Brontë Movies and TV: The Adaptations and Filming Locations You Can Visit

For huge numbers of American visitors, the road to Haworth runs through a screen: a rain-lashed Merle Oberon on a Hollywood soundstage, Michael Fassbender's brooding Rochester, Emma Mackey striding the heather in Emily. The Brontë novels have been filmed continually for nearly a century – Wuthering Heights alone has dozens of adaptations in multiple languages – and the best of them send viewers hunting for the landscapes on screen. The happy news: unlike most literary adaptations, the recent Brontë productions were largely filmed in and around the real Brontë Country, so the pilgrimage and the location tour overlap beautifully. Here is our guide to the essential screen Brontës and where to stand in their worlds.

Wuthering Heights on screen: from Hollywood to the real moors

The 1939 classic with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon – still many viewers' definitive Heathcliff – contains not one frame of Yorkshire: it was shot in California, with heather famously imported to dress the hills. The pilgrimage value is nil; the romance, eternal. Later adaptations came home. The 1992 film with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche filmed in Yorkshire, using the moors and historic houses of the region, with North Yorkshire locations standing in for the two houses. Most strikingly, Andrea Arnold's raw, elemental 2011 version was shot on the high moors of the Yorkshire Dales, all wind, mud and close-up heather – the adaptation that feels most like actually walking to Top Withens with weather coming in. For the "real" Wuthering Heights, of course, the screen can only approximate what the moors above Haworth provide free of charge: the ruin of Top Withens, the Brontë Waterfall and the wuthering itself.

Jane Eyre and the reign of Haddon Hall

Jane Eyre has been filmed even more often than her cousin-novel, and one location has come to own the role of Thornfield: Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, a spellbinding fortified medieval manor above the River Wye that has played Rochester's house in no fewer than three major adaptations – the 1996 Zeffirelli film, the beloved 2006 BBC series with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, and Cary Fukunaga's 2011 film with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Directors keep returning because Haddon is that rarest thing, an essentially unmodernised great house – banqueting hall, long gallery, candlelit stone – and visitors can tour it in season: see haddonhall.co.uk. Purists should note Haddon is casting, not source: Charlotte's own inspirations for Thornfield were North Lees Hall at Hathersage (also in Derbyshire's Peak District, and walkable from the village she used as the novel's Morton) and the attic legend of Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire – both visitable in their different ways, and covered in our companion guide to the real places behind Jane Eyre.

To Walk Invisible: the parsonage rebuilt on the moor

For the family's own story, the gold standard is Sally Wainwright's BBC drama To Walk Invisible (2016) – a fierce, unsentimental telling of the sisters' publishing years and Branwell's collapse, made by a Yorkshire writer on Brontë home ground. Its production is now local legend: a full-scale replica of the parsonage, church and graveyard was built on Penistone Hill, the moor-edge country park minutes above Haworth, so the drama could show the house in its true landscape without besieging the museum. The set is long gone, but visitors to Penistone Hill stand where it stood, with the real village below – and the real parsonage interiors informed the meticulous studio reconstruction. Watch it before you travel; no adaptation better prepares you for the actual rooms at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Emily (2022): the myth, gorgeously filmed at home

Frances O'Connor's Emily, with Emma Mackey as a wild, imagined Emily Brontë, divided devotees – it invents a romance with the curate William Weightman and takes cheerful liberties with the record – but as landscape cinema it is a love letter shot substantially in and around the real Brontë Country and Yorkshire, moors, becks and gritstone glowing in every frame. Treat it as fantasia rather than biography (our guides will happily untangle fact from invention on the day) and it makes a ravishing appetite-whetter. The film's popularity has visibly boosted a new generation of moor-walking pilgrims – no bad legacy for any adaptation.

Supporting features: the railway and the villages

Two bonus screen notes for your visit. Haworth's valley station belongs to the preserved Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, one of Britain's most-filmed heritage lines – immortal as the setting of The Railway Children (1970) – and its steam trains still serve Haworth on operating days, the most cinematic arrival available. And the conserved hamlet of Wycoller, whose ruined hall is the traditional Ferndean of Jane Eyre, is so period-perfect it needs no set dressing at all.

A word on Kate Bush, since someone always asks

Not a film, but firmly part of the screen-and-sound Brontë legend: Kate Bush's 1978 debut single "Wuthering Heights", written at eighteen after catching the end of a television adaptation, took Cathy's ghost-at-the-window scene to the top of the UK charts – the first British number one written and performed by a woman – and has since spawned the joyous international phenomenon of mass red-dress dance recreations. Bush shares a birthday with Emily Brontë, 30 July, a coincidence devotees treasure. It is a safe bet that the song has sent as many pilgrims up the moor path as any film – and yes, our guides have seen the red dresses out there.

From screen to heather

Screen Brontë is a gateway drug; the cure is the real thing. Within one region you can stand on the moors that out-act every adaptation, visit the small rooms where the actual drama happened, and – with a modest detour south – tour the medieval hall that three Rochesters have called home. Our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside, with a maximum of six guests, include themed days built around both great novels – Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – pairing the biography and the landscapes with, where wanted, the movie lore: which version got the moor right, what the 2016 replica parsonage looked like, why Hollywood imported heather. Watch your favourite adaptation on the flight over. Then come and see the location no production has ever matched: the original.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.