While Charlotte is set to be a teacher, Emily (known in the village as “the strange one”) romps across moorland, caressing trees and moss, rolling and falling in green with her beloved Byronic brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). Punctuated with fades-to-black that accentuate its fairytale fever-dream quality, Emily flashes back to the days when the young Brontë sisters delighted in the stories they told each other. Only later, when the literary torch is passed on and she can make peace with her own ghosts, does Charlotte start to realise what that “something” is… When Emily replies that she simply put pen to paper, Charlotte is unassuaged, insisting that “there is something…”. “It’s an ugly book,” Charlotte complains as her sister Emily ( Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) swoons beside her, a three-volume edition of the offending text (“full of selfish people who only really care for themselves”) propped next to a medicine bottle at her elbow. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.“H ow did you write Wuthering Heights?” demands a rattled Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) in the opening moments of this inventive, urgent gothic fable that, like Andrew Dominik’s misunderstood Blonde, could hardly be mistaken for a drearily factual biopic.
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! At nine o’clock at night, Mrs Gaskell tells, after evening prayers, when their guardian and relative had gone to bed, the three poetesses - the three maidens, Charlotte, and Emily, and Anne - Charlotte being the ‘motherly friend and guardian to the other two’ - ‘began, like restless wild animals, to pace up and down their parlour, “making out” their wonderful stories, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be their future life’. … With a feeling much akin to that with which I looked upon the friend’s - the admirable artist’s - unfinished work, I can fancy many readers turning to these - the last pages which were traced by Charlotte Brontë’s hand.
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