As a filmmaker and historian, I’m fascinated by the ways in which cinema has been used as a propaganda tool. I thought about this when Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights came out, and even before I had seen it I sensed there was something else happening, from the clips shared on social media to the promotional images of pale-skinned Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi striking a pose reminiscent of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. I kept thinking about what the appeal of that cinematic past was, and how it found an audience in contemporary culture. Surely there’d been enough adaptations of this book to last us an eternity.

I’m familiar with Fennell’s work and her background as a former actor from an upper-middle-class family (her family used to holiday with Andrew Lloyd Webber), who has successfully moved into filmmaking. I took this context into account when watching her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Despite its box office success on release earlier this year, it has been widely panned by critics for various reasons, including the apparent whitewashing of Heathcliff, which distorts a core tension of what has made the book endure for so long. One Letterboxd reviewer put it bluntly: “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” This film is simply erotica dressed up as a love story.

In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote “Fascinating Fascism”, an essay in which she took aim at silent-film-actor-turned-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, arguing that, in the making of Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, she exploited the tools of cinema to seduce the viewer. “Fascinating Fascism” covers other Riefenstahl works, including the photography book The Last of the Nuba, which clearly wasn’t state-sponsored propaganda, but was, Sontag argued, “continuous with her Nazi work”. What I’m drawn to is the argument about fascist aesthetics that Sontag made in relation to Riefenstahl’s films, which she describes as “epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission”.

I kept thinking about ecstasy and submission after watching Wuthering Heights, and how captivating it is to the viewer. Sontag wrote that fascist iconography carries a seductive visual power that operates independently of ideology:

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.

The aesthetics of power, hierarchy and the erasure of the individual, Sontag argued, can produce erotic as well as political responses, and those two responses share a common structure: beauty and domination are entangled in fascist art.

Fascist aesthetics are also obsessed with race. As Sontag wrote, Riefenstahl’s Nuba portraits evoke “some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and mental, the joyful and the critical”.

In Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this choice is illustrated by the decision to change the brown ringlets of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw to Robbie’s very blonde version on screen. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued that “blonde” has come to signify whiteness without being explicit: “We use ‘blonde’ (and if to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white’. It may also be more: a signifier of a type of white person.” [...]

Nostalgia is another signifier of these politics. The choice to yet again adapt a 19th century novel that has had at least eight adaptations is a curious one. Brontë wrote the book at the end of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social and economic transformation. That context sits at the heart of the novel, and defanging it is telling. In 2011, another Englishwoman remade Wuthering Heights, in a film that captures the brutality of that period and the tension at the heart of the novel. In Andrea Arnold’s rendering, Catherine is a brunette, Heathcliff is Black and the Yorkshire moors are anything but sentimental.

Robbie, who is also a producer on the latest incarnation, dismissed the criticism the film received, arguing at a panel event at the Sydney Opera House: “I consider audience always. I’ve never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this? I’m like, what’s an audience going to feel right now? What’s their emotional response going to be? I just believe you should make movies for the people who are buying the tickets to see the movies.”

While I respect her honesty, I do wonder if seduction is what audiences need at this moment in history. Because what the audience is asking for, and what Fennell’s Wuthering Heights delivers with incredible visual precision, is exactly what Sontag identified half a century ago: the eroticisation of domination. The pleasure of surrender to a force larger and more overwhelming than oneself. The landscapes are cinematically breathtaking, Elordi is shirtless, Robbie gorgeous in the costumes. This is a film that is concerned with vibes and wants to seduce its audience with this imagery.

Again, Sontag wrote that fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude … Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”

While people watching films and clips on social media may not be thinking about these things, those creating them understand the power that images have in myth-making, and that they are not neutral. [...]

In Fennell’s adaptation, audiences are given a visually stunning film layered with nostalgia and a sense of collective identity, all centred on a work of major cultural significance. Rather than encourage people to question the very structures Brontë was seeking to analyse in her novel, the movie brings people together to engage in the spectacle of a romance stripped of its politics. Love is an enduring narrative that many can relate to. For the film’s duration, moviegoers are seduced and don’t feel powerless at a time when the world outside is so overwhelming.

Those who enjoy films such as Fennell’s (much like those readers who have made the “romantasy” genre a billion-dollar publishing industry) are not fascists, nor are they passive or unsophisticated. They are largely online, politically aware and living through a moment of profound institutional decline. The old structures of economic security, political legitimacy and faith in the future have all but failed. What capitalism is offering them is what Benjamin diagnosed: aesthetic expression in place of structural change and maintaining the status quo.

Neither Fennell’s Wuthering Heights nor romantasy novels will dismantle racism or classism, or lower the price of petrol. If anything, they reinforce heteronormative gender roles and hierarchies. But they do offer audiences something politicians are incapable of: a temporary reprieve from the madness of the world for two hours or so.

