An alert for today, June 16 in Boston, US:
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.
Books and Publishing reports that UWA Publishing has acquired Thuy On’s fourth poetry collection Insolence. 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.”
Toronto Star asks writer Liz Johnston all sorts of bookish questions. Three authors living or dead would you like to have a coffee with? The real answer is that I can be a bit socially awkward, so I’d like to grab a coffee with authors who are already friends, or at least acquaintances. But OK, let me try: Katie Kitamura, Kagiso Lesego Molope (I’m currently enthralled by her new novel, “We Inherit the Fire”), and, just to throw a bit of time travel in the mix, Emily Brontë. (Jean Marc Ah-Sen)
A contributor to Geeks reviews Wuthering Heights 2026. AnneBrontë.org looks into what Elizabeth Gaskell's daughters said about the Brontës. An open-air film projection of Wuthering Heights 2026 in Reggio Emilia, Italy: Cinema in Festa: Arena Stalloni, Via Samarotto, 10 - Reggio Emilia - 42121 15-06-2026, 21.30h
Nei selvaggi párami dello Yorkshire, due anime tormentate vivono un'appassionata storia d'amore. Heathcliff e Catherine Earnshaw si trovano intrappolati in un legame tanto profondo quanto pericoloso. Cime Tempestose, il film diretto da Emerald Fennell, racconta una delle storie d’amore più celebri e tormentate della letteratura. Ambientato tra le fredde, selvagge e malinconiche brughiere dello Yorkshire, segue l’intenso legame tra Heathcliff, orfano dal passato misterioso, e Catherine Earnshaw, ribelle erede del maniero di famiglia. Fin da giovani, i due crescono animati da un sentimento viscerale, magnetico e inarrestabile, che sfida convenzioni sociali, differenze di classe e l’ostilità di chi li circonda. La loro passione, però, non è destinata a trovare pace: ciò che nasce come un amore assoluto si trasforma gradualmente in un’ossessione che divora tutto, generando gelosie, vendette e tradimenti capaci di segnare le loro vite in modo indelebile.
Jo-Blo discusses why literary adaptations divide audiences: In his review of Wuthering Heights, our own Chris Bumbray noted that the film would likely divide critics, and we’re certainly seeing that as other reviews roll in. “One thing is for sure—it’s strikingly different as far as adaptations go, with the classic tale reimagined into a corset-loosening erotic drama that at times feels like it owes more to E.L. James than Brontë,” Bumbray wrote. “It’s a defiantly maximalist take on the costume flick, with director Fennell throwing everything but the kitchen sink into her adaptation, which boldly ditches the entire second half of the novel and takes huge liberties with the rest.“ Before the film’s release, Fennell emphasized she never aimed for a definitive version. Her goal was to capture how the novel felt to her as a teen. “That would mean it had a certain amount of wish fulfillment,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “The Gothic, to me, is emotional and it’s about the world reflecting everyone’s interior landscape. This is my personal fan tribute to this work.“ For many classic novel fans, any deviation feels like a betrayal. But Wuthering Heights isn’t the only recent literary adaptation to court controversy. (Kevin Fraser)
Screenrant updates the top ten highest-grossing movies of 2026, so far: 8. Wuthering Heights Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi teamed up for Emerald Fennell's fresh take on Wuthering Heights, and with that starpower and the book's name recognition, the movie became a hit. It made $241.6 million throughout its theatrical run after launching over Valentine's Day weekend, on February 13. Wuthering Heights' box office is largely due to international audiences. It made $157.6 million (or 65.2%) of its total overseas, with the United Kingdom ($34.3 million), Australia ($14.5 million), and Italy ($12.8 million) driving the most interest. But after making $37.5 million and finishing at #1 in its 4-day domestic opening weekend, it was quickly forgotten and finished with just $83.9 million. (Cooper Hood)
According to the Manchester Evening News, Haworth is among the most affordable towns in the UK for a week's stay in 2026: Haworth, West Yorkshire: Brontë country at its most atmospheric. Cobbled streets, moorland walks, the famous Parsonage Museum, and a nostalgic heritage railway make this a brilliant budget literary escape. (Milo Boyd and Kieran Isgin) Antena 3 (Spain) explores the Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week 2026: Tras una última época en que las novias se carcterizaban por vestidos sencillos y contenidos, para 2027 vuelve a resurgir el drama romántico: una estética más emocional, con corsés visibles como protagonistas, mangas dramáticas, faldas con vuelo y tejidos etéreos. Esta tendencia aparece, en parte, gracias a los estímulos que hemos visto últimamente, con los fenómenos Bridgerton y Cumbres Borrascosas, entre otros. Hace falta destacar que lo que se busca es una reinterpretación de vestidos históricos, por opciones más modernas y fashion. (María Toro) (Translation)
Movie-Locations has updated its Wuthering Heights 1970 section. The Japan Brontë Society's blog reports on the 2026 Brontë Day public lecture, held on 6 June at Waseda University with 56 attendees. Two papers were delivered: one examining Charlotte's autobiographical novels (Jane Eyre and Villette), and another on embodied vision in her work, tracing links to the camera obscura and stereoscope. The day also saw the launch of a Society-supervised picture book on the Brontë siblings.
