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Introduction

1Since an offshoot refers to “[s]omething which originated or developed from something else” (OED), much contemporary fiction can be seen as an offshoot of the past, if only because the past is a predominant subject in contemporary fiction, as made obvious, for instance, by the very title of Peter Kemp’s Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction (2023). One of the ways in which the past permeates our present is through its authors, who are “by far the primary candidates for resuscitation in other writers’ fiction”.1 Hence the recent rise in the genre of biofiction but also, since the early 1990s, of biopics (i.e. biographical pictures) devoted to a writer.2 Even a novel adaptation like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) weaves in elements that belong to the author biopic by developing the character of the aspiring author. The biopic is the type of offshoot we will focus on here, examining the representation on the screen of real-life writers associated with Romanticism: Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), as impersonated by Elle Fanning and Emma Mackey in Haifa Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley (2017) and Frances O’Connor’s Emily (2022), respectively. Following Belen Vidal’s definition, “the term ‘biopic’ refers to a fiction film that deals with a figure whose existence is documented in history, and whose claims to fame or notoriety warrant the uniqueness of her story”.3 Interestingly, the success of author biopics (and biofiction) contradicts the “death of the author” asserted by Roland Barthes, a notion that seems to have prevailed only in the academic world. Indeed, what is particularly interesting for us is the notion, developed notably by Hila Shachar in Screening the Author,4 that the author displayed in biopics is largely based on “the Romantic conception of authorship, with its stress on individuality, on uniqueness and originality”.5 Therefore, the author biopic, as a whole, can be considered as a “Romantic offshoot”. Yet, incidentally, if Romantic authors have been the object of biographical fiction, as attested to by Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (1999),6 they do not feature so prominently in biopics. Moreover, looking at the list of author biopics established by Judith Buchanan in 20137 that features Jane Austen, John Keats, Lord Byron, John Clare, Samuel T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth, it seems that, overall, in the cultural imagination, the Romantic authors represented on screen tend to be male poets. The respective films by Al-Mansour and O’Connor widen this perspective by putting in the limelight Mary Shelley, who was part of Romantic circles, and Emily Brontë, whose Wuthering Heights has been called “the most purely Romantic novel”.8

2With biopics, as with adaptations in general, the vexing question of fidelity and factual truth is never far away. Thus, Madhu Benoit has drawn a list of all the inaccuracies and distortions regarding the Romantic poets and ideas in Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley.9 Along the same lines, when presenting Emily both the director and the main actress insist that it is not “a traditional biopic”,10 in reference to parts of the film seen as “fictionalised”, thus hinting that a biopic should be true to life. An opposite view is held by scholars like Mickael Lackey who, looking at the rather similar phenomenon of biofiction, think that, as creative writers, novelists are free to tamper with the historical record. Biography is anyway no longer the stable genre it was once thought to be, and, as Siv Jansson aptly remarks, “the instability of biography as a source may be advantageous for the process of making drama: there can be no a priori text to which the adapter must adhere”.11 If we follow Jansson, authors like the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley are fictional constructs to us anyway because of the temporal distance and the multiplication of discourses derived from various sources,12 including their earlier representation on screen. Indeed, in the case of biopics, as Linda Hutcheon observes, when she briefly makes an indirect mention of the genre in her A Theory of Adaptation, “the adapted text is more complex or even multiple”.13 Regarding author biopics, it is quite common for them to draw parallels between a writer’s life and their work, modelling the life and personality of the author on his/her most popular creation: examples include Becoming Jane (directed by Julian Jarrold [2007]), in which Austen “begins the film as Elizabeth Bennet and ends it as Anne Elliot”,14 and the TV series Fleming: The Man Who Would be Bond (2014).15 We will consider to what extent and to what ends Mary Shelley and Emily deviate or not from this template.

