One more positive review for the film Emily comes from Variety, which compares it implicitly with the latest take on Jane Austen's Persuasion.

There are no flirtations with the fourth wall in Frances O’Connor’s “Emily.” There is no synthpop on the soundtrack. No one ranks the relative attractiveness of the Brontë sisters on a scale out of 10, or attempts, bustle be damned, to twerk. Yet despite lacking all markers of the recent trend for girlbossified costume drama, the directorial debut from O’Connor — an actor who is no stranger to corsetry herself after “Mansfield Park” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” — gives us a strikingly current take on the Brontë behind “Wuthering Heights.” Unlike many a literary biopic, it feels anything but pagebound. If “Emily” were a book, however, it would be a fresh reissue of a Penguin Classic, with its timeless orange cover unobtrusively updated to be crisp and covetable all over again. 

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In attentively reimagining Emily Brontë as a new woman unluckily born into old days, O’Connor’s chief ally is her star, Emma Mackey. At first, Mackey’s modernity seems almost like miscasting, and not just because the actress is most familiar from Netflix’s self-consciously au courant “Sex Education.” Her gaze seems too direct, her jaw too firmly set to sit easily in the demure environs of rigidly respectable 1840s country life.

But that quickly becomes the point, with Mackey able to convey simultaneously that this is all the world her character has ever known, that she loves it deeply, and that she is entirely bewildered by it. Most of her interactions are clouded by incomprehension at why things that are so clear to her should seem so peculiar to everyone else. In a fit of frustration at her unworldiness, Emma’s elder sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling, by turns sweet and severe, like a peppered strawberry) tells her that she is called “the strange one” in the village. Being ahead of your time, while you’re still living through it, looks a lot like simply being out of your time. 

Emily even faints wrong, as she does in the opening flashforward, not swooning delicately but crumpling under her own weight, needing to be shuffled to a couch by Charlotte and Anne (Amelia Gething), the youngest, peacemaker sibling.  While Anne rushes to find their father (Adrian Dunbar), an unyielding but not unkind local rector, Charlotte tries to prise the secret inspiration behind Emily’s “base, ugly” novel from her. “Why is it so hard for you to believe that your sister might have written something of merit?” Emily whispers. And so O’Connor, working from her own unflowery screenplay, slyly acknowledges the paradox of a film that wants us to believe Emily Brontë had a vivid enough interior life to have wholly invented “Wuthering Heights” — but also that, in some part, she lived it. [...]

DP Nanu Segal’s photography is pretty but not prettified, and integral to the contemporary vibe. The subtle shake of the elegant, handheld camerawork becomes more pronounced outdoors, as though caught in the blustery dampness of the moors outside Haworth parsonage, the Brontë residence. Inside, the camera, dim with cloud-filtered daylight, settles pensively into rooms scuffed and unfussy, without a hint of chintz, sometimes pulling a trio of faces into a circle of candlelight out of a pure black background. Set to Abel Korzeniowski’s exceptional score, which is tempestuous and classical but frays at the edges into scraping violins, the filmmaking at times borders on the expressionistic, without ever betraying the traditional period form. 

Brontë purists may quibble with the futzing of the timeline. Here, Branwell dies just before Emily writes her legendary book, not after; the unmentioned “Jane Eyre” is implied to have come later again, when in fact it was the first Brontë novel to be published; and Anne never so much as picks up a quill. But O’Connor’s well-modulated debut doesn’t pretend to be a faithful recreation of the facts of the Brontës’ lives. Instead it succeeds on a much trickier level, giving us a psychologically vivid Emily who did not write “Wuthering Heights” because a real-life romance unlocked her passionate nature, but whom we’d love to imagine having had such a grand affair, because she was always the woman with “Wuthering Heights” inside her. (Jessica Kiang)

When I got the chance to get my hands on Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste for review, I jumped at it. Although I’m not familiar with Kiste’s work, I’m a sucker for revisionist versions of classics, especially the ones that reexamine the role of maligned or largely disregarded women (looking at you, The Mists of Avalon, Wicked). The classics in this case are Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. [...]

When we find them, Lucy (Dracula’s ill-fated victim) has formed a bond with Bertha (Edward Rochester’s attic-bound first wife), or Bee, as she likes to go by now. They’re living together in Hollywood, of all places, but both are trapped in a limbo where they’re simply existing while doing their best to avoid their past and the looming presence of the men that used and abused them. 

Sadly, we don’t get as much of Bee as I would have liked. Her character mostly serves Lucy’s arc to let herself open up to another friend again after being closed off so long (with Bee doing the same in turn). To some extent, Bee could have been replaced with another character instead of plucking Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre and suggesting such a drastic retelling of Jane Eyre. 

The book takes Dracula’s plot to heart, alluding to key moments in Lucy’s story such as her three proposals and Van Helsing’s attempt to save her life. Meanwhile, Jane Eyre gets the full revisionist treatment, suggesting that the people in control of the public narrative have twisted the facts to the point of being unrecognizable. Kiste certainly proposes a very interesting and juicy narrative, from how exactly Rochester and Bertha became immortal to changes in the core relationships from the book. Therefore, I’m left wishing the story had tipped more than a toe into that mystery. 

With all that said, Bee does get her own complete arc, and her friendship and sorority with Lucy is what carries the story — and Lucy — through to the end. I would have loved to see more of her, and her internal life. I do believe a split point of view would have served this book very well; there are pivotal moments in which I would have loved to jump into Bee’s head. 

The author doesn’t stop at Lucy and Bee, though. Other characters from one or both of the original novels make appearances and also get the revisionist treatment. There’s one character in particular that caught me off guard with how emotional and ultimately satisfying their arc is. I won’t spoil it here, but this is the part of the book that truly made me revise my own reading and emotions towards the original material, which is the ultimate goal of revisionist material. 

Of Rochester and Dracula’s part I’ll only say that I’m happy they’re both portrayed as exactly and unambiguously what they were in their original stories, especially Rochester. [...]

Reluctant Immortals makes no claim of excessive intellectualism, and in that unpretentiousness, I found myself more satisfied with the protagonists’ vindication than I ever did with the likes of The Mists of Avalon or even Wicked. In the end, sometimes I just need a bit of wish fulfillment, and this story delivers exactly that. I was left, however, with the urgent and unfulfilled desire to read Kiste’s version of Jane Eyre. (Alejandra)