Graphic by Gabby Gagnon ‘24
By Emma Watkins ’23
Managing Editor of Content
“Emily, how did you write ‘Wuthering Heights’?” This question, posed by actress Alexandra Dowling’s Charlotte Brontë to a dying Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey), launches the flashback where the bulk of writer and director Frances O’Connor’s “Emily” is situated.
O’Connor’s “Emily” is definitely more of a fictionalized, gothic romance than a biography. The movie captures the essence of Emily Brontë as an author — dark, gloomy and scandalous for her day — rather than taking pains to hold onto an accurate story of her life. There’s very little actually known about the mysterious middle-Brontë-sister. Emily died around a year after the publication of “Wuthering Heights,” and so the vast majority of her life’s story took place before the novel that became her legacy was written. This lack of concrete knowledge gave O’Connor plenty of room to fictionalize. Complete with tattoos, spying on neighbors and taking opium, O’Connor’s Emily is spirited and rebellious. But in this movie, the answer to Charlotte’s question of how Emily wrote the novel is mostly centered around her relationship with the new-to-town curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who moved to Haworth to assist Emily’s father with parish matters. Although it adds romance and sex appeal to the film, this assertion takes away from Emily’s merit on her own as a writer.
In an article for British Vogue, Hayley Maitland interviewed Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to dig into what was true to Emily’s life and what was fabricated for the film. “Weightman did exist — and he did flirt quite a lot,” Dinsdale said. “He was apparently very, very good looking.” But, she revealed that he may have had eyes for everyone except Emily. “Anne Brontë might have been in love with him because we have an account of him making eyes at her in church. … [And] you can’t help thinking that Charlotte herself might have been attracted to him. … But where Emily is concerned, we just don’t have much information,” she explained. Especially knowing this, the choice to revolve so much of the film — and the credit to the inspiration of “Wuthering Heights — around him is questionable, overall enjoyment of the film aside.
Filmed throughout the Brontës’ home in Yorkshire, U.K., the movie offers plenty of sweeping visuals of the very hills and moors that inspired the setting of “Wuthering Heights.” The land is romantically windswept and wild, yet ultimately bleak, reflecting the film’s love plot between Emily and William: what at first seems to be a typical enemies-to-lovers type romantic trope devolves into William condemning Emily and her writing as “ungodly” — one of the many moments in which Emily is categorized as diverging from expected social norms.
Emily’s family is depicted as tight-knit yet full of conflict in the film. Charlotte is introduced as being caught between Emily’s wildness and the disciplined adulthood that is expected from her, but she is quickly established as a normalizing force in Emily’s life that tries to tame her spirit. Anne Brontë is given the same treatment in the movie as she received in life — limited screen time, coming in third to Charlotte and Emily — but Amelia Gething played the adoring-yet-timid youngest sister well.
A few moments throughout the movie reminded me of Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer” (2021), a biopic-as-psychological-thriller that leaves the audience guessing how much they can trust what they’re seeing onscreen. Marked by haunting orchestral and choral arrangements, O’Connor creates unease in the audience. Early on in the movie, the Brontë children and Weightman find a mask that belonged to the Brontë siblings’ deceased mother and jokingly pretend to be prominent cultural figures. Instead of acting as someone famous like the other people playing the game, Emily speaks to her siblings as if she is their mother, prompting emotional and scared responses from everyone involved. Emily then buries the mask outside, leaving viewers to wonder if the dimly lit, nightmarish scene was a moment of Emily’s bizarre acting or something supernatural that she wanted to leave behind. This scene is not the only one that links Emily with the supernatural. Later on, she finds herself waking in the middle of the night to a figure of Weightman emerging from the darkness of her room. It is revealed the next morning that he died that same night, opening up the scene to be interpreted as more of a prophetic vision than a dream.
A constant refrain throughout the movie is Emily asking of, or proclaiming, her reputation to others, repeatedly asking questions like, “Don’t you know what they say about me?” Discussing this perception of Emily as ‘the odd one,’ Dinsdale explained, “In Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, she … describes Charlotte and Anne as being shy and Emily as being reserved — making the distinction that shy people would please everyone if they could, whereas reserved people don’t really care about the impression they make on others.” Emily is definitely characterized as someone who doesn’t place much value in what other people think of her and her actions. In one scene, when her brother Branwell Brontë (Fionn Whitehead) asks for her opinion of his work, Emily passionately berates his story, essentially calling it a cheap rip-off of the work of better writers. Despite noting his sadness, she does not back down and instead simply leaves him to digest the critique. Other times, Emily is shown hiding from social situations or outright stating, “You know I don’t like to meet new people.” Regardless of how reclusive and temperamental records can, or cannot, prove Emily to be, this characterization lends itself well to the gothic heroine persona the film seemed to work so hard to create.
WBUR found the fictionalized aspect of Emily’s life “thrillingly salacious” and more entertaining than negative, and this is evident. “Emily” is full of stereotypical — and many times blatantly inaccurate — moments that will make literature nerds chuckle and potentially roll their eyes, but overall it is a visually appealing and deliciously scandalous film about a beloved writer. In one cringe-yet-delightful moment, while walking the moors, Branwell waxes poetic about Percy Shelley before encouraging Emily to yell “freedom in thought” — the same statement he has tattooed on him, which Emily later copies — with him across the sprawling landscape. In another heartfelt moment, “Wuthering Heights” is shown as immediately being published under Emily’s name instead of her pseudonym, Ellis Bell, as it was in real life, giving viewers the satisfaction of seeing Emily get to view her name in print. Without those stereotypical or simply inaccurate scenes, much of the charm and emotion that makes the movie enjoyable would be lost, so it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of historical accuracy for a thrilling gothic love story — Emily, at least as portrayed by O’Connor, would likely approve.