But don't cheat!

One more article on movie adaptations of a Brontë novel. This time it's about Wuthering Heights, among others. We wonder they don't mention Jane Eyre as well, since the article is on the relationship between classics and film adaptations. You know you can't always judge a book by its movie.

As a former high school English teacher, and as a parent, I can empathize. My 15-year-old daughter is plowing through “Wuthering Heights” for her English class. I haven’t bothered telling her there are four — count ’em, four — movie versions of the Bronte classic. But when she is done with the book, we’ll sit down and watch one of them — likely William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, considered the gold standard.
Students should be forewarned of the pitfalls of relying solely on cinema to do the work for them. For instance, Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” covers only up to Chapter 17 of a 36-chapter book. I’d advise completing the thing in its entirety if you prefer a passing grade. (And no cheating by watching the movie and then reading only the last 19 chapters.)
In fact, it’s a given that in most movie adaptations of big books, timelines are compressed, characters excised, and action streamlined to squeeze hundreds of pages of text into a two-hour time frame.

However, there's speculation that Emily might have intended to write only that in the first place. But since The Professor wasn't accepted by the publisher, there was a volume of the third-volume edition to fill. Hence, many people consider that the second generation is sort of an "afterthought". Who knows, really.

Now - how would that teacher look if the student were to add this to their essay? Highly surprised, surely!

Categories: Wuthering_Heights, Movies-DVD-TV