Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Frances O’Connor, Madman Entertainment.
Emily tells the imagined life of one of the world’s most famous authors, Emily Brontë. The actual and made-up life of Wuthering Heights author intertwine, as we see the world through her eyes for the very first time.
It envisages the transformative, exhilarating and uplifting journey to womanhood of a rebel and a misfit, one of the world’s most enigmatic and provocative writers who died too soon at the age of 30.
Emily explores the relationships that inspired her – her raw, passionate sisterhood with Charlotte (played by Alexandra Dowling, The Musketeers) and Anne (Amelia Gething, The Spanish Princess); her first aching, forbidden love for Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, The Lost Daughter, The Haunting of Bly Manor); and caring for her maverick brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead, The Duke, Dunkirk), whom she idolises.
The film stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education, Death on the Nile) as Emily, who finds her voice and writes the literary classic. She brings Brontë to life on screen, noting that, “Emily was intuitive, inquisitive, observant, imaginative, bold, creative, and quietly intelligent”.
The second youngest of the Brontë children, Emily was born in 1818, and lived with her family at Haworth in Yorkshire, with the moors on their doorstep. The family suffered great tragedy with the death of Emily’s mother in 1821, followed by the deaths of the two eldest Brontë siblings, Maria, 11, and Elizabeth, 10, in 1825, who both died from tuberculosis after becoming ill while away at boarding school in Wakefield.
Charlotte and Branwell, along with Anne (the youngest in the family), would all join Emily as writers, having all created stories practically as soon as they learned to read. The surviving three Brontë sisters would all publish their first novels in the same year, 1847; Charlotte with Jane Eyre, Anne with Agnes Grey, and Emily with Wuthering Heights.
- Emily is screening in cinemas
