I have to confess I’ve never been a committed fan of the Brontë-esque. Those wild, tempestuous women crying out on the moors for their demon lovers are a bit rich for my blood.
I prefer my 19th Century costume dramas a bit more Janeite or Dickensian. But you can’t deny the power of the Brontë sisters’ writing – particularly the one novel by middle sister Emily.
And Emily is the fictionalized story of how Wuthering Heights came about. There are three sisters – Charlotte, Emily and the often overlooked Anne – all to be novelists, and none of whom lived to see 40, incidentally.
Photo: screenshot
They lived in their father’s vicarage out on the Yorkshire moors. Their father, played by Adrian Dunbar rather more sympathetically than I was expecting, is concerned about his daughters’ prospects. Particularly Emily Jane.
While Charlotte and Anne settle into teaching and governess jobs, Emily is the difficult one. Paralyzed by shyness, she prefers to stay at home, or go for long walks on the moors, making up stories.
At his wits end, her father invites his curate, the dashing Mr Weightman, to come in and teach Emily French.
Mr Weightman’s arrival has a predictable effect – all three sisters fall in love with him immediately – though he behaves like a perfect gentleman.
Certainly, compared with their brother – the rakish Bramwell Brontë, played at full throttle by star in the making Fionn Whitehead.
One of the ideas of the film Emily – the debut of actress Frances O’Connor as both writer and director – is, as you’d expect, “spot the Wuthering Heights elements”.
The barometer is set to “wuthering” pretty much throughout – I wonder how many of the cast and crew caught a cold during the water-logged shoot.
Familiar names crop up, as well as famous scenes when you least expect them. But at the centre Emily - played by Anglo-French star Emma Mackey – is her own person, as she struggles to become a writer.
Mr Weightman finds himself torn between attraction to his pupil and the fact she makes him nervous. Adding a certain je ne sais quoi to their French lessons is the fact that actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen, like Mackey, is half French. The two actors had to put on thick English accents for those scenes.
Driving the story of Emily is the rivalry with her older sister Charlotte – Alexandra Dowling – who, in this telling, is the more conventional sister. She’s constantly concerned with how Emily is perceived by their neighbours.
She’s also horrified when she reads Emily’s unfettered poetry, though that’s nothing to her reaction when Emily finally rolls her sleeves up and starts writing her novel.
Purists might quibble at how straight-laced Charlotte is being made in Emily. This after all is the woman who introduced the gothic “madwoman in the attic” to Victorian literature in Jane Eyre.
But I suppose, compared with Emily and brother Branwell, most people might come across as a little conventional.
Despite my prejudices, I found myself strangely drawn to the film Emily. Partly it was because it offered some well-researched insights into the three women who contributed so much to subsequent story-telling. Hollywood in particular owes them a massive debt.
And partly it’s the film itself.
Writer-director O’Connor captures some of the stormy darkness of the Brontës, but she also adds a warmer sympathy for the characters, particularly Mackey’s Emily.
Hard-core Brontë fans may object, but for the less extreme friends of Emily with an interest in seeing how she made her brief 30 years count, it’s an impressive debut.
