{"id":623620,"date":"2025-12-10T06:06:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T06:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/623620\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T06:06:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T06:06:12","slug":"margot-robbie-in-red-latex-kate-bush-impersonators-and-a-pint-of-emily-ale-my-crash-course-in-brontemania-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/623620\/","title":{"rendered":"Margot Robbie in red latex, Kate Bush impersonators and a pint of Emily ale: my crash course in Bront\u00ebmania | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I\u2019m drinking a pint of Emily Bront\u00eb beer in The Kings Arms. Other Bront\u00ebs are on tap \u2013 Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte an IPA, Branwell a porter \u2013 but the barman says Emily, an amber ale with a \u201cmalty biscuit flavour\u201d, is the most popular. It\u2019s the obvious choice today, anyway: in a few hours, Oscar-winning film-maker Emerald Fennell will be at the Bront\u00eb women\u2019s writing festival in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily\u2019s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The film, to be released just before Valentine\u2019s Day next year, is already scandal-ridden. It all started with Fennell\u2019s casting <\/a>of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (\u201cHeathcliff, it\u2019s me, it\u2019s Barbie\u201d) Robbie causing uproar. An erotic teaser trailer<\/a> full of tight bodices, cracking whips and sweaty bodies had the same effect. But heads were really sent spinning by reports of a scene with a public hanging and a nun who \u201cfondles the corpse\u2019s visible erection\u201d.<\/p>\n

One early review said readers would be shocked and disgusted by the book’s cruelty, inhumanity and diabolical hate<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since my visit to Haworth, the full trailer has been released, showing Fennell\u2019s brand of anachronistic sets and costumes (think sugary, eye-popping interiors and red latex gowns), some suggestive licking and bread-kneading, and Elordi\u2019s (admittedly quite good) Yorkshire<\/a> accent: \u201cSo kiss me \u2013 and let us both be damned!\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a wild response was only to be expected. As I drink up and step out into the cobbled streets of this village built on a hill, Wuthering Heights\u2019 potency is still palpable.<\/p>\n

Controversial casting \u2026 Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in the forthcoming adaptation. Photograph: Warner Bros<\/p>\n

\u201cI sometimes feel, in the morning, that I could just walk around the corner and the sisters would be there talking to each other,\u201d Diane Park tells me over a coffee in Wave of Nostalgia, her award-winning<\/a> feminist bookshop. \u201cThey are still so alive here in this village.\u201d Park\u2019s shop sits near the top of the hill, on a road lined with terraced stone houses and quirky independent businesses. Seconds away is a lane leading to the church where the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 father Patrick was reverend. Behind it is a cluttered graveyard and the Bront\u00eb parsonage, where the family lived.<\/p>\n

When Park moved here more than a decade ago, she had only read Charlotte\u2019s Jane Eyre. Today, she reads one of Emily\u2019s poems to me on the shopfloor: \u201cHope, whose whisper would have given \/ Balm to all my frenzied pain \u2026\u201d How did she feel when she first read Wuthering Heights? \u201cI was blown away by Emily\u2019s insight into the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

The world was scandalised when Emily published it, under a male pseudonym, in 1847. It is the story of fiery Catherine Earnshaw and her relationship with outcast orphan Heathcliff, in whom she finds her match as they roam the Yorkshire moors: \u201cHe\u2019s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Catherine marries Edgar Linton and dies, it sets haunted Heathcliff on a path of vengeance, as the second half of the novel becomes a story of control, abuse and digging up graves. While some critics admired its unique strangeness, many echoed one review<\/a> that said: \u201cThe reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Never mind the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 \u2026 a view from the sisters\u2019 home town. Photograph: David Zdanowicz\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t stop Wuthering Heights from becoming a classic. It was made into a silent movie <\/a>in 1920, with locals crowding around the shoot<\/a> in Haworth and playing extras. The story later moved to a Hollywood studio and enjoyed the romanticised Golden Age treatment with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, minus that more problematic second act. And at least 15 big and small screen adaptations have followed, from Yoshishige Yoshida\u2019s 1988 retelling in medieval Japan, to Andrea Arnold\u2019s 2011 version<\/a> with James Howson as the first black actor to play Heathcliff. (The main criticism levelled against the casting of Elordi is that Heathcliff is widely considered not white in the book.)<\/p>\n