3This article examines the diverse ways in which the main (or only, in the case of Emily Brontë) fictional work of the writers fuels the biopics at the same time as the literary figures are redefined, “re-authored”16 by the films. I will show how the fictional universe of the novels is appropriated, and then turn to the role of the physical books and the activity of writing in the films, all with the prospect of conveying an empowering image of female authorship. Before doing so, a little contextualisation is in order.

The Wider Picture

4The biopic is a genre as diverse as it is popular and commercially successful despite receiving generally derogatory treatment from reviewers and critics.17 The two films under study qualify as literary biopics (i.e. biopics of authors), but they are also women’s biopics, which Dennis Bingham shows to be distinct from their male counterparts. Finally, as Hila Shachar rightly insists, it is inadequate to lump together all biopics, as they both fuel and feed off their times.18 Our study thus calls for contextualisation.

5The genre of the biopic in its early studio era in Hollywood was initially concerned with great men.19 In women’s biopics of the same era, “the female protagonist […] is always positioned in relation to men”,20 as can be seen in Devotion (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946), the first movie based on the lives of the Brontë siblings.

6Today’s biopic is no longer ruled by censorship and studio-era logic, but it attends to “our own era’s multiple industrial, cultural, national, and ideological concerns”.21 In this way, it can be seen as in line with the “neo-historical” trend, itself originating from the “neo-Victorian” genre that since the 1990s has revisited the nineteenth century, giving a voice and/or a story to figures previously forgotten or considered as minor (such as women, homosexuals, the lower classes, etc.). The focus of the biopic has thus widened, embracing lesser-known figures or approaching a famous one in relation to a lesser-known figure, as is the case for Keats and his romance with Fanny Brawne in Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009).

7More inclusive, recent biopics question and challenge the patriarchal discourse by bringing to the fore female figures previously excluded from the main narrative. Indeed, both Mary Shelley and Emily give pride of place to a relatively well-known woman but who until recently had to share the screen with others. Looking at Mary Shelley in films from the late 1980s, Megen De Bruin-Molé notes that they “seem primarily interested in Shelley's relationship with the Romantic poets, rather than her own identity as a writer”.22 As for Emily, it is the first film to focus on this Brontë sister, in contrast to previous films which embraced all the siblings. Penacchia and Cartmell rightly point out that, even if recent biopics remain conservative in certain respects, they nevertheless engage with contemporary issues, such as “the exigency to enfranchise women from their subordinate position in history in order to support and encourage female agency”,23 a process which is at work in both films under study.

8Indeed, neither Mary Shelley nor Emily Brontë are, however, obscure or forgotten writers, and both biopics capitalise on their well-known stories. Promotional posters for Mary Shelley thus indicate that the heroine is the author of Frankenstein, and the film uses a quote from the novel as an epigraph. Similarly, posters for Emily specify that the film deals with “the imagination behind Wuthering Heights”, and the opening shots feature copies of the book on which one can read “Wuthering Heights, a novel, Emily Brontë” (see 00.01.46).24 In both cases, a potentially “unknowing” audience is targeted. The surprising fact that Brontë’s name appears on the book cover when it is rather well-known and significant that the novel was published under a pseudonym (Ellis Bell) may be put down to the need to clarify things for a young audience.

9Frances O’Connor has voiced her hope that her film “will inspire a new generation of young women as the novel once inspired her.”25 “The author biopic template”, Deborah Cartmell notes, “focuses on the ‘becoming’ of the author”,26 and both Mary Shelley and Emily are indeed “coming of age” movies in which the young heroine eventually manages to write and publish her work. Interestingly, “Find your own voice, Mary”, which is a leitmotiv in Al-Mansour’s film, is echoed by O’Connor in interviews, in relation to Emily Brontë.

10Mary Shelley and Emily thus focus on the creation of the work that made the woman into the author we know (i.e., Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights). Both biopics offer an imaginative explanation of the circumstances in which the novel for which they are famous came about. What underlies both biopics is the fact that Shelley and Brontë produced striking and unique novels at a young age, Bronte’s novel, for one, being deemed “an anomaly; of no clear genre”.27 Literary authorship is thus at the heart of these biopics, which can be termed romantic, with and without a capital “R”.

