The tenant of Wildfell Hall was my favourite novel. Anne Bronte.

What a wonderful film - and, for me, discovery. I came to the Brontes in their own words (as opposed to films, plays, museum displays or whatever based on their work) late in life. But over the past couple of years I have read all their novels and taken much from each of them. So to come across this, featuring Chris Smith, who I knew (and worked with on housing and other issues) as a local councillor 40-odd years ago, was a treat. Thank you.

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"The Old Wives Tale" was recommended to me by a lady whose literary tastes I admire. After reading the novel, I'm afraid I didn't share her taste in Arnold Bennett.If Bennett aspired to emulate or perhaps surpass the French realists, I'm afraid he failed with his plodding provincial tale. If the reader wants to know what it was like to live through the siege of Paris, better to read Flaubert's "A Sentimental Education". After the first few chapters of "Old Wives Tale" the trajectory of the two sisters is blindingly obvious- although the portrait of the mother is not altogether locked in to stereotype.

I’m 81 and have been reading her for decades. Never get tired of re-reading her novels. For wit with romance ..she cannot be rivaled.

Very interesting opinions 🤔

Emily Bronte, heretic....Wuthering Heights, a celebration of evil. Such conclusions ring far more true than all claims of romance and beyond-passionate love stories that readers mesmerized by the book's hypnotic language fruitlessly search for and believe they see. Cruelty, rage, depravity, brutality, or the banality of appetite is present on virtually every page, whereas the prospect of Christian love and forgiveness is nowhere to be found. Why from a clergyman's daughter, one wonders? Or perhaps equally curious, why are most (I exclude Henry T) of Jane Austen's men of the cloth such fools or hypocrites? Did Emily see the world this way, too, did she see her fellow humans and herself without masks, but elected to tell her strange story screened by a series of faulty masks? We are given the bones of the stories through a series of suspect narrators, and any descriptions (provided by the overarching Lockwood) encourage the conceit that Emily has allowed her characters to behave as they do because that is who they are, yet we're never actually inside anyone's head. We are shown the surface effects of things and are told of the passions, but it is all from multiple removes. I came to the book hoping to experience the moors and glory in their description, but Mr. TB is correct in stating this is mostly an indoors tale. We are told of the wind-swept and mostly unproductive and austere landscape, but we don't see our principals actually grappling it head on. The whole enterprise has an unreal flavor about it that likely mirrors what the ungenerous might label Emily's genteel but anger-filled inner Karen. The book proves Emie was better than her company, and suggests she was not at all approving of how The Creator ran his show.

I’m sure the death of her mother and sisters as well as the experience at school contributed to some of her cynicism and darkness seen in her writing cited here in this documentary. It is ironic because what becomes of them is so tragic.

Wuthering Heights is a story that haunts me to my core. It portrays an unrelenting ugliness in humanity and I guess Emily understood such characterization natural in light of man being not much more than beast when whittled down. I actually prefer Charlotte's steadfast loyalty to grace and goodness as the overarching supernatural quality which enables man's transcendence over beast. Emily's sheer talent is otherworldly though, and a testament to a transcendence as well. Wow.

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We visited the cemetery to pay our respects to my grandmother’s younger brother Second Lieutenant Francis Hicking who died on July 1, 1916 aged 19. A very moving experience. His brother, Lieutenant George Hicking died on the same day and he is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial. Her third brother Major HY Hicking survived the war, winning the MC and twice mentioned in dispatches. May they and their colleagues rest in peace

No mention of all of her overt mystical poetry. She was no anti-Christian.

Heathcliff was a dangerous, repulsive psychopath. I never understood why he was fluffed into a “romantic hero”. Must have been all those movie versions.

This is wonderful.

Thank you. This was excellent.

This documentary honors that of God in everything.

This has sparked my imagination, and left me on a higher plane today. Which is good at bedtime. Thank you.

The secret of "Wuthering Heights", the great novel by Emili Brontë, is that it is a tribute to his brother: he was the one scorned... by a lady of high lineage, and it seems that he had taken his love seriously, which was not the case, but quite the opposite. The topic was addressed in the biography of Emily, recently carried out by Winifred Gérin (Editorial Atlanta, 2008, in Spanish, and Editorial Oxford University Press, 1971, in English), which seems to corroborate some things that Elizabeh Gaskell says about it. , incidentally in his biography of Charlotte Brontë. There is no direct evidence, through references, etc., but what Gérin indicates makes sense: the one despised (like Heathcliff) was her brother, and - it seems - also very badly treated (due to the message of some servant of that lady"). It seems that this was what motivated the brother's ravings until he reached madness and died from excessive intake of opium and alcohol (there were no anti-depressants at that time). This is what made Emily so sensitive, because of the injustice, on the one hand, and on the other because of the bad treatment that her brother suffered, which led him to seriously rave.

I think she had Asperger’s.

Thank you for this documentary!

One f*ng thing about Britain: They gave to the world: the Bronte Sisters, Jane Austin, Elizabeth I, yes, much to my chagrain: Thatcher!!!; the suffragettes, Agahat Christie, Princess Diana, okie okie Betty II, Julie Christie, the spice girls, Victoria Beckham (ok she is an spice, but..); NAOMI CAmpbell; Jane Austen, Miranda Hart!(of course there are many more, but, for now, my enebriated mind is all I can ....AMY Winehouse!!

a little while, a little while by Emily in a little song here kzbin.info/www/bejne/a2WqmYmvqbF_o80

My favorite Bronte, i adore her ❤

I really enjoyed chloe pirrie's performance of Emily in the film 'To walk invisible'

All three sisters possessed genius. Branwell didn’t develop his.

