Now, this film was never supposed to be a remake or a direct adaptation of the novel, and the film’s director made that clear in interviews while explaining that is why the title remains in quotes. She has stated that it is how she remembers the book from the first time she read it as a teenager. While I can appreciate that this is how her teenage self read the book, even calling this an interpretation is a disservice to the original story. Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave. 

Despite my qualms with the film from a literary standpoint, I actually enjoyed it. Cinematically, it is a beautifully produced film. It is visually pleasing to watch, with intricate set designs such as the walls in Catherine’s room — which were modeled after Margot Robbie’s skin and included moles, veins and even hair. The costumes and hair for this piece, while albeit not the most historically accurate, are stunning and the overall attention to detail is impressive. (Jeni Nance)

 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

A pioneering feminist narrative, Jane Eyre blends romance, mystery, and emotional independence in a deeply character-driven story. (Dikshant Sharma)

 From windswept cheeks to just-bitten lips; the runways are overtaken by yearning. (...)

The inspiration: Wuthering Heights, romance-novel yearning, feral, flushed skin, wind-beaten cheeks

As seen at: Chanel, Chloe, Ann Demeulemeester, Ermanno Scervino, and Simone Rocha

When we first saw butt-grazing princess hair at the 2024 Met Gala, we were inclined to think it was a fleeting phase. But it seems that the sighting was only the beginning of what would be a resurgence of all things romantic. In 2026, romance makes a triumphant return to the runways, red carpets, TV and film, with this year’s most heart-racing film, Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s tragic romance novel, sweeping the world up in a surge of skin-flushing romance. Dubbed the ‘year of yearning’, it seems that the runways’ response to the world’s current state of conflict and war is one of unadulterated displays of love and feral human emotion, sparking a romance resurgence that can only be described as utterly joyful. (Nokubonga Thusi)

The Coniston Hotel & Spa has a touch of Wuthering Heights magic from the scenic hills and offers some extra thrills onsite as well...

After watching Wuthering Heights and dreaming about being swept into the Dales in Jacob Elordi's arms, a staycation to the Yorkshire Dales suddenly seemed very appealing.  Except, of course, there was no Jacob Elordi (no shade to my boyfriend), and my stay was perhaps a little more "indoorsy" than running around the hills like Cathy. However, the Coniston Hotel & Spa did offer a sprinkle of Wuthering Heights magic with its hilly backdrop and moody, Gothic charm... (Iona MacRobert)

Sprinkles of Wuthering Heights magic... ok. Whatever.

A video of The Huffington Post, with some AI-generated deep dives explores the Charlotte Brontë "dislike" of Jane Austen's prose. The House of Brontë publishes a video on Heathcliff, man or monster? The Brontë Sisters UK makes a graveyard exploration in Haworth that reads the stones of ordinary villagers who shared their world with the Brontës — tracing stories of loss, scandal, and survival in nineteenth-century Yorkshire.

Study for Jane Eyre, 2002. Pencil on paper 42 x 29.7 cm 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in 

Jane Eyre, 2002 Pastel on paper 80 x 57 cm 31 1/2 x 22 1/2 in (in the picture)

Young Mr Rochester, 2000 Pastel on paper mounted on  aluminium 69 x 49.5 cm 27 1/8 x 19 1/2 in 

Study for Wide Sargasso Sea, 1991 Graphite on paper 42 x 29.7 cm 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in 

One morning in early June, 1850, Charlotte Brontë finally met her literary hero, William Makepeace Thackeray. To do so, the 4ft 8in writer - recently unmasked as Currer Bell, the author of Jane Eyre, published in 1847 - chose to wear her “power gown”, a vibrant blue-and-white floral print dress made in a fine alpaca fabric woven in her native Yorkshire.

The meeting took place in the drawing room of her publisher George Smith. Thackeray was impressed, later recalling: “New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own.”

From experience, Charlotte knew that appearance and favourable first impressions mattered. She had been stung by criticism when she joined the stylish young ladies of Roe Head School in Mirfield in 1931, told that she was “very ugly” by one pupil, Mary Taylor, who later described her as wearing “very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable”.

A surviving drawing by Charlotte, of a young woman wearing a highly fashionable, early 1930s-style puff-sleeved gown, shows how much she had noticed and been influenced by the Roe Head girls.

This is highlighted by historian and costume consultant Eleanor Houghton, whose new book, Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes, examines how surviving pieces from the author’s wardrobe give remarkable insight into her experience, her feelings and her work.

