Why Are We Sexing Up Literary Spinsters?

Or, the Rise of Fan Fiction and the Decline of Serious Reading

Emma Mackey as Emily Bronte in Emily

For some mysterious reason, film biopics gained popularity in the late 90s/early aughts. Some were hagiographies (Kinsey made America’s most famous sex researcher into a near-saint, never mind his questionable sampling methods). Others were more critical of their subjects (Capote was pretty tough on Capote). The standouts of the genre (Ray, Walk the Line) shared the same storyline, in which the subject (1) rises from ridiculously humble beginnings to superstardom, only to (2) lose everything to addiction, then (3) dry out and make a fabulous comeback. It was such a ubiquitous narrative that Walk Hard had to come along to spoof it.

A strange thing happened as a result of the biopic boom. Famous artists, scientists, and political figures — complex human beings with maddening contradictions and ambivalences — transformed into tidier characters. The very nature of commercial film couldn’t help but blur the distinction between fiction and reality. Messy lives needed to be compressed into narrative arcs of 120 minutes or so; not-always-sympathetic subjects needed to become likeable protagonists.

And so in, say, A Beautiful Mind, we see John Nash’s brilliance and brave struggle with schizophrenia, culminating in his receipt of the Nobel prize. But we don’t see him fathering an illegitimate child, his arrest for indecent exposure, or his divorce from his wife Alicia (who only agreed to remarry Nash 38 years later). Moreover, we don’t see the real John Nash: a flop-eared, jowly kind of a guy. We see Russell Crowe in his prime.

The end result is not so much to re-create John Nash as to create an idea of John Nash. He becomes a character — the Tortured Genius Hero — within the clearly demarcated confines of a redemption story. And once subject becomes character, what need is there to serve reality, really, except with a nod and a wink?

Interestingly, the biopic’s popularity seems to have risen in tandem with the internet fan fiction of the late-nineties and early aughts. On sites like LiveJournal, Wattpad and Tumblr, writers concocted stories using pre-existing characters from massive book-to-movie franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight. Real Person Fiction, or “RPF”, became a prominent fanfic subgenre, with writers spinning romances about historical figures or, more commonly, music celebrities like Taylor Swift.

There’s a few things to note about fan fiction.

• Firstly, it’s predominantly written and read by White women — or at least by those who identify as White women, as many within the fanfic community self-report as LGBTQ.

• Secondly, it often involves characters having sex. The sexual content can be extensive and graphic, as was famously the case with the Twilight fanfic and best-selling phenom 50 Shades of Gray.

• Lastly, fan fiction often involves characters having graphic sex with a rather bland female protagonist who serves as a stand-in for both the author and the reader. In the blockbuster fanfic After, for example, author Anna Todd wrote about carrying on a torrid affair with Harry Styles, who was then a nineteen-year-old member of the boy-band One Direction. After was a runaway hit, allowing Wattpad readers to imaginatively swap themselves for the heroine and enjoy hot sex with Harry, no less than two billion times.

All of which brings me to the meat of this post: The relatively recent effort to give our most celebrated literary spinsters — those single ladies of singular talent, those bonnet-wearing buckers of the patriarchy — a sex life.

Let’s take a look at a few 21st-Century examples.

Alcott, Austen and Bronte — Oh, My!

Louisa May Alcott never married, and there’s no rock-solid evidence she ever had a serious romantic dalliance with anyone. She does appear to have enjoyed a passing flirtation with a young Polish man thirteen years her junior while working as a travel companion in Europe. Still, if there was a love affair between them, it’s lost to history, as Alcott inked out or removed all portions of her diaries she deemed too embarrassing before her death.

No matter. In her YA novel The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Kelly McNees gives Alcott a lover who is not only besotted with her, but takes her virginity, too. The plot concerns a pre-fame, 22-year-old Alcott during a summer in Walpole, New Hampshire. Like the real Alcott, McNee’s Alcott is moody, feminist, and full of literary ambitions; unlike the real Alcott, she becomes romantically entangled with a handsome local merchant. Their attraction kindles upon discovering their mutual love of Walt Whitman, then is consummated during a passionate, clandestine meeting in the woods.

Louisa, we hardly knew ye.

Jane Austen may not lose her virginity in the book and film Becoming Jane, but at the very least, Tom LeFroy gets her hot and bothered. Like Alcott, the real Austen never married, but as a young woman, she danced with the 20-year-old LeFroy at a few Christmas balls before he returned to law school in London. Much later, LeFroy confided to his nephew that he felt a “boyish love” for Austen at the time.