The fantasy of submission, whether to a lover, a racial identity, a landscape, the algorithm or even a political force, is essentially the fantasy of being relieved of one’s responsibility to the world. The audience does not want to be in control; it wants to surrender it completely. And exponents of fascist aesthetics, as Sontag argued, have always understood this with uncomfortable precision.

Viewers whose algorithms are tuned to “tradwife content”, “glow up” trends and “soft life” escapism, or reading romantasy books and watching Wuthering Heights, aren’t being recruited or radicalised. They are being distracted and comforted as they live through these tumultuous times.

This is what art can tell us about something it pretends to be unaware of. It is for future historians to give language to the aesthetics that will come to define the art that speaks to the politics and ideology of these times. But right now, it is worth remembering that good art reflects back our humanity, and shows us the world in its truth. (Santilla Chingaipe)

On the Death of Anne Brontë

By Charlotte Brontë

There's little joy in life for me,

      And little terror in the grave;

I 've lived the parting hour to see

      Of one I would have died to save.

Calmly to watch the failing breath,

      Wishing each sigh might be the last;

Longing to see the shade of death

      O'er those belovèd features cast.

The cloud, the stillness that must part

      The darling of my life from me;

And then to thank God from my heart,

      To thank Him well and fervently;

Although I knew that we had lost

      The hope and glory of our life;

And now, benighted, tempest-tossed,

      Must bear alone the weary strife.

A Charlotte Brontë biography is tipped for a prestigious international book award.

The debut book by Graham Watson, titled The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, was shortlisted from more than 200 international titles.

It is among only two UK nominees for the Plutarch Award, which recognises the best English-language biography of the past year.

The award is judged by a panel of historians and biographers in the Biographers International Organisation.

The book, which focuses on the last five years of Charlotte Brontë's life and the first Brontë biography, Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, has also been named a Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The biography has received high praise from reviews across the USA and was awarded the coveted Kirkus Reviews star for excellence. The New York Review of Books described the biography as "immersive", whilst the Wall Street Journal called it "a gripping testimony into the twists and turns, revelations and silences, and endless revisions by which literary legends endure".

The Plutarch Award winner will be announced at the Biographers International Conference in New York City on May 29.

Graham Watson said: "My book is the result of a life-long passion I’ve had for the Brontës and Yorkshire.

"Being nominated for such a prestigious award is an incredible honour." (Harry Williams)

Classic literary heroines are having a moment. With Margot Robbie starring as Cathy in February’s much-talked-about Wuthering Heights adaptation, Emma Corrin taking on the role of Lizzie Bennett in Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice series, Daisy Edgar-Jones headlining a new Sense and Sensibility flick out this fall, and Aimee Lou Wood starring as Jane Eyre in a television adaptation of the novel, the classics — particularly those written by women — are no longer solely the domain of high school English syllabuses and libraries. Even the hosts of the New York Times podcast The Book Review declared their resolution to read more classics this year, rather than dedicating their reading time to new releases. [...]

Hot take? The popularity of romantasy books — set in a fantastical world, where a love story is central to the plot — including such blockbusters as Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, has something to do with it. It might seem like the two genres couldn’t be more different, but romantasy has trained us, for one, to root for the morally gray hero. In the classics, that might look like Heathcliff imprisoning a young woman in his home in a fit of selfish passion. What’s more, Wuthering Heights is the epitome of a story centered around the fated mates trope, where two people are destined to be together because of a bond that defies even the finality of death, a trope revitalized by the romantasy genre. [...]

In The Chateau on Sunset, readers can live vicariously through Aria, the Jane Eyre character, who sets fire to the Hollywood casting couch, igniting an inferno that burns down all Weinstein-like men in its path. If only!

Romantasy novels have reminded us how much we love fierce heroines. Yes, there are strong women to be found in other genres, but fierceness is different — fierceness is strength buttressed by wild fury, and it’s almost compulsory in the romantic-fantasy mash-ups crafted by the likes of Maas and Yarros. The women in both Austen’s and the Brontë sisters’ classic novels don’t swoop into battle on the back of a dragon with a knife in hand as they do in Yarros’s stories; instead, they use their ferocious voices when it matters most. Who can forget Lizzie Bennett telling Darcy that he’s the “last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry”? Who didn’t cheer aloud at the bravery it took for her to do that at a time when women were supposed to just nod and say yes?

And what about poor, penniless Jane Eyre, in an era when feminism was at least a century away from gaining any traction, declaring to Rochester that she was his equal, that “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me”? Who didn’t love the unapologetic, almost relentless, ambition of Kat Shaw in Fargo’s novel The Favorites? Haven’t we all wanted to declare our independence or our dislike of a man in our past, or to chase after what we desire without being made to feel unwomanly? 

