Claire O’
Callaghan
Claire O’Callaghan is a literary scholar and cultural historian specialising in Victorian literature and culture, with a particular focus on the lives and works of the Brontës. Her research explores themes of gender, sexuality, and violence, and more recently, health, the body and death.
Claire has written extensively on the Brontës, especially Emily. She is Emily’s most recent biographer, and an updated, significantly expanded edition of her biography, Emily Brontë Reappraised, will be published by Saraband in 2026.
Claire is Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society, and works closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Her current collaboration with the Museum involves the transcription and publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Little Book, a long-lost manuscript. She is also preparing a new edition of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey for Oxford World’s Classics (forthcoming 2027).
Beyond her work on the Brontës, Claire is a leading expert on the novelist Sarah Waters and has published widely on her fiction. She is currently Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, U.K.
Claire is a regular contributor to television and radio. Her work has featured in The Guardian, History Today, and BBC History online, and she has been interviewed by assorted media, from Time Magazine to the History Channel.
“Thoughtful…an informally written, no-nonsense reappraisal…
Jacqueline Banerjee on Emily Brontë Reappraised, Times Literary Supplement
Books
Emily Brontë Reappraised (2026)
Claire O’Callaghan’s Emily Brontë Reappraised – the only new biography of Emily to be published during the last twenty years – returns in this updated and significantly expanded edition in 2026, bringing new insight into how we read and remember one of literature’s most enigmatic writers. Blending biography, feminist criticism, and cultural history, O’Callaghan dismantles the myths that have long obscured Brontë’s life and art, revealing a bold, passionate, and politically attuned writer whose work still resonates today.
The new analysis includes new original literary and historical scholarship and the exploration of a wide range of popular depictions and adaptations—including Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights film—to trace the reinventions of Brontë’s vision of love, freedom, and the wild northern landscape that shaped her imagination. Both accessible and deeply researched, the edition constructs a moving portrait of one of the most beloved writers of all time and invites readers to rediscover Emily Brontë’s life and work anew.
TV, media and festivals
Claire is a regular contributor to television and radio. Her recent credits include BBC 4’s Human Intelligence, The Brontës: Sisters of Disruption for Sky Arts, Death at the Parsonage for History Hit, The Secret Life of Emily Brontë and Britain’s Novel Landscapes for Channel 4, and Britain by Book for Channel 5. She has also collaborated with the BBC and The History Extra podcast.
As a historical advisor, Claire has contributed her expertise to various creative projects, most recently for Audible. She is a frequent speaker at literary and cultural events, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Durham Book Festival, Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing, Bradford Literary Festival, and Books on Tyne, among others.
Select Media and Publications
History Hit: Death at the Parsonage
178 Years of Wuthering Heights
On 4 December 2025, Claire and Dr Olivia Krauze (University of Cambridge) delivered the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s Thursday Talk, exploring 178 years of Wuthering Heights.
Charlotte Brontë’s Little Book
New publication! And a rare one! It was a rare privilege to lead the first ever transcription, editing and publication of a long lost manuscript by Charlotte Brontë for the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Now published through Brontë Studies and on sale in the Museum shop for a limited time only.
Brontë Society Annual Lecture
I am honoured to be invited to deliver this year’s Annual Lecture for the Brontë Society on 4 October St James’ Church, Thornton. My talk is based on new (book) research looking at Emily’s influence on successive women writers and is entitled ‘A happy Heathcliff and Cathy’: The influence of Emily Brontë on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. See you there!
Emily’s birthday talk
While ‘wild rainy weather’ wuthered outside Haworth Parsonage on 30 July 1841, Emily Brontë sat writing a ‘Diary Paper’ by candlelight. It was, Emily wrote, a ‘Friday evening – near 9 o’clock’. But this wasn’t any normal Friday, it was Emily’s birthday; she had turned twenty-three years old.
In this celebratory talk to mark the anniversary of Emily’s birth, Dr Claire O’Callaghan will explore the ways that Emily writes about birthdays, anniversaries, and ageing across her work, and consider how, in one way or another, it often seems a little ghostly…Booking via the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Sisters of Disruption
History Extra Podcast: The Brontës
Emily Brontë and Emily movie
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë and the truth about the ‘real-life Heathcliff’
The Enigma of Emily Brontë
Since the moment Emily Brontë died we have tried – and failed – to understand who she was.
Withering slights
10 facts about Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë
Masculinity and Jane Eyre
Journal article: ‘He is rather peculiar, perhaps’: Reading Mr Rochester’s Coarseness Queerly
Emily Brontë and solitude
Journal article: “A poet, a solitary”: Emily Brontë—Queerness, Quietness, and Solitude
Contact
Enquiries to C.OCallaghan@lboro.ac.uk
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Dr Claire O'Callaghan 