11First, the Romantic idea of the solitary genius is present in both films: for Andrew Bennett, “the Romantic author is ultimately seen as different from humanity”,28 which translates thus: “The biopic subject, at least in the male Great Man variant, is usually posed as a visionary with a pure, one of a kind talent or idea who must overcome opposition to his idea or even just to himself.”29 Al-Mansour and O’Connor both adapt this template to their female protagonist, who is shown as unique, “different” and standing out.30 Mary is shown to be morally superior to the rest, be it in her parting scene with Byron, in her relationship with the unfaithful Shelley, or in her support to her half-sister Claire Clairmont. As for Brontë, this difference is rendered visually through multiple over-the-shoulder shots when the character stands apart from the community but also from her family and her siblings, looking in on or looking at others.

12Moreover, in order to enhance the singularity and the achievement of the heroines, adverse surroundings are created: both are shown as experiencing loneliness and estrangement. Percy Shelley on screen is unreliable and unsupportive. He and Byron appear as decadent and/or irresponsible, treating their women quite badly, which leads Madhu Benoit to declare it to be “a film on the victimization of women”,31 which may be only partly true, as this serves to create an adverse context to set off Mary’s singularity and moral superiority, her development and eventual emergence as an artist in an empowering ending. In O’Connor’s film, Emily is “the odd one” (00.21.38). She is unusually singled out from the Brontë siblings, who, significantly, rarely appear together in the same shot. Charlotte and Branwell Brontë are now the villains: Charlotte is censorious and uncomprehending, while Branwell is unreliable and devious. O’Connor claims her film is an attempt to do justice to Emily: “Charlotte Brontë devoted herself to curating the sisters’ reputation, with the result that nobody really knows the truth of them. […] I feel like Emily has been edited for a lot of her life. This is me taking her and putting her in the centre of her own story”.32 This, however, is done at the expense of Charlotte and Anne. While Anne’s Agnes Grey, the third of the three-volume publication, is never mentioned, Charlotte is turned into a priggish, narrow-minded character. Emily accuses her in French across the dinner table: “Tu habites un petit monde minuscule tout propre et sans danger” (1.21.41), which seems unfair to the author of Jane Eyre and ironically echoes Charlotte’s own words about Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice she saw as “[a]n accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers – but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy – no open country – no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck.”33

13In a dialogue in the film, Emily and her lover, William Weightman, a vicar in the parish, discuss the source of their writing:

Emily: Where do you get your ideas from? […] Do you ever feel it’s not coming from you at all?
Weightman: Yes, as if I chanced to be in the right place and it chose me.
Emily: I feel that too when my writing is at its best. (1.17.25-1.18.06)

14We recognize here the Romantic version of the author who, Andrew Bennet tells us, “is conceived as a subject inspired by forces outside himself, forces that allow him to produce work of originality and genius”.34 This participates in the conflicting impulse of the biopic “to declare special and to render ordinary”35: while the film lays the stress on the transcendental nature of her writing, a title like Emily that drops the family name seems to make a formidable figure approachable, just like the plot when it deals with writers as women in love.

15Indeed, the way in which both films go about putting women writers in the centre is through love stories. In this respect, they align with what Bekers and Willems call “patriarchal” biopics of female writers that portray female authors “in relation to their love interests […] centralizing a romance story”.36 Cartmell even talks of a trap: “the biopic trap of presenting writing as inextricably connected with love”.37 If their literary achievement is not downplayed in Mary Shelley and in Emily, as was the case in early studio-era productions,38 the solitary genius is unhappy in love, and this brings about her work.39 Indeed, as Primorac noticed, a number of biopics collate author’s life and character’s life and “explain away their writing careers as inspired by, or a direct result of, a broken heart”.40 In fact, following the pattern of romance fulfils the requirement for biopics to entertain, as they are guided by “commercial imperatives and audience share”.41 For Belén Vidal, however, romance is a means to an end: “the contemporary biopic shows a renewed engagement with the formative narratives of feminism […] while filtering them through the politics of romance”.42 Vidal’s remark seems quite appropriate for both Mary Shelley and Emily, which seek to draw the portrait of strong women authors of unique novels.

