Say what?
Looks like there will be a new Emily Bronte biopic...with, of all the people, William Weightman (one of her father's curates) as her love interest. Good lord. Wiliam Weightman, for non-Bronte-afficianiados, is a likeable character in the biographical saga of this talented family - he apparrently was both cheerful and kind; for example, when he heard that none the Brontes and Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey had ever had a Valentine, he walked the twenty odd miles to Bradford to send anonymous Valentines for all three sisters plus Ellen. (They were both touched and amused, correctly identified him as the origin of the Valentines and wrote a bantering poem for him in return.) And he died tragically young (from cholera, which contracted while visiting the sick). But the one member of the family who as far as we know showed zilch interest in him was Emily. Anne is the one suspected of having had a mutual thing with him, though as Bronte biographer Juliet Barker points out, this assumption solely rests on a quote from Charlotte about Anne and Weightman in a letter to Ellen ("he sits opposite to Anne at Church sighing softly - & looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention - & Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast - they are a picture" ) and ignores that Charlotte continues in that same letter: ‘He would be the better of a comfortable wife like you to settle him you would settle him I believe - nobody else would’., which doesn't sound as if she thinks Anne's affections are engaged. You could equally make a case of Charlotte/William Weightman, since she mentions him a lot in her letters and drew his portrait, or even Branwell/William Weightman, since Branwell counted him as a friend and was crushed when he died, especially since it was quickly followed by the death of the aunt who raised him and he was present during the deaths of both. (Charlotte and Emily were in Brussels at the time, and Anne was at Thorpe Green.) (" I have had a long attendance at the death-bed of the Rev. Mr Weightman, one of my dearest friends, and now I am attending at the death-bed of my aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. I expect her to die in a few hours", Branwell to his friend Francis Grundy.) For that matter, you can even find several affectionate quotes from Patrick Brontes about William Weightman, both when his curate was still alive and when he died. But from Emilyl, or about Emily and Weightman? Nothing.
Mind you, the fact is that Emily and Anne provide only a few diary papers in terms of primary source material on their lives, and what else we know of them comes via Charlotte and other people's memories has frustrated many a biographer and fictionalizer. And there's the notorious case of one of them misreading the title of a poem - "Love's Farewell" - as "Louis Parensell" and hunting up and down in Yorkshire registries for this supposed lover of Emily's. Not to mention good old Hollywood inventing in the 1940s a justly forgotten melodram in which Emily ends up in a love triangle with Charlotte and Charlotte's eventual husband, another of Patrick's curates, Arthur Bell Nichols. The desparation to find a fictional love interest for Emily when real life stubbornly refuses to provide one is presumably due to the idea that she couldn't written Wuthering Heights without a rl romantic experience of her own. Insert my eyeroll here. But if you have to put her into a romantic plot, there's always the headmistress of the one school where Emliy briefly taught, Law Hill, who as I dimly recall was an enterprising single woman. Or use the fact Emily never left Gondal (Charlotte left Angria behind, and Anne eventually stopped writing Gondal poetry and stories, but Emily kept writing Gondal poetry even after publishing) and literary give her a lover (of either sex) formed by her own imagination, be adventurous. But don't inflict her Dad's curates on her or her on the curates.
(Meanwhile, for all the bad opinion she and others had of her looks, the Bronte sister who actually turned down several marriage proposals from clergymen, had an unrequited love for her teacher, an intense flirt with her publisher and an eventual marriage right out of a Jane Austen plot was Charlotte. )
Another trailer for an upcoming historical tv show is this one about Catherine de' Medici, called "The Serpent Queen" and starring Samantha Morton in the title role. I note with approval that the trailer contains several scenes of child and teenage Catherine, because however you interpret her, I don't think you can leave out the horrible childhood or the humilation conga she went through as a teenage wife. And Samantha Morton certainly is excellent casting for Catherine in her days of power.
Mind you, the fact is that Emily and Anne provide only a few diary papers in terms of primary source material on their lives, and what else we know of them comes via Charlotte and other people's memories has frustrated many a biographer and fictionalizer. And there's the notorious case of one of them misreading the title of a poem - "Love's Farewell" - as "Louis Parensell" and hunting up and down in Yorkshire registries for this supposed lover of Emily's. Not to mention good old Hollywood inventing in the 1940s a justly forgotten melodram in which Emily ends up in a love triangle with Charlotte and Charlotte's eventual husband, another of Patrick's curates, Arthur Bell Nichols. The desparation to find a fictional love interest for Emily when real life stubbornly refuses to provide one is presumably due to the idea that she couldn't written Wuthering Heights without a rl romantic experience of her own. Insert my eyeroll here. But if you have to put her into a romantic plot, there's always the headmistress of the one school where Emliy briefly taught, Law Hill, who as I dimly recall was an enterprising single woman. Or use the fact Emily never left Gondal (Charlotte left Angria behind, and Anne eventually stopped writing Gondal poetry and stories, but Emily kept writing Gondal poetry even after publishing) and literary give her a lover (of either sex) formed by her own imagination, be adventurous. But don't inflict her Dad's curates on her or her on the curates.
(Meanwhile, for all the bad opinion she and others had of her looks, the Bronte sister who actually turned down several marriage proposals from clergymen, had an unrequited love for her teacher, an intense flirt with her publisher and an eventual marriage right out of a Jane Austen plot was Charlotte. )
Another trailer for an upcoming historical tv show is this one about Catherine de' Medici, called "The Serpent Queen" and starring Samantha Morton in the title role. I note with approval that the trailer contains several scenes of child and teenage Catherine, because however you interpret her, I don't think you can leave out the horrible childhood or the humilation conga she went through as a teenage wife. And Samantha Morton certainly is excellent casting for Catherine in her days of power.