerald, like how [Heathcliff] lives in this barn and how he could see [Cathy] brush her hair in the window and how things were related – and then this rock that came through and all these things grew all over the house to take over. How it was suddenly winter seeing her father in misery. It was just more dramatically visualized than normal, which is fine because it’s so different and felt appropriate for this film to become heightened, letting you cry and letting you feel. [...]I listened to the commentary track on the disc and learned that some of the days were sunny outside and you needed to make them rainy and overcast?!“The biggest challenge for me is always weather on films. It’s rarely the way you want it to be, honestly. I could be particular in how i think it should look and I’m disappointed. On Bond [No Time to Die] in Matera [Italy], it was cloudy, which doesn’t at all look as brutal as it does in hard sun, so we actually came back and shot again to get a hard sun there. But that was the only thing that mattered that day was that it looked hard.In this case, we obviously had worked on soundstages first and established scenes. We decided scenes should be foggy and rainy. And then you come to the real world, which we were promised that in March, end of March, in the Moors, it’s gonna be miserable… in a good way. So we come there and it’s sunny and windy. If it’s sunny you can fog it up and make it look miserable, but if it’s windy, the fog disappears. But we did it. That was one of the few tools we had to tame nature was to add fog where we want, like when [Cathy and Heathcliff] walk amongst the rocks. That was important, because he’s finding her there and it should be obscured and not so clear.Same when she finds him returning and he’s invisible in the fog. That’s shot on location. There was no fog. It was sunny that day, but we had so much atmospheric smoke to be able to do that. Our genius special effects department was able to turn on a cue to make him invisible and become visible in a few seconds. It was like everything was in a play – like improvised jazz. It was cool how that eventually worked. On stage, that’s much easier because you can just do what you want.”I’m curious, you had said earlier you love learning. What did you learn that you were able to put into practice on Wuthering Heights?“I guess what I mean is that you learn so much from the people around you, especially intelligent directors that take you on this journey and develop a film together. It’s in all the small details that you learn from a director. It evokes situations that creates challenges that you have to figure things out that you don’t know how to do yet, and then you learn your own work.That happened, for example, on this film. I felt there was a certain amount of theatricality Emerald wanted. It’s sort of like these fantastical devices in the sets, like a rock [juts] out into the kitchen and the house is grown over by these cancerous [tumors] that are weird fabrics. There was always a level for allowance for that. At the same time, we felt that, instead of shooting on a green screen, or build a massive, super expensive Volume, I love the soft drop textiles that you print on and then you can light them for different looks – for a flat look or backlights through the clouds for a dramatic look. And that’s what we did on this film, which I’ve done before and isn’t what I learned.The thing was we were trying to get the sense, in the stage, that it was gonna be very real feeling. We knew it was going to have a stage look, but make it as realistic as we could make it. So we decided to paint the imagery so that it would have dark clouds on the top of the backdrop. On the ceiling, normally, you put white silks to create the skylight. But that bothers you if you shoot these big VistaVision shots indoors and you see the ceiling, it would have to be replaced by the visual effects. So we figured out, with that challenge, I recalled that I had seen gray silks. We did a gray silk that was the same color as the clouds in the photographed backdrop that went seamlessly together on the ceiling so the trans light kept going into the sky. With enough atmosphere, you could not see it wasn’t sky. I learned that the look of that, when you have that big gray sky, it looks so much more realistic than a white silk. So from then on, for every movie now, I’m gonna use that for sky. If you want to have light, it’s still soft, but if you pull out the lights, it doesn’t reflect lights, which would look fake.The beauty of working with interesting people is that you always learn so much. In the directing, it’s interesting to learn how directors work with actors. The actors are so important for the story and the cinematography, for me, is the tool – with the light and the lensing and the closeness or distance from the actor and the composition – that should do similar things that sound and music does with the audio.I think the cinematography should serve the emotions. It could be subtle, but it should rather serve the emotions than the plot. I’d rather feel the right feeling with the characters, if I just see an image, than if I understand what’s going on with the plot. It’s really important to focus on that. I feel like I want to be directed like Emerald’s directing actors. I want her to tell me what she tells the actors, because it’s about those things. That’s how we get the images in our heads. It’s better than coming in with visual images to show. I like to work with her telling me how to feel: like say ‘miserable.’ Well, how does that look in this world? Stuff like that.” (Courtney Howard)
What is your favourite book by a dead author?Wide Sargasso Sea is the book that revived Jean Rhys’s fortunes — brought her back from the dead while she was still alive, as it were — and it’s great, of course.