As reported in The Art Newspaper or Apollo Magazine, an exceptionally rare first edition of Wuthering Heights/Agnes Grey will go under the hammer at the end of this month at Christie's:
Christie's 30 JUN 4:30PM BST | Live auction 24521 Lot 35 Property from a Private Charitable Trust Estimate GBP 400,000 – GBP 600,000
A truly exceptional first edition of Wuthering Heights in the original cloth binding. Preserved within the same historic house library since shortly after its publication in 1847, it is perhaps the finest example remaining in private hands of a masterpiece of English literature. No textually complete copy has appeared at auction in the publisher’s cloth binding since 1908.
Due in part to its distinctive landscape and the wild intensity of its characters, Wuthering Heights ‘has emerged as one of those rare texts, like Frankenstein and Dracula, which has transcended its literary origin to become part of the lexicon of popular culture – the subject of film, song and even comedy. At the same time it has become one of the most written about novels in the language, to the point where the novel’s critical history reads like the history of criticism itself’ (Nestor). Its strangeness troubled early reviewers, especially in light of Charlotte Brontë’s more acceptable Jane Eyre, but its status as one of the great novels in English continues to grow. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it was ‘a fiend of a book – an incredible monster’, and to Virginia Woolf it was the result of a ‘gigantic ambition’: to look out ‘upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and […] unite it in a book’.
Although both Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were written and accepted for publication before Charlotte had completed Jane Eyre, it was the latter work which was published first. The immediate and enormous success of Jane Eyre prompted Thomas Cautley Newby to bring forward the release of the present works in order to capitalise on the phenomenon. Perhaps as a result of this hastiness, Charlotte judged that ‘the books are not well got up – they abound in errors of the press.’ She subsequently added that ‘the orthography and punctuation of the books are mortifying to a degree: almost all the errors that were corrected in the proof-sheets appear intact in what should have been the fair copies’. The present set contains the following errors and issue points as noted by Smith: vol. I has p.342 numbered ‘242’; vol. II has the low comma after PUBLISHER on the title, the full stop missing after VOL. in B1, p.382 numbered ‘282’, the headline HEGHTS on pp.71, 163, and 265; vol. III has the full stop missing after VOL. in C1, the headline AGNES GREY on pp.49, 96, 183, 204, 309 and 326, and p.313 numbered ‘213’.
The exact number of copies printed is unknown, but it was suggested by Charlotte that the run was limited to just 250. Of these, examples preserved in any form of publisher’s binding are exceedingly scarce, with those in full cloth being the rarest of all. Smith records five variant publisher’s bindings for the first edition, including examples in boards backed with cloth which ‘were intended for the circulating libraries. Such copies, though quite rare, are more commonly found than copies bound in cloth’. Variants of full-cloth bindings are distinguished by differences in colour, in the central stamps on their covers, in the number of blind-stamped lines in their borders, in the direction of the diagonal ribbing in the cloth, and in the lettering stamped in gilt upon the spine. The example which was given from the Blavatnik-Honresfield Library to the Brotherton Library in 2022 added a further variant in maroon cloth, and the present copy is slightly different again. It shares many of the common characteristics of other variants, including pale yellow endpapers, a four-line border, diamond-shaped and plain-ruled bands on the spine, and the arrangement of the gilt titles, and is perhaps closest to Smith’s variant D, having the publisher’s details at the foot of each spine. It differs in the shape of the central blind-stamped arabesque, the presence of decorative blind-stamped corners, the colour of the cloth, and in the absence of a full stop after the volume number on the spines.
We are aware of only five other examples of the first edition preserved in any variant of the publisher’s full-cloth binding: (1) The Blavatnik-Honresfield copy, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; (2) Weston Library, University of Oxford; (3) Ashley 2465, British Library; (4) Charlotte Brontë's annotated copy, sold Christie’s New York, 4 December 2009, lot 27 [lacking titles and 6 pages of text]; (5) Anne Brontë's annotated copy, Princeton University Library [see Parish pp.85-87].
References: Parrish, Victorian Lady Novelists pp.85-87; Sadleir 350; Smith 3; Wise pp.97-103.
3 volumes, 12mo (199 x 122mm). (Short marginal tear in L4 of vol. I, occasional very minor spots or marks, lacking the advert leaves R3-4 in vol. III as usual.) Original diagonally-ribbed green-grey cloth, covers with blind-ruled four-line border surrounding blind-stamped floral corners and central arabesque, spines stamped in blind with a band at the head and two at the foot and three diamond-shaped bands in between, lettered in gilt with titles and volume numbers between the first and second diamond bands, and with LONDON / T. C. NEWBY. at the foot, pale yellow endpapers (spines of Wuthering Heights volumes slightly cocked and faded, that of vol. II with vertical crease from textblock bulge and tiny split at upper joint, upper hinge of vol. II and hinges of vol. II cracked but holding, the lower hinge in vol. II revealing binder’s waste from North Ludlow Beamish’s History of the King’s German Legion (London: Thomas and William Boone, 1837; vol. II, p.393), faintly rubbed and marked). Provenance: Lord Harris of Belmont House (George Francis Robert Harris, 3rd Baron Harris GCSI, 1810-1872, who succeeded his father to the barony in 1845; bookplate, contemporary ink shelf numbering on endpapers recording presence of Wuthering Heights volumes on H3 and Agnes Grey on J4) – thence by descent.
The volumes, and all the other auctioned items, will be on display at Christie's from June 26 to June 30: Viewing 26 Jun 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM 27 Jun 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM 28 Jun 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM 29 Jun 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM 30 Jun 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM
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