All these books could only have been written by women because only a woman can understand the fierce desire in our hearts to speak up, to take action, to stop apologizing. The power in these novels and screen adaptations is all woman, and we’re here for it.

So, for those who think the resurgence in interest in the classics is simply because, in their known plotlines and characters, we find comfort and familiarity, I say: that’s not the whole story. These new adaptations offer us access to fantasy, and who doesn’t want to escape from this world and into another realm from time to time? They remind us to speak out. And they also show us that we can dream and we can hope — and, more importantly, if we use our own ferocious voices, we have the power to make our dreams and our hopes come true.

Kinship is likewise revealed in other documents on view: A letter from Charlotte Brontë to her most frequent correspondent, Ellen Nussey, demonstrates their bond. . . (Hannah Benson)

One of my favorite episodes is The Other Brontë Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall from February 24, 2025. The hosts tell us: "With all the fuss and fanfare around Wuthering Heights, we’re worried Emily Bronte is getting more than her fair share of attention. So today we shift the SLOB-light to her younger sister Anne, author of the remarkable The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848. Anne wrote it in a whirlwind after the successes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, determined to prove herself a Bronte in talent and spirit.

The hosts continue: "And though Anne is now the least celebrated of the Brontë trio, Tenant at the time of its publication, it was considered the most shocking in the Brontë collective oeuvre. Anne had fearlessly pulled back the veil on marital infidelity, domestic violence, alcoholism, and the systemic torments of Victorian masculinity and marriage laws." (Frank Racioppi)

In the latest Hollywood adaptation of “‘Wuthering Heights,’” Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are tortured soulmates, the moors are wide and barren, everyone is brooding, and the story is reduced to sex, violence, and revenge. The critical points about class, racial otherness, inheritance, and generational destruction Emily Brontë made in her 1847 novel are pushed aside to create a gothic romance film for a date night. 

Lately, Hollywood’s approach to classic literature feels less like reinterpretation and more like reduction. From “‘Wuthering Heights’” to “Frankenstein” to “Animal Farm,” film studios keep coming back to classic literature, and in theory, this should be a good thing. Adaptations can reintroduce older pieces of literature to new audiences and expand on the themes that remain prevalent in society today. 

But this doesn’t always seem to work in practice. Hollywood’s problem is using the ethos of classic literature without doing the work of actually engaging with its content. Adaptations don’t need to transcribe the original text, but they do need to understand what the original source material is actually doing to faithfully interpret it. [...]

In recent adaptations, studios rely too much on the marketability of recognizable names, characters, and titles. Instead of considering why the book is important, producers often focus on the parts of the book that can sell the fastest, which is how a complicated, nuanced novel is reduced to a gothic romance with elaborate costumes. 

Emerald Fennell’s “‘Wuthering Heights’” demonstrates how easily this flattening can happen. Fennell described how the novel captivated her when she was 14 years old and how she wanted her adaptation to capture the “primal and sexual” feelings she had when she first read it. But when an adaptation is based on a first impression instead of a deeper reading, it runs the risk of presenting an inaccurate version of the original text. 

Devin Garofalo, a professor in UCSD’s literature department, explained in an interview with The Guardian that Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is not just a romance; it is about “the horror of romance.” Treating violence as passion due to a teenager’s misreading of a novel is what Brontë was critiquing in the first place. [...]

In other words, bad adaptations don’t just make audiences misunderstand a book — they can make audiences misunderstand history as a whole. They offer what Garofalo called an “amnesic account of the past”: one that airbrushes historical violence from a present-day vantage point and makes the past seem distant and decorative. Classic literature matters because, as Lu explained, the past is always “infiltrating the present.” These texts help readers understand the current world by showing how language can be manipulated, how class and race shape relationships, how violence gets justified, and how these old systems of power still shape the present. When Hollywood trims these texts down to their most marketable hook, it undermines the reason why these stories mattered in the first place. 

Hollywood does this because these hooks are easier to sell and produce than a complicated, uncomfortable argument. Sex sells. Jacob Elordi sells. Topical references sell. But a serious critique of power, class, race, and gender? Those are often much harder to package and convince viewers to watch.

And that’s where the problem becomes bigger than just the adaptation. Lu described how adaptation debates often focus too much on whether a film is a good or bad rendition of the original source. But the better question, she argues, is: “What does it say about us that this is the adaptation?”

The answer is not flattering. These recent adaptations suggest that Hollywood thinks audiences want classics in their easiest, most comfortable versions: recognizable enough to market but not complicated or nuanced enough to encourage thought. They keep the title, the aesthetic, and the basic premise while watering down the harder ideas about power, class, race and violence that made these books important in the first place. 

When Hollywood strips that away, it isn’t keeping the classics alive: It’s just turning them into marketable content. Brontë is probably rolling over in her grave — because if this is Hollywood’s idea of preserving literature, the classics were better off on the shelf. (Anu Venkatesh)