Appropriating the Novels

16As noted by Buchanan in her study of author biopics, “fictionalized film versions of the writer’s life may be invited to […] mimic one of the writer’s most celebrated or prominent works”.43 Both Mary Shelley and Emily draw on the novel for which the protagonist is remembered.

17In Mary Shelley, the story, the circumstances of its composition and the publication of the novel Frankenstein are all instrumentalised to make a 21^st-century portrait of the young author. First, the novel is appropriated to explain how Mary became the author of Frankenstein: what is singled out in the narrative is the rejection of the creature. As the film lays the emphasis on the feelings of the monster to transpose them onto the character of Mary, a biographical reading of the novel is offered according to which the writing of Frankenstein and the depiction of the creature’s predicament are the result of Mary’s sense of loss and abandonment following the death of her child and Percy Shelley’s unreliability. Secondly, Frankenstein and the story of its coming about serve to convey the feminist portrait of a determined young woman. The last third of the biopic is thus devoted to Mary’s efforts and difficulties to achieve recognition for her work and not be swallowed up in Percy Shelley’s fame. The depiction of her struggle to see her name in print sends a strong feminist signal to the viewers. This culminates in a scene of rejection of the manuscript by a (male) publisher who hints that the work has been written by Percy, which enables Fanning to deliver a few home truths that point to gender inequalities that resonate with the audience today:

If I’m old enough to bear children, I’m old enough to put pen to paper. […] Did you ask this of Mr. Shelley when he first presented his work to you? Or do you save this insult for young women? And you dare to question a woman’s ability to experience loss, death.....betrayal. All of which is present in this story. In my story. Which you would have realized if you’d employed the time judging the work instead of judging me. (1.38.03-1.38.11)

18This scene illustrates how the novels, the past and their inhabitants are reconstructed to serve the present. Setting and period details convey a sense of accuracy and authenticity that shrouds and disguises our contemporary concerns for woman’s self-assertion, expression and fulfilment.44 This type of rejection inscribes Mary Shelley in what Bekers and Willems identify as #MeToo literary biopics, which are “characterized by a focus on #MeToo-related notions, such as ‘getting the word out’, empowerment, and solidarity”.45 In Al-Mansour’s film, the male opposition Mary meets includes Percy Shelley, who is shown to try and change the story written by Mary. Indeed, biopics like Mary Shelley, in Bekers and Willems’s words, “critique a society that refuses women recognition and actively denies them a platform from which to speak out”.46

19Emily opens on shots of copies of Wuthering Heights, establishing the link between the writer and her work. Like Mary Shelley, Emily is a celebrity biopic that fills in the gaps in the famous writer’s life.47 The mystery surrounding the writer and her unique novel is what drives the film and what it builds on. In interviews, actress Emma Mackey reminds the viewer that Emily is considered “the sphinx of our modern literature”.48 The film works as an explanation for Wuthering Heights, an answer to Charlotte’s insistent question to a consumptive Emily at the start of the film (“How did you write it? How did you write Wuthering Heights?”), which incidentally also voices the contemporary reception of the novel: “it’s an ugly book… base, ugly and full of selfish people who only care about themselves” (00.02.05-00.02.35). Adopting a trait common in the biopic genre,49 the film is thus mostly a flashback when Emily’s thoughts return to earlier events. Like Mary Shelley, the film invites the viewer to partake in a biographical reading of Wuthering Heights: Brontë’s life on screen is partly configured through her novel, as O’Connor appropriates events from Wuthering Heights and fits them into the narrative of her heroine’s life. Thus, it has been noted that “equating Charlotte Brontë with her fictional Jane Eyre has become a commonplace in screen adaptations”.50 Undeniably, O’Connor and Mackey’s version of Emily Brontë bears a likeness to Catherine Earnshaw, the “wild hatless little savage” in the novel.51 Emily mostly appears with her hair loose (as on the poster) and is described by their neighbour as “the girl [who] had a wild look in her eye, like a gipsy or a beggar” (00.55.07). Moreover, Catherine’s yearning for a lost childhood appears in Emily holding on to the stories the sisters told each other as children when the other two have grown out of them. Even the gentle Anne eventually rebukes her with “we’re not children anymore” (00.15.02).

