Fuel your Brontë-mania after the new Emily Brontë film
Posted on February 9, 2023
The latest Brontë biopic, Emily, directed by Frances O’Connor and starring Sex Education star Emma Mackey, hits theatres in America this month. The film is an interpretation of the life of Emily Brontë while she wrote Wuthering Heights. It features an inaccurate, but steamy romance between Emily and William Weightman, and with the gorgeous filmography it captures the moodiness of the Yorkshire Moors perfectly.
The opening scene depicts Emily on her deathbed, or death couch, as her sister Charlotte wants to know how Emily had the imagination or the material to write Wuthering Heights. The couch that was used in the film is an exact replica of one from the Haworth Parsonage that belonged to the Brontë family. It can still be seen at the parsonage today.
The couch that was used in the film was loaned to the cinema for the local premiere of the film, at Hebden Bridge Picture House. Emily Brontë Reappraised author and Brontë scholar Claire O’Callaghan delivered her talk about the Brontës and the film while sitting on the couch before the screening.
Image: National Portrait Gallery, London
To discover more about the true lives of the Bronte sisters, read our Women Writers Rediscovered series:
- Emily Brontë Reappraised by Claire O’Callaghan
- Anne Brontë Reimagined by Adelle Hay
- Charlotte Brontë Revisited by Sophie Franklin
