Emily

Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë

Yesterday, Thursday, was wet and rather miserable so I decided to travel into the city centre to see a film at The Showroom. The film in question was "Emily" directed by Frances O'Connor.

I should explain that "Wuthering Heights" and  Emily Brontë mean a great deal to me. I studied the novel at Advanced Level when I was at secondary school. I studied it again at university and when I was a secondary school English teacher, I  taught it to two cohorts of A level students.

In addition, I have visited the little Pennine town of Haworth where the Brontës lived on several occasions and I have walked over the moors to Top Withens four times. It is believed that Top Withens Farm - now a ruin - provided Emily Brontë with the idea for Wuthering Heights in the amazing novel of that name.

My daughter Frances's middle name is Emily and that is not co-incidental. There is also a character called Frances in the novel. I confess that I didn't tell Shirley about this when she said she liked the name before our beautiful baby girl was born back in 1988.

And so I came to the 2022 film with special interest. I wanted it to be good and in most ways it was good.  There was a sense of bleakness in a God-fearing community and a feeling that death might be just around the corner as it was for so many in the early nineteenth century.

Of course the director and her team were not seeking historical accuracy. They had poetic licence to create an imagined version of events and how the characters might have related to each other. There is no evidence for Emily's steamy affair with the new curate William Weightman. This is made up but adds spice to the middle section of the film. The religious propriety and watchful eyes of the early-Victorian era would have restrained Emily and Weightman like invisible chains. Besides, rumour had it that he was in fact drawn to Emily's sister Anne.

Now let's talk about teeth. In Emily Brontë's days, most people would have had terrible teeth - crooked, discoloured and often there'd be gaps too. There were no cosmetic dentists with well-equipped surgeries. So how come the characters in "Emily" all have great teeth? They are white and straight like the well-maintained teeth of jobbing actors in the twenty first century! I know that it is only a small detail and maybe it's just me but if you are seeking to recreate an authentic flavour of those days I think you have to get the teeth and indeed the fingernails right.

I was also disappointed when Emily received her first printed copies of the novel. The frontispiece said that it had been written by Emily Brontë when it should have said Ellis Bell. Like her sisters, Emily had to pose as a man in order to get published. That's how it was back then.

But let me not nitpick too much. I am so glad I went to see "Emily". It was a thought provoking take on the life of a brilliant woman - born and raised in Yorkshire - who died far too young at the age of thirty. Lord knows what excellence she might have achieved with two more decades of life and three or four extra novels under her belt. In spite of everything, she was a true literary genius and the film does not deny that.

Emily and Charlotte's grave in Haworth Church

©Stephen Craven 2019 (Geograph)