Charlotte may have much to answer for. Emily was writing another book. What happened to it? It's obvious Charlotte considered herself the superior writer. Anne and Emily were unlearned? They were governess, and Emily both studied and taught abroad. And I know one thing, Emily never would have married a curate and quit writing.

Very nicely done. I've always felt that out of all the Bronte sisters, Emily was the more interesting one, at least to my own romantic soul. Thank you for posting this.

Fantastic book. But just a book. A musing of a woman who wanted to set herself free from God. Heaven is heaven, hell is hell. There is no changing that.

The profile portrait is not of Emily but of Anne

A note on the water supply: the Brontes drank from a well behind the Parsonage above the graveyard, so their store did not pass through it. Her death is more likely to result from nursing the ailing Branwell and contacting tuberculosis, etc, from him.

The new study Iquitos has published

Private John William Hope Prince of Wales Own, West Yorkshire Regiment (10th Battalion) 3/9771. 04/04/1893-01/07/1916 Body never found.

I like her even more after watching this. I think we would be very good friends

Runway Emily. LOL!

I first read her books after finding them on my mother’s bookshelf’s and she encouraged me to read them as well as Richmal Compton p’s Just William books. I was about 11-12 at the time and absolutely loved them. My mother was extremely well read and I was quite surprised that she had so many of her romance novels, until I found how amazing they were. Now at 55 I recently got rid of my smart phone as I was too addicted and have found myself reading again a lot more. I found a number of second hand CD collections of Heyer’s books well narrated by famous English actors and have been listening to them every day on my commute. They are even better than I remember and will be encouraging my 22 & 20 year old daughters to give them a try. My 20 yr old loves K-drama romances on Netflix as only Korea seems to be still producing well plotted, romance drama in 2023. The need for romance novels and Georgette Heyer will never die, she was so talented and her writing is so witty, well researched and a joy. A wonderful gift to the world.

How wonderful. I’ve loved Georgette Heyer’s books since I was 13. I’m happy to see she has been honored with a plaque. These Old Shades and Devils Cub are two of my all time favorite books.

50 years of reading and re-reading her books and I still don't get bored.

Thanks for posting, I missed this when it was first broadcast.

Can I just say that I'm happy the House of Lords in England has such a wonderful member as the narrator of this documentary. It makes me happy.

Duisans is a lovely cemetery - we have relatives there...............

I certainly understand Emily's persona

I understand how nature can have an influence of your soul

Their father out lived his children

The Devil's cub and Friday child are my favourites. Dominique and Mary made me fall in love with Georgette Heyer. Is there any movy of the Devil's cub?

Ah! could my hand unlock its chain, How gladly would I watch it soar, And ne'er regret and ne'er complain To see its shining eyes no more. But let me think that if to-day It pines in cold captivity, To-morrow both shall soar away, Eternally, entirely Free.

Like so many devotees, I’ve been reading Georgette Heyer’s wonderful works since my early teens - 65 years. Like Mr Fry, I love her language and the depth of her research into every aspect of the roughly 50 years her books cover. I have heard her books dismissed as ‘bodice rippers’ or ‘light love’. No, no, no. Those epithets can refer to her innumerable plagiarists who range from Barbara Cartland to Mills and Boon. Miss Heyer’s use of the language of the period is amazing. It is totally painless to have learned so much history by reading her books.

A superior analysis of Emily traits I’m sure the minds eye sees in oneself

Love her mystery stories 😊😊

There are several elements that contributed to the Bronte's geniuses. 1. Living in such a barren, windy, isolated, landscape full of working class people, peasants, farmers. An area where these folk were not worldly but religious and grew up on oral tradition, especially ghost tales and fairy stories. 2. Bronte children were homeschooled after a typhus epidemic at Low Wood School, and their father a preacher and widower let them have more free-time to indulge in their imaginations than average children. It all started with a set of toy soldiers and they became child authors publishing their first books, tiny little books, with teeny letters. 3. Tabby the housekeeper was a Yorkshire woman herself. She was the live in housekeeper of the Brontes that became their family. At night, when the branches tapped the windows with the wind blowing, she would gather the children on the kitchen floor in front of the wood stove with one candle, and tell ghost stories about the moors. With a baked apple each child would sit eyes wide, mouths agape, listening, and looking at the dancing shadows on the walls, while the wind blew, and stirred their restless minds even more. *She also told them the reason you didn't see fairies anymore, was due to the mills being built along the rivers and streams. She fed their imaginations. 4. They were all voracious readers. 5. It's also obvious they were all above average in intellect. 6. They were poor, and experienced Lowwood School, poverty at the boarding school and deaths, lived near a cemetery, father was a preacher, and even had some experience as being governesses. Emily was the only one that refused to work out, staying at home. But these experiences became fodder for their stories about Victorian life of poor and social injustices. Combine all of these and you've the Brontes.

Greetings! I found your program about Emily Bronte to be of great personal interest to me, most of all the segment on The Belgian Essays. I've studied about the Bronte sisters and their lives and works, and your program helped me gain a better understanding of her because of the three sisters she and her novel stood out the most to me. I've been on my own journey with the Brontes just like you've been on yours. Please write back sometime, I'd like to talk about it. Thanks, Phillip!