Anna Royal Brings Wuthering Heights to Life

As English Teacher Anna Royal prepared to introduce seniors to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she set out to explore the landscapes, art, and visual culture that shaped the novel.

With support from a Fund for Teachers grant, Royal traveled to London and Haworth, England, for 10 days in June to study 19th-century photography, portraiture, art, and the rugged Yorkshire landscape surrounding the Brontë family home. Her research will inform a senior seminar she is teaching this year centered on Wuthering Heights.

“The goal for my class is to make the work of reading a 19th-century British novel more meaningful by exploring it through different media,” Royal said.

Alongside traditional literary analysis and essay writing, students will study Victorian photography and art and participate in tableau and performance-based activities. Royal hopes these different approaches will help students examine how the Victorians understood identity, relationships, and their rapidly changing surroundings.

In London, Royal visited the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Photography Centre, where she explored early photographic processes and studied the work of pioneering Victorian photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll. She considered how photographers used composition, light, positioning, and landscape to tell stories and communicate information about their subjects.

Those questions will help students explore the social world of Wuthering Heights. How might the novel’s characters have posed for a photograph? How would gender, class, and status have shaped their positioning? 

Royal sees a connection between studying Victorian photography and helping students navigate today’s image-saturated culture.

“These questions are essential to understanding Victorian photography and visual culture, but they are also relevant to today’s digital images, which can inundate our students,” she said.

At Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Royal continued examining how Victorian artists created mood, constructed narratives, and depicted the changing British landscape. She discovered that storytelling was embedded in the period’s famously long novels, as well as in its paintings and photographs.

The final portion of her journey took her north to Haworth, where she visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum and walked on the Yorkshire moors. Seeing the Brontës’ modest home, the graveyard beside it, and Emily Brontë’s bedroom overlooking the surrounding landscape gave Royal a deeper understanding of the physical environment in which the sisters lived and wrote.

“If you read her novel and her poetry, so much of it is about the wind and the moors,” Royal said. “She was right there by the window.”

Walking the moors also revealed the dramatic contrast between Haworth’s isolation and the energy of London. Even with modern transportation, the village felt remote.

Royal’s summer learning also extended beyond her research trip. She participated in the Fulbright Global Teaching Dialogue, a two-day virtual conference with sessions on subjects including place-based education and using virtual pen pals to broaden students’ perspectives.

The experience gave Royal new ways to help students step inside the world of Wuthering Heights; connecting Brontë’s novel to the images, landscapes, and social forces of its time while encouraging students to consider how visual storytelling continues to shape the way we understand ourselves and others today.