The new Wuthering Heights film has been slammed by critics for ‘lewd, exhausting sex scenes’ that ‘combine Barbie and BDSM’.

But the drama, ‘debauchery and bawdy mischief’ shown in the movie adaptation of the Victorian novel is nothing compared to the real-life brutalities lived by its author Emily Brontë and her sisters.

The famous family of writers endured everything from opium addiction to water contaminated by a cemetery, as well as a string of tragically early deaths that saw three out of four siblings – including their only brother, Branwell – deceased within a year of one another, all close to their 30th birthdays.

And their precocious beginnings are almost as well documented as their ‘spiteful’ attitudes, with biographers remarking on the sisters’ history with animal abuse, disdain of young children and ‘anger management issues’.

As revealed by literary critic Claire Harman in Charlotte Brontë: A Life, there was also the matter of the sisters’ ‘plain’ and ‘poorly’ appearance.

According to the writer, Emily had a large protruding tooth, while Charlotte had hardly any teeth at all.

Undersized and undernourished, she was described by her fellow novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, as having a forehead that was ‘square, broad and rather overhanging’.

And while their youngest sister Anne was described as ‘gentle’ and ‘quite different’ to them in looks, her friend Ellen Nussey had also eerily remarked on a ‘clear, almost transparent complexion’.

Despite racking up a whopping £56m during its opening weekend, Wuthering Heights was slammed by critics for ‘lewd, exhausting sex scenes’ that ‘combine Barbie and BDSM’

Almost all the girls had at some point held jobs as teachers or tutors – which they, it appears, largely grew to despise.

Emily, for one, while posted at Law Hill School in Halifax, reportedly said she ‘preferred the company of the house dog’ over her pupils, as shared by author Juliet Barker.

And while not as combustible as her sister, Charlotte wasn’t to be trifled with either. When she taught at a girls’ school in Brussels, she gave any student who displeased her a tremendous tongue-lashing.

‘If those girls knew how I loathed their company, they would not seek mine as much as they do,’ she wrote in her journal.

In fact, several of her pupils seemed to have loathed her as much as she loathed them – one even threw a stone at her.

Charlotte’s family, it seems, were not immune from her criticisms. In an introduction to her sister Anne’s second novel, Charlotte shared that ‘Wildfell Hall it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve’.

‘The choice of subject in that work is a mistake – it was too little consonant with the character – tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer,’ she continued. 

Historians have dubbed the jabs an attempt to ‘consign her sister’s novel to oblivion’.

Emily’s temperament was also well known and has been a topic of discussion for historians – despite claims that Charlotte had tried to ‘clean up’ her sister’s image posthumously.  

The famous family of writers endured everything from opium addiction to water contaminated by a cemetery, as well as a string of tragically early deaths that claimed three out of four siblings. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë depicted in a painting

On one occasion, the family dog, Keeper – a mastiff and a big one at that – dirtied a counterpane with his muddy paws. When Emily heard about this, she punched Keeper in the face, not just once, but so often that he was left ‘half blind and stupefied’. 

Charlotte was said to have been in awe of her younger sister’s raw talent and genius, describing her as a ‘baby god’, but also clearly found her tough to understand, writing in a preface to a second edition of Wuthering Heights: ‘My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion.’

Emily, she added, ‘rarely crossed the threshold of home’ and ‘knew people, though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced’.

‘She could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word,’ Charlotte concluded. 

Elsewhere, historian Juliet Barker described Emily as being ‘so absorbed in herself and her literary creations that she had little time for the genuine suffering of her family’.

And suffering they were. 

Within a year and a half, Branwell, Emily and Anne had all died – Branwell of drink and Emily and Anne of TB. Emily was so thin when she died that her coffin was only 16 inches wide. 

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Branwell was said to have spent his last years in debt, drunk and on opiates, after being fired from his position as a tutor to a Reverend Edmund Robinson’s young son, due to a rumoured affair with his wife Lydia, and, according to A Brontë Encyclopedia, his behavior escalated into an embarrassment for the family. In one instance, he was said to have set fire to his own bed.

It is thought he likely died of tuberculosis, aged just 31, in September 1948. Just a few months later, in December of that year, Emily, then 30, also passed. 

The following year, in May, 29-year-old Anne also passed away from the disease.

‘I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect,’ she had written.

‘But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it.

‘I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.’

Losing so many family members so quickly took a toll on Charlotte, who herself died just six years after Anne, at 38.

In her last years, she also enjoyed a marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father Patrick Brontë’s curate.

Despite his insistent pining and yearning, Charlotte first rejected him. However, eventually – in what many consider to be an attempt to escape her father’s control – she accepted his proposal and the couple were wed in 1954.

While the union looked to be a happy one, a letter to her friend Ellen (‘Nell’) revealed the writer found being a wife in the 1800s a ‘solemn and strange and perilous thing’.

After becoming pregnant, Charlotte was laid low with hyperemesis gravidarum, an extreme reaction of the hormones to pregnancy.

Bedridden and in agony, she soon went downhill. She died, along with her unborn baby, on March 31, 1855.

Despite their complicated legacies, the sisters are remembered as fixtures of British literature, and Emily’s Gothic novel Wuthering Heights has recently been adapted into a romantic drama from Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the star-crossed Catherine and Heathcliff.

New statistics show that the controversial film made US$34.8m in the North American box office in its first three days which makes it the year’s biggest opening so far.

According to PostTrak polling, an estimated 76 per cent of those ticket buyers were women. 

The Warner Bros./MRC production cost a reported $80m to produce, not accounting for the millions spent on marketing and promotion. 

If the four-day totals match the estimates, that makes for a strong $82million global debut. 

And the film still has several big openings on the horizon, in Japan and Vietnam on February 27, and in China on March 13. 

The film has largely divided critics and currently sits at a mixed 63 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

However many film fans are already hailing the sweeping period drama as the ‘movie of the year’, as they took to social media to share their thoughts on the moving plot, admitting they ‘cried their eyes out’.