The Enduring Appeal of the Brontë Sisters
Ask Emma Rice to explain the extraordinary shelf life of the Brontë sisters—Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, those 19th-century Brits who wrote some of literature’s most celebrated works—and her answer is simple. “These were not Victorian damsels,” Rice says. “They were hard as nails.” Rice is the adapter and director behind the Wise Children theater company’s production of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which the Guardian called “bold and ingenious” during a UK run and is now touring the U.S. And while Rice knows why revisiting Brontë’s story appealed to her (“the Brontës’ world is about emotional chaos,” she says, “and we’re also fighting for hope at the moment”), she isn’t alone in finding the sisters fascinating.
In late 2021 a British charity raised close to $20 million to purchase a trove of work by the Brontës, including letters and diary entries, and last April a miniature book of poetry made by the 13-year-old Charlotte sold for $1.25 million at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. This month filmmaker Frances O’Connor will release Emily, (starring Emma MacKay, above), a beautiful big screen ode to the author that earned raves when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. “There’s this crossover between who she was and what’s happening at this moment for young women, when there’s a pressure to present perfection,” O’Connor says of her subject. “I wanted to say something about that.”
Perhaps that’s the appeal: The Brontës are a heritage brand that’s seemingly ripe for a refresh—whether or not you’ve studied every word. As Rice says, “With great novels,you’ve either never read them and pretend you have, or you read them a long time ago and can’t remember them.”
This story appears in the February 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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