Margot Robbie in red latex, Kate Bush figures, and a pint of Emily Ale: A crash course in Brontemania | film

IIt’s the afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I’m drinking a pint of Emily Brontë’s beer at The Kings Arms. There are other Bronte brews available — Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte is an IPA, and Branwell is a lager — but the bartender says Emily, an amber ale with a “malt biscuit flavour,” is the most popular. It’s the obvious choice today, anyway: In a few hours, Oscar-winning director Emerald Fennell will be at the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily’s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

The film, which will be released before Valentine’s Day next year, is already full of scandals. It all started with vinyl’s casting of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (“Heathcliff, It’s Me, It’s Barbie”) Robbie caused a stir. The sexy teaser trailer filled with tight bodies, cracking whips, and sweaty bodies had the same effect. But heads were actually turning over reports of a public hanging scene and a nun “fondling the corpse’s visible erection.”

Since my visit to Haworth, the full trailer has been released, showing off Fennell’s brand of outdated sets and costumes (think eye-catching, sugary interiors and red latex gowns), some suggestive licks and bread-kneading, and Elordi’s (very good) Yorkshire accent: “So kiss me – and we’ll be damned!”

Such a wild response was expected. As I drink and venture out onto the cobblestone streets of this hill village, the power of Wuthering Heights is still evident.

“I feel like sometimes, in the morning, I can walk around the corner and the sisters are there talking to each other,” Diane Park tells me over coffee at Wave of Nostalgia, her award-winning feminist bookstore. “They are still alive here in this village.” Park Shop is located near the top of the hill, on a road lined with stone terraced houses and quaint independent businesses. Seconds away there is a path leading to the church where Brontë’s father, Patrick, was a priest. Behind it is a crowded cemetery and the Brontë rectory, where the family lived.

When Park moved here more than a decade ago, she had only read Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. Today, she reads to me one of Emily’s poems on the shop floor: “Hope, whose whisper would give / Balm to all my feverish pain…” How did you feel when you first read Wuthering Heights? “I was blown away by Emily’s vision of the spirit.”

The world was scandalized when Emily published it, under a male pseudonym, in 1847. It is the story of the passionate Catherine Earnshaw and her relationship with the outcast orphan Heathcliff, in whom she finds a mate as they wander the Yorkshire moors: “He is more myself than I am. Whatever the composition of our souls may be, he and mine are the same.”

When Catherine marries Edgar Linton and dies, it sets the haunted Heathcliff on a path of revenge, with the second half of the novel becoming a story of control, abuse, and grave-digging. While some critics admired its unique strangeness, many echoed a review that said, “The reader is shocked, disgusted, and almost disgusted by the details of cruelty, inhumanity, and diabolical hatred.”

This didn’t stop Wuthering Heights from becoming a classic. It was made into a silent film in 1920, with locals crowding around the photo shoot in Haworth and playing extras. The story later moved to a Hollywood studio and enjoyed the romantic Golden Age treatment with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, except for the more problematic second act. At least 15 adaptations for big and small screens followed, ranging from Yoshishi Yoshida’s 1988 retelling set in medieval Japan, to Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version with James Howson as the first black actor to play Heathcliff. (The main criticism leveled against Elordi’s casting is that Heathcliff is widely considered non-white in the book.)

It was the full story of the 1967 BBC series, starring Ian McShane as Heathcliff, that inspired Kate Bush to write her hit song, bringing Wuthering Heights into every home. “I just got to watch the last few minutes, where there’s a hand coming in through the window and there’s blood everywhere and the glass,” she said, admitting that she wrote the song before reading the book.

So why does the story of passion-torn lovers on rain-torn swamps have such hold? “I think Wuthering Heights persists because the relationships between Cathy, Heathcliff and Edgar are not easy to measure,” says author Juno Dawson, who grew up in Bingley and calls the Brontës “the pride of Yorkshire.” Dawson was inspired by Wuthering Heights to write a short story for an anthology called I, Heathcliff. “It doesn’t fit into traditional notions of a romance novel or a ghost story,” she continues. “And every character is frustrating, incomprehensible. If there’s anything I learn from them, it’s that mystery can be as satisfying as exquisite precision.”

I wander around the place where the Brontë family lived, and mingle with my fellow visitors – mostly single women I later notice in Fennell’s talk. “People are always coming on pilgrimage,” says Rebecca Yorke, director of the rectory and Brontë Society, which opened in 1928. “If you look at the visitor book, it’s a mix of the UK, the USA, Australia, Japan and Europe. About a third of our visitors are from abroad.” There are famous signatures too, from Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith.

This is actually my third visit, or pilgrimage, to the rectory with my mother. It keeps pulling us back. Today we learn that the trees in the garden separating it from the cemetery did not grow until after the Brontë family was here. So the family would have had scenes of death on one side, and endless swamps on the other. The rooms are quite stuffy, and downstairs is where they wrote their novels, at a table engraved with the letter “E”. In the corner is the sofa on which Emily died, most likely of tuberculosis, at the age of just 30. The average life expectancy at Haworth was only 24 years, partly due to the overcrowded cemetery contaminating the drinking water. Such details from this place’s past still seem compelling today, especially when it comes to the author of Wuthering Heights.

