Tea at Trianon: The Wildest Adaptation Yet

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

The Wildest Adaptation Yet

two figures in historical attire standing in a moody landscape The costumes are deliberately inaccurate. The story begins in the 1780's but the costumes have no connection to the era. The chunky jewelry is of the sort which may have been worn in Imperial Russia but are out of place in a film about Yorkshire gentry. As for the casting, Margot is lovely but too old to play teenaged "Catherine Earnshaw," the "Edgar Linton" character is too dark for Catherine's pallid husband. I do think Jacob Elordi is perfect for "Heathcliff." Having an Asian actress for the part of Ellen is odd since the whole point of Ellen is that she is a tough, no nonsense Yorkshire woman, the same age as the protagonists but reared to be a servant. Ellen as principle narrator has a decidedly unromantic view of the characters as expected of a person with such a background. Replacing her with an Asian adds an air of exoticism to the Earnshaw household, which was a place of dreary abuse and harsh fanaticism. From Country Living:

Our first clue that Fennell’s version might be unlike any that came before it is the quotation marks around the title: “Wuthering Heights”.
It’s a subtle typographical choice that has sparked intricate discussion online – from TikTok speculation to serious cultural debate. Some fans on social platforms posited that this punctuation choice hints at a narrative choice – that someone from a later period is reading the book or imagining themself within it.
But in a recent Fandango interview, Fennell herself put these theories to rest and explained her reasoning: that a novel as "dense, complicated and difficult" as Brontë’s resists a straightforward cinematic translation – you simply can’t adapt it faithfully scene by scene.
“I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights," she explains. "It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There's a version that I remember reading that isn't quite real, and there are things I wanted to happen that never happened.
"So, it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t – but really I'd say that any adaptation of a novel should have quotation marks around it." (Read more.)