‘To Walk Invisible’ Showcases The Kind Of Verisimilitude That Brontë Fans Have Been Craving

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë wrote one of the most popular novels of her day and a work that endures more than one-hundred-fifty years after its initial publication. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights also sold well during her lifetime and has become part of the English literary canon. Anne Brontë surpassed Emily’s commercial success with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but, after Anne’s death, Charlotte suppressed this novel, which is why, today, it’s really only familiar to students taking a Victorian Lit class and Brontë superfans.

And there are hardcore Brontë devotees—quite a lot of them. The Brontë Society has been continuously active since 1893 (Full disclosure: I’m a member), the Brontë family home is a museum, and, yes, there is fanfiction. (There is, in fact, an argument to made that the Brontës invented fanfic). While To Walk Invisible offers elements familiar to anyone who consumes a lot of Masterpiece—period costumes, period settings, dreary cinematography—this film seems to be designed primarily for readers who know and love the Brontës. For example, filmmakers built a replica of the parsonage where the Brontës spent most of their lives and surrounded it with a model Haworth, their Yorkshire village, as it would have looked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is the kind of verisimilitude Brontë fans might be expected to crave, and it should appeal to fans of historical drama. One the other hand, there’s much here that would be uninteresting or unintelligible to anyone who isn’t learned in Brontë family lore.

Take the opening scene. In this dreamlike sequence, four children—three girls, one boy—wearing haloes of fire run into an empty ballroom where they play with toy soldiers come to life. Anyone schooled in Brontë lore will recognize this as a reference to the imaginary worlds created by the Brontë children, worlds that fueled their pretend play and inspired their earliest stories. It’s hard to know what a viewer lacking this information would make of this weird vignette. But, if we accept that this production is for superfans only, we have to ask: What are the superfans getting? Speaking as a Brontë fanatic, my answer is: Not much.

My beef with To Walk Invisible is right there at the beginning. Branwell, the lone Brontë boy, takes center stage here, and, from this point on, the whole narrative is built around him. The story proper begins when Branwell returns home—to the parsonage where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne still live with their father—after having an affair with his employer’s wife. His physical and mental disintegration descent gives the plot its shape. There’s no question that Branwell played a part in his sisters’ development as authors. He was there when they created their first manuscripts, he’s there in Wuthering Heights as Hindley Earnshaw, and his dissolution runs throughout The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But I can’t imagine that anyone who comes for the Brontës wants to spend a lot time with Branwell. And, given that an essential element of the Brontë story is that three brilliant women felt compelled to publish under male pseudonyms, it’s especially galling that, in a film ostensibly about them, their lives and their literary careers are subordinate to the decline of their profligate, parasitic brother.

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were circumscribed by class, geography, and gender. They knew this, and they wrote what they wanted to write—what they needed to write—anyway. They published what they wrote and they sold what they published. Why build a narrative around the freeloading loser who impeded their lives and their work? Bad boy Branwell provides more cheap dramatics than his bookish, reclusive sisters. But how interesting is he, really? Failed artists and addicts are a dime a dozen, both individually and combined. Obviously, it’s a challenge to make riveting television from characters whose inner lives were so much richer than their everyday existence, but I do wish that writer-director Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley) had a at least tried.

Here’s the moment that frustrated me the most: There’s a fairly lengthy scene devoted to debt collectors coming for Branwell. Then we get a few seconds of Charlotte submitting Jane Eyre for publication after The Professor is rejected. Pan to the Yorkshire sky and… Cut to the works of Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell—the pseudonyms used by the Brontë sisters—on the shelf at the parsonage. As an argument between Patrick and Branwell rages offstage, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne decide that they should tell their father that they are making money from their writing so that he doesn’t worry about what will happen to them after their brother dissipates the meager family fortune.

So, the collected genius of the Brontë sisters—the whole reason this thing was made, the whole reason we’re watching—is reduced to a footnote to Branwell’s dissipation. Jane Eyre becomes little more than a commercial enterprise that might help Patrick Brontë trust that his daughters won’t starve even if their brother drinks their inheritance away. As Charlotte, Emily, and Anne talk to their father about their work, we get some of the only moments in which these authors discuss their fiction, its reception, and its success. What a drag. There’s much that we don’t know—can’t know, will never know—about the Brontës. But, if we’re going to imagine their lives, let’s give them freedoms that they didn’t have in life. Acknowledge the institutional structures that made their publications so unlikely, but don’t reiterate those limitations by making a story about three pioneering women writers into a narrative about a dilettantish asshole who made life hard for his brilliant sisters.

Having said all that, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the acting here is excellent. Special shout-out for Chloe Pirrie for her portrayal of Emily. Wuthering Heights is my fave, and I believed her not only as the author of that novel but also as the teacher who told her students that she preferred the school dog to any of them. (Brontë superfans will know what I’m talking about.)

Jessica Jernigan is a writer, editor, and mom-about-town in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You can find her professional website here, but Instagram is where the cat photos are.

Watch To Walk Invisible on PBS