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by Deborah WeissManchester University PressISBN: 9781526175717November 2024Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors - Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays - blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers - Edgeworth and Opie - located causality in less gendered and less victimized accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.
It’s been a month since Wuthering Heights was released in cinemas and the Cathy/Heathcliff fever is still burning. But if Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel deviated too far from the original story for your taste, you’re likely to find more to love about Essie Fox’s recent literary reimagining, Catherine.Shifting the perspective from the original book’s narrators – outsider Mr Lockwood and insider Nelly Dean – to that of Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw, we follow the titular character as she forms a fierce and unbreakable bond with a foundling boy her father rescues from the streets of Liverpool. As they grow older, Catherine and Heathcliff’s friendship evolves into an intense love. But everything changes when Catherine’s father dies, leaving her bitter and pitiless brother as master of the house. Heathcliff is reduced to servitude and Catherine, desperate to save him, turns to her kindly neighbour, Edgar, believing that her marriage to a wealthy heir will free Heathcliff from cruelty. Reader, it does not. [...]I first read Wuthering Heights almost two decades ago and whilst the specific details of the story have faded with time, that haunting backdrop and the intensity of the characters has stuck with me ever since. It’s a relief to read Essie Fox’s take on Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive relationship and still recognise the gothic backbone that made Brontë’s story such a seminal novel. Catherine is steeped in the kind of dark and moody atmosphere that makes you live and breathe every part of the book. It helps that the setting is almost a character in itself; Fox captures the rugged, windswept Yorkshire moors with a cinematic wildness that’s both brutal and beautiful.The same words can be used to describe the story’s central duo too. As children, they’re equally charming in their own ways – Catherine is passionate, spirited and open with her affections, whilst Heathcliff is quiet, compassionate and empathetic. It’s easy to like their younger selves, but much harder to like who they grow up to become. As a woman and a wife, Catherine’s youthful tendency towards immaturity and selfishness is amplified. Heathcliff, on the other hand, has become an entirely different person. Having shed the softness that made Catherine love him in the first place, he’s made himself into a monster purely to torture those who tortured him. And yet, toxic and terrible as they both are, they remain sympathetic characters – which is no mean feat.By framing the narrative around Catherine’s POV, Fox gives her novel an urgency that really delves into the character’s deep inner turmoil. The book leans more heavily into parts of Brontë’s story that were only hinted at or briefly touched upon, which really ups the tragedy, trauma and emotional torment the characters wrestle with. Wuthering Heights was never supposed to be a romantic love story but there is still love to be found in all the misery, whether it’s housekeeper and mother figure Nelly Dean’s love for the children under her care, or in Catherine’s love for the daughter she never had a chance to know, or the ghost of the boy who deserved a kinder life than he was given.If you want to read a classic novel with a modern touch, Catherine delivers all the obsessive yearning, eerie chills and untamed insanity you could hope for in a Wuthering Heights reimagining. It’s an absorbing and detailed historical novel that will please fans of the original, whilst introducing new readers to Brontë’s literary genius – which is exactly what retellings should do. (Natalie Xenos)
Grey skies, gravestones and misty moors might not seem like the obvious ingredients for a viral social media post.Yet since the release of Wuthering Heights, influencers’ and BookTokers’ gloomy content has inspired hundreds to descend upon a village on the edge of the Pennine moors.There has been an influx of younger visitors to Haworth in West Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters lived, buying copies of Wuthering Heights and occasionally wearing costumes inspired by Cathy, the story’s female protagonist.The interest in the village, which is typically busy during the summer but less so during colder months, has filled up car parks and prompted businesses to extend their opening hours.Brontë-related attractions include the parsonage, where the family lived, the church, where Charlotte and Emily are buried, and the post office, where the sisters posted their manuscripts.Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse on the moors above, is believed to have inspired the location of Wuthering Heights.Although Emerald Fennell’s adaptation was not filmed in Haworth, she used locations across Swaledale and Langthwaite in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, now signposted on the Visit North Yorkshire website.Dani Leigh, 33, a travel blogger from Manchester, decided to visit Haworth with her partner for Valentine’s Day in anticipation of the film’s release that weekend. She said it was busy with other tourists.She posted videos of her visit, overlaid by Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights and the caption, “If you’re a literature girlie, a dark academia lover or a whimsy traveller, you need to go to Haworth.”Leigh told The Times: “It was amazing to wander the same streets that the Brontës would have done. With the strong winds, sweeping moors and cobbled streets, I can definitely see how Wuthering Heights came to be written.”The film, which puts the title of the novel in quotation marks, received mixed reviews from book fans, who criticised the casting of Heathcliff and changes to the original plot. The headline stars and press tour outfits, however, helped the film gross $80 million domestically and over $130 million internationally and brought younger generations to the Brontë story.Staff at the Brontë Parsonage Museum said they welcomed double the number of visitors this February half-term compared to the same time last year. The shop also sold 388 copies of Wuthering Heights, double the amount it usually sells in a week.On Saturday, March 7, the museum welcomed 590 visitors, a figure they would typically expect at the height of August.“Comments in the visitors’ book reveal that some people have been inspired to visit after seeing the film, and we did spot a visitor last week channelling Margot Robbie’s look in the film, complete with ribbon-braided hair,” Diane Fare, a staff member, said.Mark Graham, the operations manager at The Hawthorn restaurant and co-owner of Haworth Old Post Office café, said, “I live opposite the Brontë Parsonage, and therefore I can see the car park … and it’s full every day.“It used to be the case that it was full in June, July, August, at weekends. Now it’s full when you look out on a Wednesday or a Thursday.“People are parking outside the village, up on to the moors, on the road and then walking in.”He said that the Old Post Office recently had a queue outside its door before it opened, while each weekend the café has 70 to 80 bookings a day despite only accommodating 50 covers.“Haworth used to be coach trips, pensioners, there’s now a lot of younger people, and you’re seeing your sales rise of things like matcha, Valencia lattes,” he said.He added that the café had been selling 20 copies of Wuthering Heights a week.Jamila Juma-Ware, 42, co-owns Writers Bloc, a bar which hosts book clubs and serves Brontë Bramble cocktails.“It’s gone from being almost like a ghost town in January, February, when it’s really chilly,” she said, to “an influx of influencers and people via social media coming to take a look.”“I don’t think anything of our time has kind of had this much impact in terms of this tourist drive.“It’s been such a hotly debated topic this film … I think just that kind of talk appeal mixed with social media has created this kind of frenzy.”Cobbles and Clay, a pottery painting café, noticed the trend online when their social media platforms soared from 41,000 views in January to 98,500.There was so much interest in a Brontë quote on display in the café that the owners offered visitors free copies of the poem the quote was taken from. In two weeks, the staff said 240 copies have been taken.Around 20 minutes drive from Haworth is Holdsworth House hotel, where the cast, including Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, stayed for the final night of filming in 2025.Chris Meehan, the general manager, estimated the film had boosted his usual bookings during the “quieter months” by around 15 per cent.“The film is on the tip of everybody’s tongue. Everybody’s either seen it or wants to see it,” he said, adding that more guests had pre-planned visits to the Brontë attractions.Wuthering Heights? I don’t recall Emily Brontë writing about masturbationDue to demand, the hotel introduced a Brontë Country Escape package, which includes tickets to the parsonage museum.AirBnB also temporarily installed “Cathy’s bedroom” on the site, after searches for West Yorkshire Valentine’s getaways increased by 67 per cent among UK Gen Z travellers and 59 per cent globally.In the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Andrew Hields operates both the Tan Hill Inn and the Green Dragon, near filming locations.He said they had hosted a “smattering of influencers” at both pubs, including Italians and Germans trying Yorkshire pudding and posing by the fireplace.“We always say that if Cathy and Heathcliff ever went on a pub date, they would meet at Tan Hill Inn,” Hields said. (Lara Wildenberg)