In Becoming Jane, though, the Austen-LeFroy relationship is more than a passing flirtation. LeFroy is a sexually experienced tease who enjoys pushing Austen’s buttons with some naughty innuendo about birds. More importantly, LeFroy maintains Austen cannot write authentically about men and women until she’s experienced some carnal passion herself. Like all prissy rom-com heroines, Austen eventually loosens up enough to realize she’s gaga for LeFroy, sharing some steamy kisses and nearly eloping with him. Their union is never realized and Austen remains a spinster, but it’s all good: Because of her affair with LeFroy, Austen “becomes Jane,” gaining the insight and inspiration for Pride and Prejudice — and indeed, her entire life’s work.

If Austen owes her career to a fling with a man, the same can now be said of Emily Brontë. Yes, that Emily Brontë: the undisputed weirdest Brontë sister, which is really saying something.

The actual Emily Brontë was severely socially withdrawn, observed to fall silent and avoid eye contact in the presence of those outside her family. Brontë biographer Claire Harman recounts how Emily beat her dog, Keeper, for dirtying a window, to the point the poor animal was “half blind and stupefied.” And when Emily was bit by an apparently rabid dog, she went straight home, grabbed a red hot poker from the fireplace, and cauterized her wound herself. This combination of reclusiveness, emotional combustibility, and unflinching rigidity has led Harman and others to speculate Emily was on the autistic spectrum.

Oh — and she was reported to be plain, too. Branwell Brontë wasn’t a great artist, it’s true, but if his portrait of his sisters is any indication, the Brontë girls were an awkward, spooky-looking bunch (Emily is in the middle).

Unsurprisingly, there’s zero evidence Emily Brontë was ever romantically involved with anyone. Yet in the biopic Emily, she falls for William Weightman, the new assistant curate in her father’s parish. Their love is fraught with Heathcliff-and-Cathy intensity, including nasty fights and — as one viewer wryly put it — “corseted shagging.” When Weightman ends their affair, distraught Emily vows she’ll never again pick up her pen. Yet after Weightman’s death from cholera, Emily receives a posthumous letter from him, urging her to write. And so she channels all the tumultuous passion of their relationship into Wuthering Heights.

I should also mention that Emma Mackey portrays Emily, styled with unbound and windswept hair (as pictured in the photo at the top of this post). She’s a beautiful actress but, with those full lips and sultry eyes, looks more like a lingerie model than a Brontë.

So there you have it: three spinsters, all responsible for some of our most cherished novels. All re-imagined as the heroines of love stories where they enjoy varying degrees of sexual intimacy. All ostensibly inspired by that intimacy to write their way to greatness.

The question is: Why?

What Gives With All the Sexiness?

Let me begin by saying I’m not against the fictionalization of real-life figures per se. I’m not even against fiction taking generous liberties with the historical record. One of my top-five movies, Amadeus, portrays Mozart as an irresponsible lout, which he wasn’t at all. But the characterization is a device, used to explore the ideas of God-given genius and divine grace. And while I’m pretty sure the highest-ranking members of the Soviet Politburo didn’t engage in comedic banter, in The Death of Stalin that banter is a clever way to satirize the absurdity of the communist regime. The inaccuracies serve a larger artistic purpose.

So what’s the larger artistic purpose of giving literary spinsters heartthrob lovers? Particularly lovers that become the muses for their masterpieces? At face value, the purpose seems to be to undermine the notion of these women as exceptional talents, with exceptional imaginations that transcended their own circumstances (including the lack of a boyfriend).

But the argument that an Alcott, Austen or Bronte couldn’t possibly write about love unless they had experienced it directly simply doesn’t hold water. As Laura Miller stated in her wonderfully scathing view of Emily:

A big problem with this premise is that Wuthering Heights depicts exactly the sort of love affair that a person who’d never been in a romantic relationship is likely to invent, all wildness and extremity and drama. The brilliance of the novel lies in that wildness, in its author’s complete commitment to the ruthlessness of her characters’ emotions and the uncanny afterglow left in their wake—not in its realism. Wuthering Heights works because it is a fantasy untrammeled by the sort of practical considerations that dominated the actual lives of Emily Brontë and her family. Besides, romantic love is arguably the predominate theme of Western literature and culture, especially the parts of it with which the Brontës were familiar. It’s not as if they (or anyone else) needed first-hand experience to know anything about extravagant passion, given how much, and how widely, they read.

