Banbury Cross Players presents:

Underdog: The Other Other Brontë

by Sarah Gordon

Thu 18th — Sat 20th June

Main Auditorium, The Mill Arts Centre Spiceball Park Road, Banbury , OX16 5QE

This is not a story about well-behaved women. This is a story about sisterhood, love, jealousy and competition. The gritty and controversial plot lines and characters mirror those in Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and Wuthering Heights.

It is also an irreverent and funny re-telling of the life and legend of the Brontë sisters, and the sibling power dynamics that shaped their uneven rise to fame.

It is a familiar story told with a modern voice that brings these three exceptional women to life for an audience of today.

A rare first-edition copy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, complete with its original spelling errors, is poised to go under the hammer for the first time in over a century. The auction comes as the tragic, tempestuous romance continues to captivate new audiences, fueled by a recent big-screen adaptation.

Christie’s auction house announced Monday that this particular volume is the first copy of the novel in its publisher’s original cloth binding to be offered at auction since 1908.

Only about 250 first editions were initially printed, and this specific book has remained in a private library since shortly after its publication in 1847.

Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, underscored the extreme rarity of such an item. "The vast majority of surviving copies were rebound for collectors or libraries, meaning original cloth examples are now extremely scarce," he stated.

Being sold along with a copy of sister Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, it’s expected to sell for between 400,000 pounds and 600,000 pounds ($540,000 and $800,000) at a June 30 auction in London. Both books carry the male pen names the sisters adopted to get published: Ellis Bell for Emily and Acton Bell for Anne.

Wuthering Heights was rushed to publication after the success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the first edition is notorious for its typographical errors including, Wiltshire noted, the occasional misspelling of the word “heights.”

Emerald Fennell ’s recent movie with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as mismatched pair Cathy and Heathcliff is the latest work to be inspired by — and take liberties with — Brontë’s brooding, Gothic tale.

The novel shocked some critics when it was published, with one in 1848 decrying its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

Since then, Wiltshire said, it has “moved beyond literature to become a cultural touchstone,” inspiring art, music — notably Kate Bush’s pop-operatic 1978 song — and multiple film adaptations.

“It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere, and its psychological intensity, ensuring its place not only in literary history but in wider cultural imagination,” Wiltshire said. (Jill Lawless)

The enduring fascination of ‘Wuthering Heights’

Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 7:00 pm

WBUR CitySpace, 890 Commonwealth Avenue. Boston, MA 02215

The gothic romance “Wuthering Heights,” Emily Brontë's only novel published in 1847, is having a renaissance due to Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. Book sales have skyrocketed and the themes of class, racism and sexuality are being dissected across book clubs and group chats. Here & Now associate producer Kalyani Saxena moderates a conversation with Brontë biographer Deborah Lutz and WBUR film critic Sean Burns exploring the many interpretations the novel has inspired over the century. We’ll show photos and film clips to trace its evolution on screen.

Copies of Lutz’s biography, “This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life” will be available to purchase from our bookstore partner Lovestruck Books & Cafe and Lutz will sign following the conversation.

UWA Publishing (UWAP) has acquired world rights to Insolence, the fourth poetry collection by Melbourne-based poet, critic and arts journalist Thuy On.

According to the publisher, Insolence “reinvents, reimagines and rearranges iconic figures in our literature, visual art, history, books, and screens”, bringing a contemporary feminist perspective to both real and fictional characters.

In the collection, Eve explains why she ate the forbidden fruit, Medusa recounts her own origin story, and Jane Eyre, Emma Bovary and Ophelia update their Tinder profiles. From Ada Lovelace to the Mona Lisa and Hello Kitty, the poems offer “a witty and perceptive celebration of women’s voices across time and space”.

On said, “Insolence offers poems from the point of view of female characters both real and fictional who have been historically sidelined or silenced and grants them centre stage.”