20The film designates Emily’s experience of love and of pain as the source for her book, but without transposing directly the complicated Cathy-Heathcliff relationship into the biopic. William Weightman, the love interest in the film, like Heathcliff, “has an erect and handsome figure”,52 but he has none of Heathcliff’s cruelty, anger and meanness. Episodes from Wuthering Heights are resituated in Emily’s relationship with Branwell, which echoes the sexless brotherly relationship and love between Catherine and Heathcliff. Thus, scenes when Branwell and Emily spy at night on their neighbours’ cosy interior bring to the mind of a Wuthering Heights reader a similar scene in which young Catherine and Heathcliff spy on the Linton family. The reappearance of elements from the novel in the biopic is an example of what Mathew Smith calls “Reverse-Engineering”, i.e., creating a scene or elements that look like the basis for a scene in the novel, thus generating the illusion of authenticity.53 Finally, as discussed above, a biopic often has several source-texts: the shots of Emily and Branwell sitting on a hill in the moors also bring to mind similar shots of Cathy and Heathcliff in screen adaptations.

Of Books and Writing

21Both stories and the physical object that contains them are central to both biopics. So is the activity of writing or the different stages of the process.

Literary biopics make a feature of shots that lovingly fête the writing process. We are familiar with aestheticized views of desk, quill, parchment, inkpot, typewriter, the writer in a moment of meditative pause, the evocatively personal oddities that adorn the space of writing, the view from the window as a reflective space that feeds the imaginative process.54

22These shots of writing scenes have come to form “a template for literary biopics”.55 Interestingly, Shachar points them out as a means “to insert the author’s body into a cultural template of Romantic identity, created for wider cultural consumption”.56 Apart from the first sequence where Mary is still trying to learn to compose, images of the protagonist in writing fits develop the popular idea of the Romantic writer, as she is shown in a frenzy to pen down her thoughts and emotions in her journal and then in her novel, as though driven by an immanent force.

23Shachar’s idea that “[t]hese images, and these shots, often serve little purpose to the development of plot or storyline”57 needs to be nuanced in the films under study, as such images also clearly invite the viewer to make a biographical reading of the novels. In the latter part of Al-Mansour’s movie, when Shelley is writing Frankenstein and the voiceover reproduces her words, mixing speech by Frankenstein and by his creature, shots of the past of her writing or of the other characters intertwine, conveying the idea that they all add up to build what she is now writing. Similarly, towards the end of Emily, shots of the protagonist shown actually writing for the first time are punctuated with shots of all the previous locations in the movie. The graveyard, rooms in the parsonage, the moors, the barn, etc., are then, however, pointedly empty of character and action, as if to indicate that they constitute the bare bones of what Emily is writing.