It was the BBC\u2019s full-story 1967 series, starring Ian McShane as a brooding Heathcliff, that inspired Kate Bush to write her otherworldly hit, which brought Wuthering Heights into every home. \u201cI just managed to catch the very last few minutes, where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass,\u201d she has said<\/a>, admitting she wrote the song before reading the book.<\/p>\n

So why does this story of passion-ravaged lovers on rain-ravaged moors have such a hold? \u201cI think Wuthering Heights endures because the relationships between Cathy, Heathcliff and Edgar aren\u2019t easy to quantify,\u201d says author Juno Dawson<\/a>, who grew up in Bingley and calls the Bront\u00ebs \u201cthe pride of Yorkshire\u201d. Dawson was inspired by Wuthering Heights to write a short story for an anthology called I Am Heathcliff. \u201cThey don\u2019t fit into traditional notions of a romance novel or a ghost story,\u201d she continues. \u201cAnd each character is frustrating, unfathomable. If there\u2019s something I take from it, it\u2019s that ambiguity can be as satisfying as neat resolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

I stroll over to where the Bront\u00ebs lived, mingling with fellow visitors \u2013 mostly solo women whom I later spot at Fennell\u2019s talk. \u201cPeople have always come to make a pilgrimage,\u201d says Rebecca Yorke, director of the parsonage and the Bront\u00eb Society<\/a>, which opened in 1928. \u201cIf you look at the visitors book, there\u2019ll be a mixture of UK, USA, Australia, Japan and Europe. About a third of our visitors are from overseas.\u201d There are famous signatures too, from Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This is actually my third visit, or pilgrimage, to the parsonage with my mum. It just keeps pulling us back. Today we learn that the trees in the garden separating it from the graveyard only grew after the Bront\u00ebs\u2019 time here. So the family would have had views of death on one side and endless moors on the other. The rooms are quite claustrophobic and downstairs is where they wrote their novels, on a table that has an \u201cE\u201d etched on it. In the corner is the sofa on which Emily died, most likely of tuberculosis, aged just 30. The life expectancy in Haworth was a mere 24, partly due to the overcrowded graveyard contaminating the drinking water. Such details from this place\u2019s past still feel compelling in the present, especially when it comes to the author of Wuthering Heights.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmily is quite enigmatic,\u201d says Yorke. \u201cWe don\u2019t know as much about her as we do about Charlotte. And Wuthering Heights was her only novel \u2013 but it\u2019s one of the best-known in the English language.\u201d How, then, to square this woman described as peculiar, introverted and nonconformist, with the literary genius who created a novel so haunting, dark and poetic that it still fires people up today? As Charlotte said of her sister: \u201cAn interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.\u201d So much so that Charlotte made efforts to \u201ccorrect\u201d Emily\u2019s reputation after her death, further adding to the mystery.<\/p>\n

Top Withens, thought to be the inspiration for the fictional farmhouse that gives the novel its name, is now endangered<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The siblings have proven almost as popular as subjects for drama as their works, from Christopher Fry\u2019s 1973 ITV series The Bront\u00ebs of Haworth to Sally Wainwright\u2019s 2016 To Walk Invisible<\/a> for the BBC. In 2022, Emily got a somewhat reimagined biopic<\/a>, with a passionate portrayal by Emma Mackey, and a raunchy affair with a curate. With each new film or TV series, fresh hordes of tourists have flocked in to Haworth.<\/p>\n

