“A big problem with this premise is that Wuthering Heights depicts exactly the sort of love affair that a person who’d never been in a romantic relationship is likely to invent, all wildness and extremity and drama”
“The brilliance of the novel lies in that wildness, in its author’s complete commitment to the ruthlessness of her characters’ emotions and the uncanny afterglow left in their wake—not in its realism”
“Wuthering Heights works because it is a fantasy untrammeled by the sort of practical considerations that dominated the actual lives of Emily Brontë and her family”
“Besides, romantic love is arguably the predominate theme of Western literature and culture, especially the parts of it with which the Brontës were familiar. It’s not as if they (or anyone else) needed first-hand experience to know anything about extravagant passion, given how much, and how widely, they read”
“The characters in Emily don’t do much reading, and none at all if you eliminate the times they pore over little scraps of paper scribbled on by one of the other characters”
“Instead of books there is “writing,” something the characters in Emily speak of with a breathless, aspirational reverence, as if educated 19th-century British people weren’t constantly writing in one form or another: letters, diaries, poetry, sermons, essays, reviews, and so on”
“For the Emily Brontë of Emily, however, “writing” is less something you do or consume than it is a kind of longed-for identity, or personal brand, which tracks with other ways in which the film depicts her as an early incarnation of Gen-Z sensibility”
“She’s a cottagecore Brontë whose main activity is wandering through meadows in long skirts, trailing her slender fingers through willow leaves for a sunstruck lens”
“This harsh view of Charlotte is par for the course of late, and she was certainly not blameless. Nevertheless, she was navigating a major cultural pivot. The Brontës grew up marinating in the texts of peak Romanticism, but by the time Charlotte suddenly found herself a celebrated literary figure, moral fashion had shifted. (No one likes to admit that morality is subject to fashion, but it is.)”
“The bold individualism that the Romantics championed became tarnished in the eyes of the Victorians, not least because of the destructive behavior of the people, like Byron, who espoused it”
“To this day, many readers object to the selfish cruelty of the characters in Wuthering Heights, and to the idea that the grandeur of Brontë’s vision compensates for it”
“The film implies that Bronte’s verse was mostly heady love poems, but the poem in question, “Speak, God of Visions,” is addressed not to a lover but to the Romantic personification of the imagination. Like so much of her verse, it has a mystical, intellectual, solitary bent completely absent from Emily, in which freedom consists mainly of snogging a curate in an abandoned cottage and dancing drunkenly in your brother’s railway station office”
“Emily is a movie about “writing” that’s forgotten how to read”