Moreover, the premise that great writing depends upon direct experience ignores the powerful role of wish fulfillment. Emily’s sister Charlotte, for example, became romantically obsessed with the married teacher Constantin Heger while attending school in Brussels. What Heger lacked in looks he made up for in charisma; to Charlotte, he was sharp and critical but also warm and witty. Heger did not reciprocate Charlotte’s feelings and, once aware of them, distanced himself from her, pointedly refusing to answer her letters when she returned to England. But the very absence of a love relationship was the impetus for Charlotte to create one. She channeled Heger’s personality and authority into Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, who — in a thinly-veiled dig at Mrs. Heger — cannot legally marry Jane because he’s saddled with a crazy wife.

The irony of all this is that female writers like Alcott, Austen and Brontë are often held up as early feminist icons of literature. Through genius and persistence, they managed to produce classics at a time when books were largely written by men. Why undercut that achievement — even unintentionally — by suggesting it was really due to a dude?

I think the answer lies in the combined influences of fan fiction, feminism, and the decline in literary reading.

I Can Be Who I Want to Be - And Sexy

As I mentioned previously, fan fiction romances — and most romances, really — are popular with female readers as vehicles to imaginatively enmesh themselves with the heroine. 50 Shades fans, for example, insert themselves into the Anastasia Steele role, thereby enjoying being the object of Christian Grey’s kinky sexual obsession. The reader’s and the heroine’s point of view meld, which is why I suppose most fan fiction (and a lot of modern fiction, actually) is narrated in the first person: It eases that blending of perspectives.

Works like The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Becoming Jane, and Emily act as fan fiction in that they also offer readers/viewers the chance to identify as one of the most celebrated female writers of the 19th Century. This identification provides the vicarious experience of being a fiercely intelligent, talented, and ambitious woman in a man’s world. It offers the sense of being special — different, even, in the case of Emily — and all the challenges that entails, save for one: The lack of a love life.

You see, literary spinsters simply can’t remain single in the era of sex-positive feminism. It’s the era that celebrated the Girl Boss, the plucky young woman who achieves success in a male-dominated sphere, upending gender norms just as Alcott, Austen and Brontë did in their old-timey, writerly sort of ways. But just as importantly, it’s the era that celebrated sex as a form of female empowerment, and the pursuit of sexual pleasure as inherent to female freedom.

And so of course our literary spinsters have to engage in wild couplings in the woods, and passionate kisses, and corseted shagging. The point isn’t to honestly examine what it meant to live a solitary creative life in a bygone era, but to narcissistically reflect the aspirations of the current audience. Female readers/viewers want to imaginatively realize the promise of modern feminism: With hard work and determination, you can crash through glass ceilings and attain your every aspiration . . . but still have a hot guy who is really hot for you. Or a hot woman, if that’s your thing. The streaming series Dickinson, for example, portrays Emily Dickinson being physically intimate with her sister-in-law Susan, getting high at a house party, and generally acting like a sassy modern-day lesbian — when she isn’t writing ground-breaking poetry, that is.

To put it in musical theater terms, the message of all these works is: I can be who I want to be . . . but sexy.

Part of the gag in the foregoing clip is that brain-dead Karen from Mean Girls thinks Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks can be sexpots, too. And why not? Karen obviously has little knowledge about who Roosevelt and Parks were, beyond that they were “Badass Women.” Her Halloween cosplay is all about vibes.

Unfortunately (at least in my opinion), it’s all about vibes for modern readers/viewers, too. Reading in general is down, with nearly half the respondents in a 2025 survey reporting not having read a single book in more than a year. Of those who do crack a spine, it’s unclear how many are reading literary classics, particularly since what qualifies as a “classic” can be up for debate. We do know, however, that romance currently accounts for 21% of all adult fiction sales; right now, the genre lags behind mystery/thriller/crime but is steadily gaining market share.

As such, my working hypothesis is that the sexing-up of literary spinsters is happening because we’re losing the sense, not only of who these women were, but of the literature they created. To paraphrase Miller, these are works about writers and writing, made for audiences who have forgotten how to read — or at the very least, forgotten how to read anything that doesn’t have a meet-cute and at least one explicit sex scene. The end result isn’t an insightful look at the lives of Alcott, Austen or Bronte, but dramatized Cottagecore, the stuff of a million Pinterest boards. Gowns with petticoats! Upswept hair, elaborately braided! Candlelit balls! Beautiful lace-trimmed underthings that take forever to put on but are removed in a flash by a fiery lover with ripped abs!

Vibes, in other words. Still, if only vibes matter, isn’t Bridgerton enough?