H ow could a Victorian vicar’s daughter have written Wuthering Heights? How could she have known how to make her characters act and speak with such flaring passion? In the opening sequence of Frances O’Connor’s film about Emily Brontë, her evidently mystified sister Charlotte asks the same question: “How did you write it? How did you write Wuthering Heights?”

The film gives its own answer. Like many a literary biopic before it, Emily is determined to prove that the novel was inspired by its author’s life, resisting the truth — that it came entirely from the imagination of a highly gifted writer.

Instead, O’Connor invents for Emily a passionate affair with her father’s curate, William Weightman (a real historical figure). It is thoroughly and

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