Here’s everything you need to know about the forthcoming literary biopic.
The headlines:
Sex Education’s Emma Mackey leads the cast as the titular heroine, while newcomers Alexandra Dowling and Amelia Gething appear as Charlotte and Anne, respectively. Meanwhile, Oliver Jackson-Cohen delivers a breakout performance as Emily’s dashing love interest, William Weightman—more on him below—and Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead takes a turn as her brother Branwell, whom many mistakenly credited with writing Wuthering Heights upon its publication.
Emily is due to hit U.K. theaters on October 14. A U.S. date has not yet been confirmed.
Emily imagines what might have inspired Emily’s moody literary output, in a way that’s comparable to Shakespeare in Love—albeit drawing on real historical figures from the Brontës’ parish rather than wholly fictional characters.
The first trailer for the biopic dropped on August 11; watch it in full below.
The details:
Rather than creating a purely historical account, director Frances O’Connor takes the opportunity with Emily to fantasize about what might have led the middle Brontë sister to write Wuthering Heights. Her wild theory? That the reclusive Emily had an affair with Weightman, an assistant curate who worked with her father, Patrick, a rector in the Yorkshire town of Haworth.
While there’s no historical evidence of any romance between Emily and Weightman, the Durham graduate did play a significant role in the life of every member of the Brontë family. Arriving at their parsonage in 1839, Weightman immediately charmed the three sisters—delivering them personalized Valentine’s cards after learning that none of them had ever received one. He would become a dear friend of Emily, whom contemporaries described as incredibly reclusive, even by the Brontës’ standards.
It’s Anne, though, who’s generally believed to have been in love with Weightman—portraying him as the Reverend Weston in her criminally underrated novel, Agnes Grey. He’s also believed to have inspired many of Anne’s poems after his death from cholera at the age of 26. Charlotte, too, fell under Weightman’s spell for a while, before later dismissing him in a letter to her friend Ellen with her usual severity: “For all the tricks, wiles and insincerities of love the gentleman has not his match for 20 miles round.”
The works of the Brontë sisters are inextricably bound up with the Yorkshire landscape, and O’Connor insisted on shooting the biopic in and around their native Haworth (in spite of frequent rain), with actual village scenes filmed on the high street that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne would have frequented. Meanwhile, a Georgian manor in Dent stood in for the girls’ home, as their actual parsonage is a functioning museum.
Given their collective status as literary titans, it’s hard to imagine the reality of the Brontë sisters’ busy everyday lives, a fact that Emily tries to correct by shadowing the writer as she experiments like every other twenty-something. Her partner-in-crime throughout: her brother Branwell, who proved a constant source of anxiety for his family (and whom Emily hero-worshipped). Branwell, whom some believe to have partly inspired the character of Heathcliff, and his many demons are central to the plot of Emily.
In spite of early promise, the only boy among the Brontë children failed to make a living as a painter in Bradford—his first dream—before being fired from a number of positions ranging from a school tutor to a railway clerk. He gave rise to further scandal when he moved into the nearby Thorp Green Hall to work as a tutor at Anne’s recommendation, only to be sacked from that post, too—allegedly for having a relationship with his employer’s wife.
Within a few more years, Branwell had become reliant on drugs and alcohol (with a special penchant for opium), moving back into the family home in Haworth. After setting fire to his own bedroom, he had to sleep with his father for his own safety. When Branwell died at the age of 31, Charlotte tellingly wrote: “I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light…”
It’s still yet to be officially confirmed that Mackey will decline to return for the next season of Sex Education, but she has a number of interesting film projects coming up that will no doubt keep her busy. In addition to Eiffel, a period drama about the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Netflix star has a yet-to-be-disclosed role in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming Barbie movie, with rumors flying that she may be appearing as Barbie’s look-alike younger sister, Skipper.