Muse, Sister, Myth: The Cultural Afterlives of Emily Brontë on Screen

Abstract

This article was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Bicentenary Conference for Emily Brontë, Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music (7–9 September 2018, Marriott Hotel, York). It explores the cultural portrayal and legacy of Emily Brontë through an analysis of several representative screen adaptations of both her biography and her novel, Wuthering Heights. It uses the recent BBC biopic directed by Sally Wainwright, To Walk Invisible (2016), as the guiding screen adaptation around which to discuss the various ways Emily Brontë has been adapted as a cultural persona on screen, imagined in various guises as a mystical author, a radical feminist ‘sister’, and a muse for our contemporary age. Moving from classic Hollywood film to recent independent and BBC productions, this article suggests that Emily Brontë has become implicated in wider and ongoing cultural debates about authorial identity, gender and myths of creativity that contemporary culture has inherited from the nineteenth century.