“Emily is quite mysterious,” York says. “We don’t know as much about her as we do about Charlotte. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was her only novel – but it is one of the most famous novels in the English language.” How, then, can we reconcile this woman, who is described as strange, introverted, and unconventional, with the literary genius who created a novel so painful, dark, and poetic that it still excites people today? As Charlotte said of her sister: “The translator must always stand between her and the world.” So much so that Charlotte made efforts to “correct” Emily’s reputation after her death, adding to the mystery.

The siblings have proven their drama themes almost as popular as their works, from Christopher Fry’s 1973 ITV series The Brontës of Haworth to Sally Wainwright’s 2016 To Walk Invisible for the BBC. In 2022, Emily gets a somewhat re-imagined biopic, with a sentimental portrayal by Emma Mackey, and a salacious relationship with one of the curators. With every new film or TV series, new hordes of tourists flock to Haworth.

Down the hill, a record store bearing the “Never Mind the Brontë” label is just one of many nods to local celebrities. Other windows feature a lampshade made from book pages and bog paintings. Authors live locally, or come to stay on writing retreats, and “there’s this creative feeling at Haworth,” Park says. But did Brontë’s influence have any impact on local culture in ways beyond the obvious? It goes deeper, says Park, with things like the natural sculptures at nearby Penistone Hill Country Park, part of Bradford’s year as a City of Culture. “It’s like Emily is in the heather and the trees. You’re just breathing the air. Wuthering refers to the weather and I feel like she’s made her mark here.”

It’s not just about tourism. Take last month’s Wandering Imaginations project, which saw two young authors from Bradford and two from Ghana write stories inspired by the Brontë brothers’ fictitious African kingdom of Angria. “We’re here for the people who live here,” York says. The society has just acquired a new building on Main Street, where it will focus on “providing opportunities for local people to get closer to their heritage”. She hopes to “instill that sense of pride in something on your doorstep, something that people all over the world think is worth visiting.”

The event that ticks all of Brontë’s boxes, though, is absolutely Wuthering Heights Day, which takes place on July 27 every year. Hundreds of people wearing red dresses gather in venues across the country to sing and dance to Kate Bush’s song. This summer, at Penistone Hill, the campaign also doubled as a campaign to protect Top Withers – believed to be the inspiration for the fictional windswept farm that gave the novel its name – from planned wind farm development.

Of course, Brontë’s Beautiful Country isn’t just for literary nerds. This has always been a rugged paradise for hikers and runners. The Tour de France took off from here in 2014, and inspired the Yorkshire Tour. A moody path behind the rectory leads to a waterfall named after the sisters, where they are said to have spent time. This magical feeling becomes even stronger as you walk around the place following their little steps. “These heather-laden moors call to you as much as they call to Emily, who roamed as free as Cathy,” says Park.

Night fell in Haworth and I headed to the crowded church. The young woman sitting next to me is visiting from New York, and is staying in a hostel for the entire festival weekend, which includes a writing workshop in the swamps the next day. Vinyl comes out wearing a t-shirt stamped with “The Brontë Sisters” in gothic, heavy metal style letters.

She says the book “opened my eyes” after reading it for the first time when I was 14. She cited the “primitive and sexual” initial reaction to her film. But what resonates most in The Room is the way Fennell talks about Wuthering Heights and she speaks to it differently at different points in her life. I recently read it again for the first time in 15 years and couldn’t believe I ever found it interesting.

Many others agree. “If you read it as a teenager, you might think, ‘Oh my God, that would be great to experience love and emotion like this,'” Yorke says. And then, as you get older, you might think, “Actually, that’s not very healthy.” Fennell goes further: “It’s absolutely crazy.”

Perhaps this is why she also “does dirty” for the second half of the book, where she drops it and sticks to the love story. This may have been a missed opportunity to explore Heathcliff with more nuance – although it is impossible to say at this point. But there is a call for further exploration of the novel’s controversial and highly complex relationship with race.

Emily, who was well-read, wrote it in the years after slavery had been abolished in the United Kingdom, and Heathcliff was not found without an “owner” in Liverpool. However, the film is a vinyl edition. “It’s very personal for everyone,” she says. “But I can’t offer something for everyone: no one agrees on any element of it.”

Fennell certainly isn’t afraid to shock, but Dawson doesn’t care. “If someone is going to do it, I’m glad it’s vinyl,” says the author. “She is a director who is not afraid to actually adapt, rather than copy from book to screen.”

As I walked to my car in the dark, silence surrounding the village and the moors, I remembered something Park had told me about Emily. “Her poetry penetrates deep into your soul and into your heart,” she said. “I can’t express how alive I feel.”