In early 2026, a museum employee at the Brontë Parsonage described the weeks after the release of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation as “mind-blowing”. Visitors from America were turning up in numbers the parsonage doesn’t usually see outside peak summer. People who had never read the book bought it on the way in. The cobbled main street filled up on weekday mornings. It was, by most accounts, the most concentrated burst of interest in a very long time.None of this was new, exactly. Haworth has been doing this for over 130 years. What’s worth asking is how it started, what it actually built, and whether literary tourism – the kind that rests entirely on three writers who died in their thirties – is a stable foundation or just a very old habit.There’s a pattern in how people approach places with a strong cultural pull. Whether someone is planning a walk to Top Withens or deciding which casinacho casino to try on a leisure trip, the decision tends to start the same way – with research, with a story someone already believes, with a destination that promises to match an expectation. Haworth has been selling that match for a very long time. The question is whether it still delivers.How literary tourism in Haworth actually beganThe Brontë Society formed in 1893, two years after Charlotte’s biography by Elizabeth Gaskell had already turned the parsonage into a place people actively wanted to visit. Earnest readers were knocking on the door through most of the 1870s and 80s – the Society simply institutionalised what was already happening. In its first year of formal operation, roughly 10,000 visitors came through. By the 1930s, when the parsonage was purchased and opened as a museum, that number had grown substantially.What the Brontës did to Haworth was not subtle. Before the family arrived in 1820, the village was a working industrial township. Patrick Brontë’s appointment as curate brought him to a place with an estimated 1,200 working handlooms, 13 small textile mills, and public health conditions that would horrify anyone reading about them now. An 1850 report found that more than two in five children died before their sixth birthday. Average life expectancy sat under 26 years. Haworth was not a destination. It was a place people tried to survive.The Brontës didn’t transform it while they were alive – they mostly just lived there, often miserably. The transformation came after their deaths, when their novels became canonical, their short lives became the subject of biography and mythology, and the physical place they had occupied became somewhere people felt compelled to see for themselves. That process took decades. It never really stopped.What the economy of Haworth actually looks like nowToday, with a population of around 6,000, Haworth functions almost entirely as a tourism economy. The 2019 Retail and Leisure Study for Bradford District found that the village centre exists primarily to serve visitors rather than residents. Of 55 retail units on the main street, 28 cater almost exclusively to the tourist market – gifts, craft shops, art galleries, second-hand books. The convenience retail that a normal village needs is thin.The Brontë Parsonage Museum draws between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors annually in ordinary years. The Bradford district as a whole attracts 12 million visitors per year, generating an economic contribution of £696 million and sustaining 14,000 jobs. Haworth accounts for a meaningful slice of that cultural draw, alongside Saltaire and the city’s other heritage sites. [...]The parts of Haworth that have nothing to do with the BrontësHere is where the story gets more interesting. Haworth has always had a second tourism strand running alongside the literary one, and it doesn’t involve parsonages or moors at all.The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway opened in 1867 – six years after Charlotte’s father died in the parsonage, ending the family’s direct connection to the place. The five-mile heritage line has since appeared in The Railway Children, Yanks, Alan Parker’s The Wall, and numerous other productions. It runs its own visitor events throughout the year and draws an audience that has no particular interest in Victorian literature. It attracts railway enthusiasts, film location tourists, families on school holidays.The annual 1940s Weekend, which fills Haworth’s cobbled street with people in wartime dress, draws coachloads from across Yorkshire. The Christmas Market does something similar in December. Neither of these events connects to the Brontës in any direct sense – they function on the village’s physical character: the stone buildings, the narrow streets, the preserved appearance of a mid-19th century settlement. The Brontës didn’t create that character. The village’s industrial past and the absence of postwar redevelopment did. The Brontës just made people look.What happened in early 2026The release of a major Wuthering Heights film adaptation in February 2026 produced the most immediate and measurable spike in Brontë tourism in recent memory. Staff at the Parsonage described visitor interest as unlike anything seen outside peak summer months. People arrived from North America and continental Europe specifically because of the film. The museum ran an exhibition – Haunt Me Then… and Now: Wuthering Heights on the Big Screen – to meet that interest directly.This is not the first time a film or television adaptation has done this. Every major screen version of the novels produces some version of the same effect. The 2011 Jane Eyre adaptation added a visible peak to parsonage visitor numbers that year. The pattern is consistent: adaptation releases, visitors arrive within weeks, numbers return to baseline after several months. The spike is real. Its duration is finite.Whether the original proposition still