The book is illustrated by Eleanor’s own beautiful drawings which capture the detail of the dresses, shawls, bonnets, boots, combs, corsets and more.

Charlotte made her own clothes, with housekeeper Martha Brown, using fabrics from Yorkshire mills. The gown that later became known as the “Thackeray Dress” was made in a cloth called Alpaca Orleans, a blend of alpaca and cotton, woven by Sir Titus Salt who had mills in Bradford just nine miles from Haworth (Salts Mill in Saltaire opened later in 1953).

ir Titus was a fabric pioneer, and managed to transform fine alpaca fleece into a lustrous but hardwearing fabric that quickly became a rival to silk. Printed (probably in Accrington) in a vibrant blue and white pattern of leaves and flowers, Charlotte bought the fabric around 1848 - and the blues retain their bright quality to this day.

Charlotte left most of her wardrobe to her husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, and some also to Martha. Pieces were acquired by fans down the years, but many found their way home to the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, which now looks after around 150 items.

The Thackeray dress was given to Martha’s niece, who made significant alterations, adding a brown collar and removing fabric from its full skirt.

Charlotte’s clothing reveals a woman more body and fashion-conscious than suspected. In Brussels, she bought a corset measuring just 18.5 inches around the waist. It became a staple, and later caused concern to her publisher George Smith. Eleanor Houghton writes: “Nearly forty years after her death, still impacted by what he had seen, Smith told his friend, the novelist George Gissing, that Charlotte was ‘very vain of her narrow waist … and laced herself so tight as to injure herself’.”

Pointing out that tight lacing at the time was the practice of a minority of women, Eleanor suggests that Charlotte, always conscious of her perceived lack of beauty, was “deliberately and blatantly exhibiting her femininity”. The corset might also have served as an armour as she sought strength and protection while nursing a heart broken by her unrequited love for M Heger in Brussels.

On display now at the Brontë Parsonage is a paisley print dress Charlotte wore in the 1840s, exotic and vibrant in shades of duck egg blue, mint, red and black. One Haworth resident, who recalled seeing them many times in the village, said: “I don’t know that I ever saw them in owt but print - I’ve heard it said they were pinched - but it was a nice print … They looked grand.”

Born on April 21, 1816, this Tuesday marks the 210th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë birth. The Brontë Parsonage Museum and the nearby Brontë Birthplace in Thornton are hosting special events, including performances and talks.

Eleanor has been a consultant for many TV and film historical dramas including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible, written and directed by Sally Wainwright, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.

In 2022, in collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she curated a large exhibition of Charlotte’s surviving wardrobe. “The museum has become a second home. The staff have been endlessly patient and helpful and always willing to clamber to the back of the Bonnell Store or to upend the library in search of a particular garment or record,” she says.

“I considered why Charlotte had chosen each piece, what it revealed of her taste, the challenges she faced, and the sartorial conventions and codes of 19th‑century society.”

She traced how and where the clothes were worn, how they were changed, and how they shaped Charlotte’s daily experience, studying them alongside letters and diaries, to uncover a rich, complex picture of Charlotte and her ever-changing world.

“The village’s surviving mills and weavers’ cottages are reminders, too, that Charlotte lived in a landscape shaped by the Industrial Revolution and by the textile economy that produced so many of the fabrics in her wardrobe.

“These gowns, bonnets, bags, and boots have presented to us a very different Charlotte Brontë,” she says. “She is a woman who is more rounded, more three-dimensional and braver, bolder, and yet somehow more vulnerable. She is less isolated and more globalised. She is more fashion-conscious and defies long-held preconceptions.

“She shows herself to be very self-critical, but also provocative and tenacious. By hearing the clothes’ testimonies, we encounter Charlotte not simply as a writer but as a real, thinking, feeling, breathing woman.

“Yet these clothes reveal more than Charlotte alone. They bring the world she inhabited vividly into view — nineteenth-century Yorkshire, with its rugged moors and sprawling villages; the networks of makers, merchants, and markets; the drive and creativity of industrial innovation; and the global routes that brought fabrics, fibres and influences from France, Peru, Mexico, Canada, and the United States to a little parsonage in the West Riding.

"They allow us to see how Charlotte navigated her social and material world, balancing expectation, personal comfort, and self-expression — and in doing so, they let us step closer to the woman behind Jane Eyre, behind Lucy Snowe, and to see beyond them to the life she really lived. (Stephanie Smith)

A lost manuscript which had been hidden for more than a century has uncovered a teenage Charlotte Brontë's fascination with "very naughty" Parisian society.

