The former model’s involvement in the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the novelist’s birth spurred an author to pen a scathing attack.
LONDON — Should a supermodel help lead celebrations of the 19th-century British poet and novelist Emily Brontë? And who gets to decide?
Those questions are at the crux of a row centering on the former British model Lily Cole and plans to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Brontë, the author of “Wuthering Heights.”
The Brontë Society, one of the oldest literary societies in the world, anointed Ms. Cole a “creative partner” this week for a festival to celebrate “this most enigmatic of the Brontë siblings,” who was born on July 30,1818.
But word of the collaboration spurred a Brontë biographer and member of the society to write a scathing blog post. It denounced Ms. Cole’s selection as a “rank farce” and accused the society of nepotism.
The author, Nick Holland, asked: “What would Emily Brontë think if she found that the role of chief ‘artist’ and organizer in her celebratory year was a supermodel? We all know the answer to that.”
The society runs a museum at the parsonage in the village of Haworth, in northern England, where Emily grew up and wrote stories with her sisters, Anne and Charlotte, both of whom also wrote major novels, and her brother, Branwell.
Mr. Holland said Ms. Cole’s appointment smacked of a desire to be “trendy.” He was quitting the society, he added, “before they announce James Corden as the creative partner for 2019” and “Rita Ora as organizer for Anne Brontë’s celebrations in 2020.”
The clash may seem, to paraphrase another literary giant, much ado about not much. But in this era, when women the world over have broken through the walls of silence surrounding forms of patriarchal abuse, the Cole-Brontë row became a trending topic on social media. The issue was skating on the edges of a familiar push to control what women do and say, some commenters said.
Many dismissed Mr. Holland’s comments as sexism and snobbery. Others rejected his arguments with pithy obscenity.
Moreover, said Helen Small, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, making assumptions about how Emily Brontë would have reacted was a stretch. This, she noted, was a writer regarded as one of the most enigmatic figures in literary history because of the absence of a confessional narrative in her work.
“You can’t place her within the same contexts that other people operate,” Ms. Small said in a phone interview on Friday. “There is so little evidence for what she thought — using her in this way is irrelevant.”
But some of the questions at issue might have been familiar to the Brontë sisters. They initially published their work under pseudonyms, some androgynous and gender-neutral, in order to protect their art from gender prejudices.
When Charlotte, the author of “Jane Eyre,” asked for the opinion of the poet Robert Southey about her work, for example, he gave faint praise while dismissing her, according to The Guardian .
“You evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of verse,’ ” Mr. Southey wrote, adding, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”
For the Brontë anniversary, Ms. Cole, 30, was tasked with making a short film for the museum about Heathcliff, the antihero of “Wuthering Heights,” according to the BBC. The society said she was to “consider gender politics and women’s rights, in the year which marks 100 years since women got the vote” in Britain.
Ms. Cole responded to the contretemps by highlighting the parallels between the prejudice that forced the Brontë sisters to publish their work under pseudonyms and the current row centered on her public persona.
In statements published by the BBC and The Guardian, she wrote, “Now I find myself wondering, fleetingly, if I should present the short film I am working on for the Brontë Parsonage Museum under a pseudonym myself, so that it will be judged on its own merits.”
Ms. Cole shot to prominence in the early 2000s as one of a crop of “otherworldly” models. She was the youngest woman to appear on the cover of British Vogue, at 16. She walked some of the most prominent runway shows before moving on to university ( according to her website, she graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in art history) and dipping in and out of acting and activism.
In this, she followed in the footsteps of a number of her supermodel peers, who in the late 1990s parlayed their fame into personal brands and platforms. Cindy Crawford was among the first of the model-moguls; not to mention Iman, who launched a successful makeup line; and Christy Turlington, who went to New York University, received a masters in public health from Columbia and is known for her advocacy of women’s health issues.
Indeed, increasingly models see their modeling careers as springboards to entrepreneurship. Karlie Kloss, for example, who still models, is getting her degree from N.Y.U. and runs programming camps for girls, Kode With Klossy .
Ms. Cole describes “Wuthering Heights” as one of her favorite books, saying, “The fact that Emily had to change her name — to Ellis Bell — in order to publish the novel intrigues and inspires me.”
In her statement, she also said: “I would not be so presumptuous as to guess Emily’s reaction to my appointment as a creative partner at the museum, were she alive today. Yet I respect her intellect and integrity enough to believe that she would not judge any piece of work on name alone.”
But to Mr. Holland, Ms. Cole is hardly fit to run in Bronte’s circle: He said the society should have appointed a female writer instead. The society, however, listed a roster of female artists for the festival: the poet and performer Patience Agbabi, the artist Kate Whiteford, and the folk duo the Unthanks.
In his post, Mr. Holland focused on Ms. Cole’s past acting performances, describing once having a front-row seat at a play about Helen of Troy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theater in which she had the title role. “The play was so bad that it is the only one I have ever walked out of at the interval,” he wrote.
He also saw shades of nepotism in Ms. Cole’s selection because the current creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Simon Armitage, was the writer of that play. Attempts to reach the Brontë Society were unsuccessful on Friday; a note on its website said it was closed for January.