24In Mary Shelley and in Emily, the resulting physical books are given pride of place and are signaled as the embodiment of the heroine’s achievement, thus serving to give her agency. Publishing her novel and being acknowledged as its author is Mary’s challenge in Al-Mansour’s film. The first and last shots are to do with Mary’s writing: first, scribbling away in a notebook beside her mother’s grave, and, finally, a published author, under her own name. Indeed, part of Mary’s battle is to see her name in print. The sense of empowerment of the woman writer is reinforced in the last sequence, which shows her work eventually recognised. This sequence acts as an epilogue because of the passage of time intimated through shots of a slightly older and respectable-looking Mary walking peacefully up the street with her little boy. Most importantly, in a sight link, Mary looking off-screen gives way to what she is looking at: her father behind his shop-window and smiling a little when he sees her. The camera then tilts down to reveal what he has left in the shop window: her authored novel. This is followed by a cut to a final image of Mary as she looks at her book off screen (see 1.51.59-1.52.17).

25Similarly, in O’Connor’s Emily, close shots of the physical books posit their importance and signal Emily’s success. Emily opens with alternating shots of Emily’s and Charlotte’s faces and two close-ups on copies of Wuthering Heights. The film dwells on the material object, as she later opens the package containing her printed story alone in the graveyard, including close shots of her face to convey her happiness. The film shows no battle for publication, but the protective hands and the (anachronistic) presence of the name “Emily Brontë” on the book cover serve to give the character agency and participate in conveying a sense of satisfaction and achievement for character and spectator alike (see 1.55.23-1.56.00).

26Writing is pointed as the defining characteristic of Emily and the subject of discussion with both Branwell and Weightman. Moreover, in many scenes in the film, Emily is heard in voiceover as other characters are reading her poems or her letters, but her actual writing is not shown until the end. Her writing is also a narrative device: Emily’s declaration that she no longer writes because of Weightman’s rejection of her and her consequent departure for Brussels brings about his note begging her to stay. Finally, it is when she eventually reads Weightman’s note after Branwell’s death that she sits down and puts pen to paper again to write Wuthering Heights, and only then does the film contain the expected writing scenes.

27At the very end, after Emily’s death, we move to another author, as Charlotte sits down to write, as if prompted by her sister. In a flashback, Charlotte recalls Emily saying, “I used to love listening to your stories. Where did they come from?” (2.02.54) Charlotte opens the windows in front of her, observes and listens to nature, chuckles as if she has suddenly understood something, and starts writing. Whereas the sisters all wrote together (which appears briefly in one scene), Emily is shown as an inspiration to Charlotte, this character acting as an intermediary between Emily and the viewer both at the beginning and the close of the film.

Conclusion

28“Romanticising” in the title of this article refers to the fictionalisation process at work in the biopics under study and plays on the root of the verb to convey both the reference to the Romantic movement and to love stories in Mary Shelley and Emily, which adapt the idea of the Romantic genius to women authors. Their respective novels also undergo appropriation as they are used to make the portrait of their author, a portrait also marked by a romantic notion, as is typical of biopics. Biopics may remain conservative, notably in their depiction of the author as a unique genius, but Al-Mansour’s and O’Connor’s films extend this to previously ignored women writers. Somewhat like coquels that develop a sideline in the main narrative, biopics and biofiction insert themselves in the gaps of the story of a real-life figure, and take it somewhere new. There is arguably something of fan fiction with a strong emotional involvement in these re-imaginings of real-life figures, especially in Emily, which grants its protagonist not only an unlikely love story but also the satisfaction of reading her own name on the cover of the book. Moreover, a form of self-consciousness pervades O’Connor’s Emily. Indeed, Emily’s feverish state as context for the main narrative invites caution and distance. Plus, at the height of her affair with William Weightman are images that both confirm and contradict what Emily’s letters say in voice-over (1.15.52-1.17.22). This discrepancy is most interesting because it shows how letters, considered as factual documents, and on which biographies are based, can in fact be highly ambiguous. The biopic here displays self-reflexivity that is also a form of self-justification for its imaginary affair between Emily and the vicar.58

29In the end, if literary offshoots like biopics participate in “determining an author’s cultural longevity”,59 then Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley and O’Connor’s Emily make their respective subjects relevant to new generations by offering a reading and understanding of them close to our contemporary concerns.