Brontë

Campaigners have saved the birthplace of the Brontë sisters and are now fundraising to turn the building into a cultural and education centre – helped by a man with a link to the literary family.Nigel West, who traces a family connection to Charlotte Brontë’s husband, made a “significant donation” to the crowdfunding appeal, which aims to transform 72-74 Market Street in Thornton, Bradford, into a tourist destination.Around a million visitors a year travel to Haworth, to visit the house that writers Charlotte, Anne and…

That wind is from the North, I know it well;No other breeze could have so wild a swell.Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,Then faintly dies,And softly sighs,And moans and murmurs mournfully.I know its language; thus is speaks to me –‘I have passed over thy own mountains dear,Thy northern mountains – and they still are free,Still lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and drear,And stern and lovely, as they used to beWhen thou, a young enthusiast,As wild and free as they,O’er rocks and glens and snowy heightsDidst often…

“How did you write Wuthering Heights?” demands a rattled Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) in the opening moments of this inventive, urgent gothic fable that, like Andrew Dominik’s misunderstood Blonde, could hardly be mistaken for a drearily factual biopic. “It’s an ugly book,” Charlotte complains as her sister Emily (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) swoons beside her, a three-volume edition of the offending text (“full of selfish people who only really care for themselves”) propped next to a medicine bottle at her elbow.…

Dir: Frances O’Connor. Starring: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Amelia Gething, Adrian Dunbar, Gemma Jones. 15, 130 minutes.“How did you write it?” asks Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) of her sister Emily (Emma Mackey). “How did you write Wuthering Heights?”. This is where actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor begins her feverish reimagining of Emily Brontë’s brief life – not at the start but at the very end, Emily a wasted figure nearly consumed by tuberculosis. For O’Connor…

Frances O’Connor had her performing break back in 1999 playing Fanny in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which she famously went toe-to-toe on screen with Harold Pinter who was playing her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram. Now she has made a really impressive debut as a writer and director with this study of Emily Brontë, intelligently played by the Franco-British star Emma Mackey. It’s beautifully acted, lovingly shot, fervently and speculatively imagined, although Mackey’s portrayal, excellent as it is, may be…

Frances O’Connor was a 15-year-old pupil at an all-girls Catholic school when she first read Wuthering Heights on the hour-long bus journey to and from her home in the hills outside Perth, Western Australia. “It was the feeling of the elements, and the environment, that I recognised so strongly from my own childhood,” she says. “I remember not wanting to leave that windy, gothic, slightly supernatural place to go back to the real world.”She also loved “just how kickass Cathy and Heathcliff were – that feeling of being…

Actor turned writer-director Frances O’Connor’s sensuous and loosely biographical drama about the Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë captures the Victorian era with a modern sensibility.Not modern in that post-Bridgerton sense, where Black and brown characters hold positions of power in a fantastical British society stripped of colonial history. Instead, Emily feels modern in the way it imagines Brontë’s reclusive demeanor and emotional swings with consideration towards trauma, depression and other possible mental…