“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)

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)

RECORRIDOS LITERARIOS

Hasta el 12 de julio puedes recorrer las muestras “Literatura gótica” y “El mágico mundo de los libros de Harry Potter” en nuestra Fundación Cultural. 

El primer recorrido rinde tributo a la literatura gótica y a su extensa tradición a través de los siglos, desde grandes clásicos como Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein y Drácula, hasta su influencia contemporánea en la obra de autoras como Samanta Schweblin, Anne Rice o Agustina Bazterrica. Un viaje a través de conceptos claves de este género narrativo como el amor, el monstruo y la muerte.

Para todos los fanáticos de Harry Potter tienen la oportunidad de disfrutar del mágico mundo de sus libros, rememorando pasajes icónicos del universo literario que partió con la publicación de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal en 1997.

Further information, here. 

Brontë Country

It is difficult to imagine a fictional tale more gothic, inspirational and remarkable than that of three brilliant sisters who lived in relative isolation on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, secretly battling their socially conscripted futures by writing poems and novels that they dared not publish under their own names.

Two of those novels — ”Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë and “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, are still considered masterworks, influencing subsequent generations and endlessly adapted for film and television. (In the ultimate Yorkshire crossover, Wainwright wrote the breathtaking two-part Brontë biopic “To Walk Invisible,” which everyone should see.)

The Brontë Parsonage Museum, and the town of Haworth which it overlooks, is very much a tourist attraction. An information annex, gift shop and public restroom have been added behind it, but once you enter the small garden that stands between the parsonage’s front door and St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, you are in another world.

In 1820, Patrick Brontë, recently appointed incumbent of St. Michael, moved his wife, Maria, and their six children into the parsonage where they all lived for the rest of their natural (albeit in most cases, short) lives. Maria died in 1821; the two older children, Maria and Elizabeth, died four years later after being sent to a typhoid-plagued school Charlotte would pillory as Lowood in “Jane Eyre.”

The museum is meticulously restored to reflect the years that the surviving children — Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, the only son — were young adults. The dining room table, where the sisters wrote, is strewn with manuscripts, quill pens and tea cups; a bonnet and shawl bedeck a chair in the small kitchen. Patrick had his own study but it is difficult to imagine three women being able to write separate works, never mind classics, in such close quarters. Ironically, only Branwell’s room, papered with sketches and poems, looks like an artist’s refuge.

Unlike his three sisters, Branwell, his artistic career stunted by alcoholism and an opium addiction, never published. He died of tuberculosis in 1848 at 31.

If any place should be haunted, it is the Brontë parsonage. Shortly after Branwell’s funeral (and just a year after “Wuthering Heights” was published), 30-year-old Emily also died of tuberculosis, expiring on the sofa that stands beside the dining room table. A few months later, after the publication of her second novel, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Anne, 29, succumbed to the disease in nearby Scarborough, just south of Whitby.

Charlotte, who wrote two more novels after “Jane Eyre,” was the only sister to be celebrated during her lifetime. She married and then died at the parsonage in 1855 at 38 of complications from her first pregnancy. Only Patrick lived to old age — 84 — dying in 1861 in the home where he had served for 41 years.

But it is not a sad house; instead visitors are left to wonder at the genius, resolution and audacity that roiled the quiet rooms and halls where the sisters secretly wrote and sent out their manuscripts, all initially under the the names of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell.

The steeply descending main street of Haworth is filled with tea shops, pubs and stores clearly dedicated to pleasing Brontë pilgrims, but its basic form, including the original stationery store where the sisters once bought their paper, remains the same.

As do the moors that stretch behind the parsonage. On a walk to the Brontë Waterfall (more like a small but still lovely rill) and Top Withens, the ruin of a 16th century farmhouse believed to have inspired “Wuthering Heights,” the wild silence and sweeping vistas are even more transporting than the parsonage. One imagines not the ghost of Cathy or Heathcliff, but a trio of women, very much alive and striding through the heather, their minds alight with the stories they would tell, set among similar terrain. (Mary McNamara)

Emerald Fennel's [sic] Wuthering Heights is divisive at best, with its radical reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's classic, but no one can deny the sizzling chemistry between its two leads. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the ill-fated Catherine and Heathcliff raised eyebrows, as the romance between the two took a steamy, intimate turn, ultimately ending in tragedy for everyone around them.

Wuthering Heights got backlash for turning Cathy and Heathcliff's destructive dynamic into something romantic, and there were concerns about casting all-white characters, particularly Heathcliff, who had been described as a dark-skinned man. Even so, Wuthering Heights had hearts racing, and thankfully, there are several more great steamy romantic titles to choose from to recreate that feeling. (Fawzia Khan)