The most mysterious Brontë, revealed and unsolved

YOU PROBABLY KNOW RIGHT OFF THE BAT WHETHER you’re a Wuthering Heights person or a Jane Eyre person. Both, of course, are great.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

But as chilling as Charlotte Brontë’s mad-wife-in-the-attic yarn may be, her sister Emily’s book—a story of melancholic obsession, of love that seeps into the soil of the grave, of pearl gray skies and majestic, gnarled tree branches—speaks to even darker recesses of the human spirit. It’s a book you either embrace forever or want to burn after reading.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction— paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been. Emma Mackey