Down the hill, a record shop with a \u201cNever Mind the Bront\u00eb\u201d poster is just one of many nods to the local celebrities. Other windows boast a lampshade made from book pages and paintings of the moors. Authors live locally, or come to stay for writing retreats, says Park: \u201cThere\u2019s that creative feeling in Haworth.\u201d But does the Bront\u00eb effect have any impact on local culture in ways beyond the obvious? It runs deeper, says Park, with things such as the nature sculptures at nearby Penistone Hill Country Park, part of Bradford\u2019s year as City of Culture. \u201cIt feels like Emily is in the heather and the trees. You just breathe the air. Wuthering refers to weather and I just feel she\u2019s left her print here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The Bront\u00ebs are still so alive here\u2019 \u2026 Diane Park, owner of Haworth bookshop Wave of Nostalgia. Photograph: Wave of Nostalgia<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just about tourism. Take last month\u2019s Wandering Imaginations<\/a> project, which saw two young authors from Bradford and two from Ghana writing stories inspired by the Bront\u00eb siblings\u2019 fictitious African kingdom Angria<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re here for the people that live here,\u201d says Yorke. The society has just acquired a new building on the main street, where it will focus on \u201copportunities for local people to get closer to their heritage\u201d. She hopes to further \u201cinstil that sense of pride in something on your doorstep, something people across the world think is worth visiting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The event that ticks all the Bront\u00eb boxes, though, is the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever<\/a>, held on 27 July each year. Hundreds of people dressed in floaty red dresses come together in spots around the nation to sing and dance to the Kate Bush song. This summer, at Penistone Hill, it also doubled as a campaign to protect Top Withens \u2013 thought to be the inspiration for the fictional windswept farmhouse that gives the novel its name \u2013 from a planned windfarm development.<\/p>\n

Of course, the beautiful Bront\u00eb country isn\u2019t just for literary nerds. This has always been a rugged paradise for hikers and fell runners<\/a>. The Tour de France pedalled through here in 2014, and inspired the Tour de Yorkshire. A moody walkway behind the parsonage leads to a waterfall named after the sisters, as they were said to spend time there. That magical feeling just gets stronger as you stomp around, retracing their tiny footsteps. \u201cThese heather-laden moors,\u201d says Park, \u201ccall to you as much as they did to Emily, who roamed as free as Cathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Family home \u2026 Haworth parsonage. Photograph: Richard Hilsden\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Night falls in Haworth and I head to the packed church. The young woman sitting next to me is visiting from New York, staying in an inn for the whole festival weekend, which includes a writing workshop out on the moors the next day. Fennell walks out wearing a T-shirt with \u201cThe Bront\u00eb Sisters\u201d stamped on it in gothic lettering, heavy-metal style.<\/p>\n

The book, she says, \u201ccracked me open\u201d after first reading it aged 14. She drew on that \u201cprimal, sexual\u201d initial reaction for her film. What chimes most in the room, though, is how Fennell talks of Wuthering Heights speaking to her differently at various stages in her life. I recently read it again for the first time in 15 years and could not believe that I used to consider it at all sexy.<\/p>\n

Many others agree. \u201cIf you read it as a teenager,\u201d says Yorke, \u201cyou might just think, \u2018Oh my goodness, to experience a love and passion like that would just be amazing.\u2019 And then, as you get older, you might think, \u2018Actually, this isn\u2019t very \u2026 healthy.\u2019\u201d Fennell goes further: \u201cIt\u2019s so bonkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018We know the least about Emily\u2019 \u2026 from left, Anne, Emily and Charlotte, painted by their brother Branwell. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s why she also \u201cdid the dirty\u201d with the book\u2019s second half, dropping it and sticking to the love story. This may have been a missed opportunity to explore Heathcliff with more nuance \u2013 although it\u2019s impossible to say at this point. But there is a call for more exploration of the novel\u2019s highly debated and complicated relationship with race.<\/p>\n

Emily, who was well read, wrote it in the years after the abolition of slavery in the UK, and Heathcliff is found with no \u201cowner\u201d in Liverpool. Still, the film is Fennell\u2019s version. \u201cIt\u2019s very personal for everyone,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I can\u2019t make something for everyone: no one is in agreement about any element of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fennell certainly isn\u2019t scared to shock, but Dawson is unconcerned. \u201cIf anyone\u2019s going to do it, I\u2019m glad it\u2019s Fennell,\u201d says the author. \u201cShe\u2019s a director who isn\u2019t afraid to actually adapt, rather than photocopy from book to screen.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I walk to my car in the dark , silence now enveloping the village and the moors, I remember something Park told me about Emily. \u201cHer poetry gets so deep into your soul, into your heart,\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t express how alive it makes me feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wuthering Heights will be released on 13 February<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I\u2019m drinking a pint of Emily Bront\u00eb beer in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[748,393,4884,12,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-623620","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115693773478345680","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}