Naomi Alderman returns with a new series of the programme that examines the minds of great thinkers and discovers where their creativity came from and how they applied it to work that influences us today. She begins with Emily Brontë, whose Wuthering Heights has spawned many remakes, and asks if her reclusive nature contributed to the intensity of her writing. The Behind the Glass: A Parsonage podcast from the Brontë Museum in Haworth takes an in-depth look at items in its collection, plus social issues that would have affected the family.  (Clair Woodward)

The Brontë Parsonage is a must-visit and will help you learn more about the sisters’ lives through immersive exhibitions.

If you are up for a walk, the Brontë waterfall and bridge that was often visited by the sisters is a 45-minute walk away.

To explore more of the surrounding area, you can get a Day Rover ticket for the heritage steam train that runs along the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

For food, you might want to stop at Cobbles and Clay for either some breakfast or a hearty sandwich for lunch.

The café also serves a range of hot and cold drinks alongside plenty of homemade cakes to choose from.

If you are looking for somewhere to treat yourself, you could try the Hawthorn restaurant that offers seasonal dishes created using local ingredients. (Amy Britton)

Different eras posed different challenges. For instance, trying to represent the whole of 20th-century literature by means of 10 books felt like trying, in Emily Brontë’s words, to plant an oak tree in a flower pot (...) [The quote is from Chapter XIV and goes like this:

He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!] 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The first reviewers were horrified – “How a human being could have attempted such a book… without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,” declared one American critic – and poor Emily Brontë died at 30 within a year of publication, not knowing her only novel would come to be seen as the masterwork of Victorian fiction. 

What raises Wuthering Heights above other love stories, including Emily’s sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, is the way it conveys passion as a physical force, as irresistible as gravity and potentially as dangerous. Adaptations never do the book justice, because capturing the elemental essence of “imp of Satan” Heathcliff and his lover/possible half-sister Cathy is trickier than taming tigers.  (Jake Kerridge)

The play takes a few liberties with the historical Brontë sisters — Emily, Charlotte and Anne — who were never simultaneously at the Roe Head School for Girls. But that matters little for the purposes of the charming ghost story that Zolidis has created. Emily (Taylor Curtis) seeks to understand why her mother died young and spins a series of tales aimed at relieving her sense of loss. (For Brontë enthusiasts, there will be the added poignancy of knowing that Emily herself would live only to age 30.)

At the final dress rehearsal seen by The News-Gazette, director Emily Ritter’s production appeared to need more rehearsal time given the challenges faced in performance. Although the playwright estimates a 90-minute performance, the Twin City production adds 45 minutes to that. In comedy, less can often be more, and the trick is to know when to simplify. (Jeffrey Eric Jenkins) 

BBC Four reairs tonight  (21:40 h GMT) The Brontës Live Here: Writer's Houses with Margaret Drabble visiting the Parsonage in 1973. The influencer and writer Carolina Müller recommends Wuthering Heights in Alternativo (México). The Sunday Guardian (India) lists ficional character with powerful life lessons, including Jane Eyre.

The Creature in the Attic

Jane Eyre Meets Frankenstein

 The Collision Canon - A Literary Mashup Thrillers

"Julian Harborough"

ISBN: 9798182146203

July 2026

Jane Eyre meets Frankenstein.

Jane has never asked Thornfield Hall to make sense. The sounds from the locked floor at night, the housekeeper's careful non-answers, the master's grief that sits behind his charm like a second person in the room. Jane has survived worse than a house with secrets. What she has never faced before is loving a man who has done something she cannot forgive... but cannot stop trying to.

Edward Rochester did not lock a madwoman in his attic. He locked away the thing he built there. A living being, assembled in grief and brilliance, and a desperate refusal to accept his young son's death, four years and one terrible secret ago. It became something he never intended to create: articulate, self-aware, lonelier than anything Jane has ever met, and entirely uncertain what it owes the man who made it, or what he owes it in return.

When Jane finally climbs the stairs she has been told never to climb, she does not find a monster. She finds a question neither Brontë nor Shelley had to answer alone: what does a person made rather than born have the right to demand? And what does loving the man who made him cost the woman who loves him?

The Creature in the Attic keeps Jane's unflinching, self-examining voice exactly as it should be, and asks it to confront what neither novel could explore on its own. This is gothic romance with its conscience fully switched on, where the horror is not a monster in the dark but the weight of what one brilliant, frightened man was willing to do for love.

Book Two of the Collision Canon. A series in which the greatest novels ever written begin, one book at a time, to bleed into each other.

But these are not isolated cases: recently, the same technique has been used in other movies with historical backdrops such as Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015), Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2016), The King (David Michôd, 2019), The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio, 2022), The Northman (Robert Eggers, 2022), Firebrand (Karim Aïnouz, 2023) and Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennel, 2026). And last year Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet entered the Oscars race with that same visual register used also in French blockbusters such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan, and Spanish movies from Alatriste to El Cautivo.

In all these cases, the absence of color tells us we are watching an important film, suitable both for an award and box office success, as discussed by the artist and scholar David Batchelor in his book Chromophobia (Ed. Síntesis), originally published in 2000. According to Batchelor, this expulsion of color usually takes place in one of two ways. In the first, the color is attributed to some “foreign” body: the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological — or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. In the first case, the color is considered something strange and, therefore, dangerous; in the second, it is perceived simply as a secondary quality of experience and, therefore, unworthy of serious consideration. (Ianko López)

Entertainment can often be a way for us to switch off. This year what’s on our screens has frequently been aimed at turning us on. From the sensual pleasures of “Wuthering Heights” to the steamy shower scenes in “Heated Rivalry”, sex has been front and center in a slew of recent hits in ways that might previously have made them ineligible to be mainstream cultural powerhouses. It’s safe to say horniness is having a moment. (David Mack)