holdsThe honest answer is yes, but with caveats. Three things keep Haworth’s Brontë tourism working across 130 years where other literary destinations have faded:The novels are still read and still taught – they are not obscure or dated in the way that drives other literary sites toward decline; Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights remain on school syllabuses internationally.The parsonage is physically intact and genuinely interesting as a place – the rooms are small, the moorland setting is immediate, the family history is extraordinary enough to hold attention without being dressed up.Screen adaptations keep arriving every decade or so, each one resetting the cultural clock and sending a new generation to Haworth who might not have gone otherwise.The village’s second tourism strand – heritage railway, events calendar, moorland walking – absorbs visitors who arrive for the Brontës and then find other reasons to stay.What does not hold is the idea that literary tourism is self-sustaining or risk-free. The Brontë Parsonage is a charity-run operation that depends on ticket sales, memberships, and event income. When visitor numbers drop – as they did during the pandemic and in poor weather years – the financial pressure is real and the consequences fall directly on the building and its collections.Haworth as a place is also not without tension. The village centre reads, by Bradford’s own planning documents, as a tourist economy that serves visitors rather than residents. That works when visitors are arriving. It creates a fragile local retail structure when they are not. The butcher and the pharmacy are not the main businesses on Main Street. The souvenir shops are.What the Brontës did to Haworth was remarkable, durable, and, on the evidence of early 2026, still capable of producing something close to frenzy when the right film lands. Whether that constitutes a solid foundation depends on what you think a foundation needs to do. It has lasted 130 years. It also needs a new film every decade to keep the numbers moving.
Every few years, Heathcliff trends again. A new adaptation is announced, a new actor is cast, and suddenly we are filled with declarations that this is the ultimate love story. Once more, Heathcliff is portrayed as intense, irresistible. Once more, we are invited to fall for him. And I find myself asking the question: did we read the same book?Heathcliff is framed less as Brontë’s embodiment of obsession and cruelty, and more as a misunderstood romantic hero whose violence is merely the byproduct of heartbreak. The cultural script is familiar: he is damaged, intense, difficult. But he’s redeemable. The question worth asking is not whether the latest adaptation succeeds or fails. It is why we are so determined to rescue Heathcliff from the novel. Because the Heathcliff on the page is not merely brooding, he is methodical in his revenge. He marries Isabella Linton not out of passion, but to punish her brother; he abuses her and hangs her dog before the marriage even begins. He brutalises his own sickly son. He manipulates the young Cathy Linton to extend his resentment to the next generation. This is not moral ambiguity. It is sustained, deliberate harm.What is often lost in adaptation, and in popular memory, is the second half of the novel. Many versions prefer to linger in the feverish intimacy of Catherine’s death, freezing Heathcliff in a posture of eternal grief. But Brontë does not grant him that romantic stasis. He lives on, not chastened but hardened. He does not simply suffer; he cultivates suffering. Even her death, so often aestheticised as tragic romance, is somewhat darker in the text. Heathcliff begs her ghost to haunt him, he asks not for peace, but for perpetual disturbance. This is not a love that seeks healing. It is not a romantic attachment but a consummating obsession. Modern adaptations keep the windswept declarations and lose the cruelty. “I am Heathcliff” survives, the bruises and manipulation don’t. The result is a softer Heathcliff, wounded rather than monstrous. In a culture obsessed with the “morally grey” man, intensity is mistaken for intimacy. Heathcliff begins to look less like a warning and more like a prototype.The casting of Jacob Elordi in the latest adaptation makes this shift clear. Elordi arrives already seen as a romantic ideal. He is globally recognisable and algorithmically desirable. But in Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned gypsy,” a stray of obscure origin whose presence unsettles the household from the beginning. His otherness is racialised and classed. He is seen as foreign, animalistic. That exclusion is not incidental; it shapes both his humiliation and his rage. When Heathcliff is re-imagined as a conventionally beautiful, culturally adored leading man, the dynamic changes. The unsettling outsider becomes an object of aspiration. His persona is aestheticised. We are no longer confronted with a figure whose difference destabilises the social order; we are invited to desire him. And here the algorithm quietly hovers in the background. Contemporary culture is structured around repetition and desirability. Certain faces circulate. Certain archetypes trend. We consume variations of the same romantic template. When an idealised