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This Emily is a rum-and-gin-drinking, opium-fuelled young woman, whose life was, in O'Connor’s vision, a version of Wuthering Heights.

Australian-British director O'Connor has described her film as putting Emily at the centre of her own story. While reclaiming Emily as a rebel, misfit and the weirdest of the “weird sisters”, as Ted Hughes memorably called them, the film departs knowingly from historical fact, mixing biography with Brontë mythology and dramatic invention to present a very different picture. The film presents a romantic origin story to account for Brontë’s iconic novel. But the historical picture is far more murky. But did a real-life romance inspire Emily Brontë’s only novel? According to Frances O’Connor’s new film, Emily, the answer is yes. One described it as “a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors”.Īfter Brontë’s death, when the novel began to find success, many were surprised to find that such a tempestuous gothic romance had been written by a quiet parson’s daughter.

When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, outraged Victorian critics deemed it savage, indecent and immoral.