The Journal of a Frenchman was the missing part of a series of The Young Men's Magazine, which Brontë edited and wrote aged 14.

It belongs to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and has been analysed for the first time by the University of Chester's Professor Deborah Wynne, who said she was honoured to be chosen.

On reading the magazine Wynne said she discovered aspects to Charlotte Brontë she "hadn't really encountered before".

"It's written as though Charlotte herself is a French young man who's a dandy. He gets drunk and disorderly.

"So you've got this Yorkshire clergyman's daughter, who seems so respectable, but she seems to know all about being drunk and disorderly in Paris in this journal entry.

"And you realise she had this sense of humour, which doesn't always come out in quite the same raucous way in her novels.

"She's more ladylike in the way she writes in her novels, whereas she gave herself this freedom to write as a man and really went to town with that," she said.

In 2019, the magazine was discovered and purchased by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the sisters lived and wrote their novels, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The museum had all other issues of The Young Men's Magazine and bought the September 1830 issue when it appeared in a Parisian auction house.

The museum set up a fundraising campaign, which Wynne donated to, and it returned to Haworth where it has now been examined and preserved.

Six scholars were invited to analyse the work the results of which were published in The Journal of the Brontë Society last year.

Wynne said discovering the manuscript was "fitting together this piece into a jigsaw".

"It was an amazing experience to see that manuscript and know it had been hidden away for over a century," she said.

"To know I was the first person to actually push all of that jigsaw together, as it were, it was really exciting. So it's been one of the best projects I've ever worked on."

She said themes in the manuscript reappear in Brontë's later more well-known works, such as Jane Eyre and Villette.

"She really presents the aristocratic characters in France negatively. And later in her novels, a lot of the aristocratic characters are presented negatively too," she said.

"So you can sort of see how she's already a little bit disapproving of her Frenchman. And in the end, he loses all of his money and he becomes a tavern keeper. And he says he's much happier drawing pints for the people who come into his tavern.

"There is this sense that France is a very naughty sort of place. It's a place where things go on that don't in Yorkshire parsonages."

Measuring just 3cm by 6cm the magazine is part of a series of works the Brontë children wrote on scraps of paper because of the high cost of paper in the Victorian era.

Principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage, Ann Dinsdale, explained the little manuscripts were meant to look like printed books and magazines produced at the time.

"These tiny little books have got title pages, they've got contents pages, they contain all the kinds of stories, reviews, poetry that you'd expect to find in Blackwood's magazine.

"Some of them have even got advertisements in the back. So these were the first publications by the Brontës really."

She said the children would have created them using quill pens.

"It would have taken a fair amount of practise to kind of devise this almost sort of italicised style of writing that they developed for the little books," she said.

"It became like a secret code among the siblings because they must have realised that if their father or their aunt came across any of these tiny manuscripts they wouldn't have been able to read them.

"Which is probably quite a good thing because some of the content is not the kind of thing you would expect from the minister's children." (Grace Wood)

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is weighing in on Jacob Elordi’s rapid rise and questioning whether the actor has yet proven his full range. [...]

Almodóvar acknowledged Elordi’s growing star power, saying he believes the Australian actor is “without doubt” on track to become a major star. Still, he admitted he remains uncertain about how to define him, raising the question of whether Elordi is primarily a sex symbol or a performer with deeper dramatic range.

“I’ve been wondering whether he’s just a sex symbol or a respected actor,” Almodóvar said, adding that he would need to see Elordi in a role that demands more before reaching a clear conclusion.

The director also critiqued some of Elordi’s recent projects, arguing that they do not fully showcase the actor’s abilities. He pointed to “Wuthering Heights” and “Frankenstein,” suggesting the material limits the opportunity for more layered performances. Almodóvar candidly characterized “Wuthering Heights” as “very bad,” while noting that neither Elordi nor his co-star Margot Robbie were to blame. (Kennedy French)

3 Wuthering Heights

Where? Yorkshire Dales

Yorkshire’s raw, wild, moody moors are as much a character in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel as Cathy and Heathcliff. So where else could filming for Emerald Fennell’s movie version take place? The production used spots around rippling Swaledale, one of the loveliest and least-touched valleys in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Scenes were shot amid Low Row’s comely stone cottages and in the untamed moors above, around Old Gang Smelt Mill and Surrender Bridge – which, incidentally, also starred in the opening credits of All Creatures Great and Small. There’s great walking country all around. (Sarah Baxter)