heartthrob plays Heathcliff, we do not meet the character neutrally. We import desire into him. The cultural machinery has already decided he is someone to want.What cannot be so easily re-framed, however, is the extremity of Brontë’s original vision; a man who hangs dogs, terrorises children, and clings to his own resentment as a form of identity. That version resists romantic branding. It is too abrasive, too uncompromising, too uninterested in redemption. So, we adjust him. We explain his violence as trauma. We disguise his obsession as devotion. But Wuthering Heights offers no redemption arc. Heathcliff does not apologise, evolve, or transcend his bitterness. He persists in it until it consumes him. The novel’s bleakness is structural, not decorative. Love here is not glorified. The moors are not a backdrop for swooning romance but a symbol of emotional extremity.So why do we keep re-writing him?Perhaps because the idea of an unredeemable man is intolerable. It is easier to imagine that cruelty hides vulnerability than to confront the possibility that some forms of love are simply destructive. We want the aesthetic of darkness without its implications. Maybe the real discomfort of Wuthering Heights is that it refuses to reassure us. Heathcliff does not become better, love does not fix him, time does not soften him. The novel leaves us with a man who chooses bitterness again and again, and calls it devotion. Each generation produces its own Heathcliff. In doing so, we reveal less about what Brontë intended and more about what we desire.The question is no longer whether Heathcliff is redeemable.It is why we need him to be. (Lola Mandalaoui)
What makes this film so great, in my opinion, is that it refuses to be orderly. For every declaration of love, there is pitiless cruelty. For every moment of sheer tenderness, there is a wound that is reopened and left to bleed. Fennell allows room for seamless contradictions, and she does not at any point attempt to soften edges or make it more palatable. It remains erratic, selfish, obsessive, and utterly human. I will not go as far as to suggest that it is the most provocative film I’ve seen, but it is making its way up there. There is something romantic and erotic about the griminess and chaos that defines the film and subsequently Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance. It’s not meet-cute, candlelit dinner, standing-outside-your-window-with-a-boombox romantic, but rather something so deeply feral and intimate that it is destructive.I left the movie theater in shambles. The only other movie that makes me cry this much is Titanic (which I was not allowed to watch as a child because I would have a nervous breakdown every. single. time). But this was different. This is the type of movie that shifts something in your soul, leaving you feeling helpless and empty, yet so very full. It’s been about two weeks since I’ve seen it, and it still has me by the throat. I applaud Emerald Fennell for not trying to tame “Wuthering Heights” and letting it exist in all its wildness and glory. She embraced the obsession, brutality, and anguish that can only exist within unrequited love—and had fun doing it. It’s a visual tour de force with a soundtrack that will stop you dead in your tracks every time you hear it.Some films entertain you for however long they are, and some linger in your heart and head, leaving you haunted and wondering how something so fleeting can feel so eternal.I give it a 4.5/5. Some part of me never quite made it back from the moors. (Sama Farrag)
Robbie and Elordi appear to be acting in different movies. Elordi is inert early on, wandering shirtless and brooding without much projection; later, as a sleek avenger, he’s slyly amusing but never convincingly dangerous.Robbie fills the frame with a committed but undisciplined performance. As often happens when she lacks firm directorial guidance, she pours twenty gallons into a ten-gallon bucket.The two leads generate neither chemistry nor heat. Considering their self-immolating bond is the story’s engine, this is disastrous.There is no fire here. “Wuthering Heights” becomes a whirling stylistic dervish with no heart, no soul, no passion. Dirty words and dirty bits are flung at us, but without conviction. The film doesn’t end with Fennell winking into the camera — but it comes close, finishing on a smirk that says more than perhaps it intends. (C.B. Jacobson)
In a 1970 interview with Peter Burton, Jean Rhys, fresh off the success of her 1967 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, was asked about her reasons for making Bertha Mason, or as she’s known in WSS, Antoinette, the central lynchpin of the novel. The consequences of this literary act are not insignificant: in writing what is effectively a prequel to Bronte’s 1847 bestseller Jane Eyre but focussing on the “horrible white indian” woman, Rhys reframes Antoinette and gives her a voice outside of her captivity. She becomes a complex, lonely woman rather than the mad villain. Rhys replied with almost comical honesty: “I had always wanted to write about her […] she’s not a true character at all, unlike Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, so I wrote her life”. (Lottie Roddis)
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