The IMDb page shows that this film was been rated an average of 7.1 by 352 men. That’s exactly 352 more men than have ever read a book by Emily Bronte.
Just kiddin’. I read Wuthering Heights (her only novel). In fact I read it twice, but to be fair:
1. I majored in English Lit as an undergrad, and it was required reading for the course on “The English Novel.”
2. I’m not all that manly.
Weirdly enough for a prestige project, this film fabricates an important distortion of history. The first edition of Wuthering Heights is pictured with her name listed as the author.
This is not possible. She wrote under the name Ellis Bell, and her identity was not revealed until after her death. Wuthering Heights was published while she was alive.
Here is the actual first edition from 1847:
And here is an edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey from 1858, ten years after Emily’s death, in which she and her sister Anne were still identified as Ellis and Acton Bell
The reason it’s important to get this right is that it demonstrates that era’s attitude toward women, which is a crucial fact in a Bronte biopic. What’s really odd is that this was not a mistake, but a deliberate decision by the filmmaker, as evidenced by the fact that the prop book has obviously been modeled exactly on the real book, except for the name. (See the two images above.)
Another key fact is that publishers of the time were not even clear that Emily and her other sister, Charlotte, were two different people. In the first American printing, the publisher didn’t even identify the author by name, but just listed it as “By the author of Jane Eyre” which was in fact her sister, Charlotte. (Or maybe I should say “his brother, Currer.”)