From The Wall Street Journal:
‘To Walk Invisible” presents the Brontë sisters as they’ve never quite been seen before. Nor is it likely that devotees of Charlotte’s (Finn Atkins) “Jane Eyre, ” or Emily’s (Chloe Pirrie) “Wuthering Heights” or Anne’s (Charlie Murphy) “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” ever paused long to consider the circumstances in which all three of these writers lived together, or rather, survived together, as sisters.
. . . .
In this darkly acerbic, and riveting, Masterpiece drama, written and directed by Sally Wainwright (writer of the wonderful “Last Tango in Halifax”), it is the struggle to survive, not literary ambition—though that ambition is a strong one—that takes precedence in the lives of these sisters.
. . . .
A flamboyant sort, Branwell continues to harbor dreams of literary achievement, with no hope of fulfilling them. He’s a drinker and can’t stop, the chief cause of the somberness that sits heavily on life at the Yorkshire parsonage where the Brontës lived.
He’s not, however the only cause of the gloom and tension that hang in the atmosphere, that seems to touch every conversation between the sisters, each with literary ambitions, each secretly—at least at first—trying her hand at writing. Their ultimate triumph arrives with the emergence of their actual identities after writing wildly successful works, all under male-sounding pseudonyms.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)
Can’t wait to see this tonight.
We saw this here months ago – and very good it was too. The sad thing about Branwell seems to have been that he could have been a fair artist, but he wanted to be a writer. He seems to have self sabotaged – and whatever way you look at it, it feels as though he was envious of his sisters’ talents. They loved him, but he was an impossible young man. Haworth was a deeply, terminally unhealthy place in those days. I was born not too far away in Leeds. We used to walk across those moors quite often.