While she credits Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë as inspiration – “Rebecca and Jane Eyre were the original domestic thrillers,” she told the Times – her contemporary favourites include Verity by Colleen Hoover, Room by Emma Donoghue, and The Green Mile by Stephen King. (Ella Creamer)

ZOOM: The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: Elizabeth Gaskell and her Infamous Brontë Biography by Graham Watson 

Wed 22 Apr, 7:00pm

Since its publication in 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë has divided opinion. Some critics suggest it is historically unreliable – perhaps Gaskell’s sources were flawed and maybe she exaggerated or even invented details for profit? Now new research into her writing and methods tells a different story: that of a diligent whistleblower silenced by the very forces she sought to expose.

Now Graham Watson’s The Invention of Charlotte Brontë traces the events behind Gaskell’s sensational biography and the cultural legend it inspired – from her six-year friendship with Charlotte Brontë to the media scandal that followed the book’s release, when Gaskell was pressured into a false confession of error to protect her publisher from a lawsuit.

Graham Watson argues that long-standing criticisms of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, still repeated today, must be challenged, as they first appeared within weeks of its publication – and all came from the very people Gaskell had criticised.

Doomed survivor of a family of geniuses, Charlotte Brontë had a life as dramatic as her famous novel, Jane Eyre. Now you can join us as Graham Watson challenges the established narrative to reveal the Brontë family as you’ve never seen them before.

The first in the Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell mini-season, in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

Underdog: The Other Other Bronte

by Sarah Gordon

22-25 April 2026, including Saturday matinee

Directed by Carole Shinkfield

With Emily Duffy, Miranda Chance, Laura Elizabeth, Tom Lilly, Gareth Leadbetter, Paul Roman, Daniel Tolley, and Steve Bird.

Charlotte Brontë has a confession about how one sister became an idol, and the other became known as the third sister. You know the one. No, not that one. The other, other one… Anne.

This is not a story about well-behaved women. This is a story about the power of words. It’s about sisters and sisterhood, love and jealousy, support and competition.

Sarah Gordon’s new play is an irreverent retelling of the life and legend of the Brontë sisters, and the story of the sibling power dynamics that shaped their uneven rise to fame.

Director Carol Shinkfield said: "They were the feminists of their time and I love the sense of anarchy within the play, which has allowed us to explore and subvert the traditional view of the Brontë sisters." (...)

Quick-witted in tone, the piece dismantles the notion of the Brontës as reclusive and reserved, instead presenting them as progressive thinkers navigating the challenges of a male-dominated literary world.

Carol, who recently completed an MA in theatre directing at the Arden School of Theatre, brings a fresh perspective to the show. (Jessica McKeown)

Do you voraciously read the pages of steamy romantasy bestsellers by Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros? Or flood your group chat with breathless recaps of the latest goings-on in TV series such as Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton? Or even immerse yourself in the divisive and challenging cinematic worlds of Emerald Fennell? If so, you surely can’t have failed to notice that in pop culture, the female gaze – storytelling that highlights the meandering, textured, sublimely messy inner worlds and wants of women – is enjoying an explosion.

On TV, you can see it everywhere, in the interior lives and desires taken up by Big Little Lies, Sirens or Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s Little Fires Everywhere. Romantasy harbours it in the shape of powerful maidens and sex in fae (fairy) realms, while Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Promising Young Woman are marketed with the promise of converting women’s experiences into dark beauty on the big screen. (Deborah Linton)

Instead of excavating the forgotten story of a heroic woman from history, Natasha has built a new story that fictionalises 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood and rests it on the foundations of Jane Eyre. The orphaned heroine is Aria Jones, and she, the modern iteration of Jane, has been transported from gothic England to the Chateau Marmont during the Hollywood studio era. This new setting is no less confining than 1800s rural England, and plenty of menace lurks behind the hotel’s many doors, from ghostly apparitions to sleazy film directors.

Natasha’s characters are undeniably contemporary. The young women who fill the Chateau fizz with ambition, potent beauty and unmet potential. Their stories are inspired by real stars who once graced the hotel, including Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood. Aspiring actresses Calliope (who cannot be called beautiful because the word is “wholly inadequate”) and Flitter, who is “chasing beauty but hasn’t caught it yet” are tools for Natasha to explore the treatment of women under the studio system, and to show how they used what meagre power they had to take control of their own fates. A teenage Aria is welcomed into their shared bedroom where she finds sisterly love and advice amid cosy pyjama-parties and mint juleps ordered from Schwab’s.

The Chateau itself is almost a character. It observes and sighs and welcomes Aria, who was orphaned at the age of 13 after her parents are killed in a gas station inferno. The reason she has come to the chateau is that it is where her aunt, the washed-up actress Miss Devine Rey, lives.

The narrative shifts back and forth between young, newly arrived Aria, and a more mature Aria who has taken on the role of being a sort-of governess to Adele, the daughter of the new owner of the Chateau, gruff rock star, Theo Winchester.

Like Edward Rochester, Theo has a history of excess, and a mysterious, checkered past. Though he’s more conventionally attractive than the original. [...]

Aria’s goal in taking a job as Adele’s carer is to save enough money to one day break free of the Chateau. Just as Jane Eyre yearns to see the world beyond the English hillside, Aria dreams of the ocean. She is haunted by apparitions of fire, which foreshadows the inevitable fate of the building.

The Chateau on Sunset is not a re-telling, however, it is a re-imagining, and Natasha has allowed herself to create new fates for the characters. There is a distinct shift in tone after the famous woman-in-the-attic-scene, with plenty of surprises as the story barrels towards its ending. (Genevieve Gannon)