Bad boyfriends

A contributor to London Review of Books writes about the film Emily.

Emily, written and directed by Frances O’Connor, is a ‘speculative biopic’: a heavily altered version of Emily Brontë’s life, centred on an imaginary relationship with William Weightman, her father’s curate at Haworth from 1839 until his death from cholera in 1842. There is some historical evidence to suggest that Weightman had a relationship with the youngest Brontë sister, Anne; but O’Connor’s film goes with feeling – some people find it difficult to believe that a virgin could have written Wuthering Heights – rather than fact. In interviews, O’Connor has defended her decision, which I think is interesting, through the lens of popular feminism, which I think is not: ‘There’s always a gap between who women really are and who they’re supposed to be.’

nterest in the lives of the Brontë sisters – in who they ‘really’ were – is seemingly inexhaustible, fuelled in part by frequent adaptations of their most popular works. O’Connor’s movie, which contains multiple references to the visual motifs of Wuthering Heights (a face at the window, a white nightdress, an impassioned ghost in the night), is beautifully filmed, with a compelling central performance from Emma Mackey; still, it’s difficult to watch without a sense of déjà vu. It’s hard to take seriously a scene in which a woman in a corset sits down at a desk, takes up her quill, and spells out the title of one of the most famous novels in the world.

Admittedly, I may be too easily inclined to feeling like a cog in the Brontë machine. Over the past six years, I’ve taught various Victorian literature modules at many different British universities, always on short-term or hourly-paid ‘teaching track’ contracts (i.e. no research). It doesn’t matter what your specialisms are: if you’re a Victorianist with a heavy teaching load, especially if your work relates even tangentially to gender, you’ll spend a lot of time marking essays on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and ‘strong female characters’. This is frequently a pleasure: discussing the novels with students often reveals something real among the overdetermination, helps me see the texts clearly again. The fact remains, however, that I neither chose nor expected to devote quite so much of my working life to the Brontës, and yet here I am. They got me. [...]

In the movie’s version of Charlotte, so entirely in the thrall of convention, I can’t recognise the writer of Jane Eyre and Villette: O’Connor alters the chronology to suggest that Charlotte only began to write novels after Emily’s death. (In fact, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published the same year.)  [...]

It wasn’t teaching that was the enemy of freedom or thought for Emily, but rather the institutions in which she had to work, an experience shared by her sisters, even if they were more resilient. Still, the appeal of feeling persists. The stifling school corridors of Emily are an easy image to set up as the opposite to what counts, in O’Connor’s terms, as Emily’s ‘real’ life: the freedom of the moors, writing late into the night, sex. These are the images that have compressed the Brontës into a recognisable and strangely impenetrable commodity. (Helen Charman)

A 'young reporter' reviews the film for The Argus.

Frances O’ Conners’ [sic] “Emily” was a powerful display of the harrowing love that Emily Brontë herself wrote and fantasised about. My mother having read the books in her youth claimed the film to be “a beautiful imagining of what their lives could have really been like”, highlighting the depth of writing and cinematography that went behind shooting this drama. The writing has been complimented with beautiful shots of the Haworth moors in Yorkshire, giving the actors and directors just over six weeks of shooting time whilst they were there in April 2021. Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” breaks the binaries of love, deconstructing the normalised perceptions we have surrounding it and instead replacing it with something much more grotesque and unsettling. The beautiful language is something that links the Brontë’s, which is certainly seen in Emily’s famous line “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”. To read, watch or listen to the Brontë’s is to communicate with the past, the present and the future. (Megan Lovell)

Nouvel Observateur (France) features the recent ARTE TV documentary "Les hauts de Hurlevent" : amour, haine et vengeance.

Jusqu’à inspirer un tube à la chanteuse Kate Bush. Mais comme le remarque Lucasta Miller, biographe des Brontë, le film de Wyler fait l’impasse sur les aspects les plus perturbants du livre : la violence de classe, le sadisme, que souligne le cinéaste japonais Kijû Yoshida en citant Georges Bataille, et l’origine de Heathcliff, ce personnage « noir comme le jais et le feu ». Il est ainsi rappelé que Liverpool fut un port négrier et que les débats sur l’abolition de l’esclavage faisaient rage quand Emily Brontë écrivait son roman. Bien plus qu’une histoire d’amour, conclut avec justesse le documentaire, « les Hauts de Hurlevent » contient tout ce qui minait la société victorienne. Et c’est ce qui en fait un vrai et grand roman du scandale. (Elisabeth Philippe) (Translation)

The New York Times features the She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C. exhibition at the Morgan Library.

[Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near Eastern antiquities] sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects from nine institutions around the world — as part of the Morgan’s long history of exhibitions on women writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. (Jennifer Schuessler)

London Review of Books discusses the life and work of Elizabeth Hardwick.

Hardwick is most famous for the essays collected in Seduction and Betrayal (1974), a series of pieces on women in literature first published in the NYRB (a magazine she helped found) in the early 1970s. Her topics included writers and fictional characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her treatment of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. . . (Joanne O’Leary)

Literary Hub looks into the last days of Assia and Shura Wevill.

Wevill was in despair; according to her journals of March 20, 1969, she asked Hughes why he couldn’t commit to a life with her, to marriage and their family. In the years since Plath’s 1963 suicide, Assia and Shura had often lived with Hughes, while she cared for his children with Sylvia, Frieda and Nicholas. But it always ended badly. “‘It’s Sylvia—it’s because of her,’” Wevill records him telling her: “Ted drunk—stroking my shoulder. The terrible talk in the ‘lounge’ of the Elm Hotel.” [1] The next day, Wevill went to Haworth, the village up the road where the Brontës lived and wrote and died, and bought Seconal sleeping pills from the druggist. Two days later, she dragged a mattress into the kitchen and killed herself and Shura in London flat. (Emily Van Duyne)

Spectator Australia shares the best contributions to their 'Toe-curling analogies' writing competition.

Their love was like Heathcliff and Cathy’s, if Heathcliff and Cathy had moved on and suffered awkward reunions at cocktail parties.

Janine Beacham

Finally, two Brontë characters are among 'the 5 worst boyfriends in fiction' according to RTÉ. 

Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff is the absolute worst. Yes, he has an intense relationship with Cathy but, after overhearing Catherine tell Nelly that she plans to marry their rich neighbour, Edgar Linton, Heathcliff runs away instead of speaking with Catherine. Upon his return several years later, he dedicates his life to destroying the lives of those around him primarily because he didn’t get the girl. And for those who still think that he’s just misunderstood, never forget that his wedding present to his wife Isabella was to murder her dog.

Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

When they first meet, Rochester pointedly treats Jane as an equal rather than her employer. However, this is undermined by his behaviour towards Jane when his aristocratic houseguests come to visit. After intentionally hurting Jane by feigning an interest in marrying Blanche Ingram, Rochester eventually declares his love and proposes to Jane. The problem? He’s already married, and his wife is locked up in his attic.

To make matters worse, when his lies become apparent, he tries to convince Jane to abscond to Europe with him knowing that this would destroy Jane’s reputation thereby preventing her from ever finding employment or a respectable husband. In this era, the loss of both of these options would leave Jane destitute if dumped by Rochester. (Maria Butler)