BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
TO WALK INVISIBLE: THE BRONTE SISTERS BBC ONE, 29 DECEMBER, 9PM DIRECTOR: SALLY WAINWRIGHT
What to read, watch and listen to this month, from a Brontë drama to a Hebridean journey.
Sally Wainwright writes and directs this biopic of the Brontë sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte. It’s a bleak but beautiful production, set in the stunning landscape of the North York Moors, where the three girls and their brother Branwell were brought up by their curate father.
The drama is set in their adulthood at home in the village of Thornton, with flashbacks of their fiction-filled childhood. The narrative follows the evolution of Charlotte, Emily and Anne into three of Britain’s most heralded authors, in an era when women were rarely recognised as writers, or indeed in any field.
The small, drab but turbulent domestic world that they inhabit is juxtaposed by the wide bright expanse of the moors – their indoors landscape oppressive; their outdoor landscape liberating. It is made clear that the freedom and wildness of the land fires their imaginations, and infuses some of their greatest works, from Charlotte’s Jane Eyre to Emily’s poetry and Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
The chaotic heart of the drama is their depressed and dissolute brother Branwell (Adam Nagaitis), a failed poet plagued by demons of despair. His acts of self-destruction disrupt their domestic life, and yet the family’s love endures.
A slightly sentimental ending aside, the drama provides an engaging and fascinating insight into the lives of these extraordinary women and the hardships they weathered in the 1840s.