Wuthering Heights in Providencia

 An ongoing exhibition in Providencia, Chile, devoted to Gothic Literature and featuring Wuthering Heights:

RECORRIDOS LITERARIOS

Hasta el 12 de julio puedes recorrer las muestras “Literatura gótica” y “El mágico mundo de los libros de Harry Potter” en nuestra Fundación Cultural. 

El primer recorrido rinde tributo a la literatura gótica y a su extensa tradición a través de los siglos, desde grandes clásicos como Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein y Drácula, hasta su influencia contemporánea en la obra de autoras como Samanta Schweblin, Anne Rice o Agustina Bazterrica. Un viaje a través de conceptos claves de este género narrativo como el amor, el monstruo y la muerte.

Para todos los fanáticos de Harry Potter tienen la oportunidad de disfrutar del mágico mundo de sus libros, rememorando pasajes icónicos del universo literario que partió con la publicación de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal en 1997.

Further information, here. 

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Brontëmania!

Wuthering Heightsmania may be slowly fading only to make way for Brontëmania. As reported by Agence France-Presse:

Perched on the edge of the rugged Yorkshire moors that inspired Emily Brontë to write her masterpiece “Wuthering Heights”, the quaint village of Haworth has long been a place of literary pilgrimage.

Now the latest big-screen adaptation of her classic 1847 novel – starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and with a Charli XCX soundtrack – is drawing a fresh influx of visitors.

It was here that Emily and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, lived and wrote.

More than 150 years after the sisters’ deaths, “the world is still fascinated with their stories,” said Canadian retiree Nancy Marto, adding that being able to visit Haworth was “a dream come true”.

“I think the fact that there is a new version of ‘Wuthering Heights’... speaks to the power of these authors, to Emily, but also to her sisters,” she said.

Two weeks after the release of the film, picturesque Haworth in north-west England with its narrow, cobbled streets and small stone houses, is packed. [...]

Mr Johnnie Brigg, a local tour guide, has been inundated with requests in recent weeks.

“They want to come here and experience the Brontës, the moor, and find their own interpretation of Emily,” he said.

The film would attract a “whole new generation of people” who had not yet read the book but were “completely besotted” after seeing the film, he added.

The parsonage between the village and the moors where the Brontës lived with their clergyman father and brother, Branwell, is now a museum dedicated to their memory.

Emily’s sister Charlotte also wrote “Jane Eyre” here, another classic of English literature.

The museum’s Mia Ferullo, who has been giving talks on “Bronte-mania” for the past fortnight, said “so many people” were “picking up the book for the first time” as a result of the film.

Museum director Rebecca Yorke said 500 people of all ages and backgrounds visited on one Saturday.

Numbers like that were usually only seen in peak season such as during the August summer holidays, Ms Yorke said.

“Everyone is talking about Emily Brontë and ‘Wuthering Heights’.... It’s just extraordinary,” she added. 

Also in Yorkshire Live.

Wales Online recommends a cottage in Haworth as a staycation option to enjoy World Book Day.

Become a Brontë for the weekend in Haworth, West Yorkshire

Heathcliff Cottage – Haworth, West Yorkshire

Sleeps: Six

Price: Seven nights from £565

The aptly named Heathcliff Cottage is a traditional stone-built retreat set in the heart of Haworth, the village where the Brontë sisters resided.

Complete with subtle nods to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, including inspired artwork, it’s the perfect base for fans of the story. Beautiful interiors add depth and character, including exposed wood and stone, as well as luxurious colour schemes.

The Yorkshire Moors, where Wuthering Heights is set, are within walking distance of Heathcliff Cottage, and guests can also explore the independent shops of Haworth before popping into a local pub or café. There’s also the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which holds regular talks, exhibitions, and displays. (Daniel Smith)

The Herald reports on someone who had got the name of Wuthering Heights wrong for years.

We recently mentioned a blockbuster movie based on a classic Emily Brontë novel. Which inspires Jenny Wilson to admit Withering’ Heights.

“I always wondered,” says Jenny, “how much the Heights withered. Was it enough for them to become Lows instead of Heights?” (Lorne Jackson)

BBC News feels the ned to feature a bookshop owner saying that, 'Wuthering Heights is not bonkbuster like the film'.

A bookshop owner says customers wanting to buy a copy of Wuthering Heights because they think ithat for years she believed the book was called ‘t is a "bonkbuster" are "going to be seriously disappointed".

Demand for Emily Brontë's magnum opus soared after the release of Emerald Fennell's film adaption starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

According to Penguin Classics, sales of the 19th Century gothic tragedy went up by 469% year on year in January 2026, with 8,795 more copies sold.

But Suzie Grogan, from Framlingham Books, warned that any shoppers hoping for the novel to be as raunchy as the film version might end up feeling shortchanged.

"I'm going to tell you, if you're looking for a bonkbuster, you're going to be seriously disappointed," she said.

"There's so much naughty stuff in it (the film) and, to be quite honest, Emily Brontë must be turning in her grave in Howarth [sic] at the idea of it, frankly." (Sarah Lilley and George King)

Similarly, The Shield claims that 'Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis, but ‘Wuthering Heights’ (2026) was still the worst thing that happened to her'. We know it's said in good fun, but she was an actual woman who lived and breathed and who lost her mother when she was 3 years old and then saw three of her siblings die and saying that an innocuous movie adaptation was worse than that is rather awkward.

The Sun reports gleefully that a Reddit user has spotted a blunder in Wuthering Heights 2026:

The original novel Wuthering Heights was published by Emily Brontë in 1847, but the story itself is set much earlier – beginning in 1801.

Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights takes place in 1771, with the new film adaptation wrapping up events in 1784.

But sharp-eyed fans have pointed out that Belgium – referenced in the movie – wasn’t founded until 1830, decades after the timeline in which the story unfolds.

Taking on Reddit, one fan wrote: “In Wuthering Heights, Isabella, when talking to Cathy, boasts about dresses from France, Italy and… Belgium.

“This makes no sense as Belgium did not exist as a state until 1830, almost half a century after the events of the film take place.”

Despite the major blunder, the UK ranks Wuthering Heights among the top-grossing films of the year, with strong ticket sales behind it. (Henna Sharma)

The 'despite the major blunder' bit truly had us in stitches. In all likelihood it's a nod to Emily Brontë's own stay in Belgium.

Some more reviews:

Berkeley High Jacket:

The ambiance emphasizes the unsettling, somewhat dreamlike feel that encapsulates “Wuthering Heights.” 

All things considered, the film is not an exact adaptation of Brontë’s gothic romance novel “Wuthering Heights.” If one goes into the film expecting a true adaptation of the original novel, they would leave the theaters disappointed. As its own, individual work of art, the film proves to be a beautiful picture, throwing the audience into the setting. “Wuthering Heights” is a movie really made to be seen in a theater to experience the true atmospheric nature of it. (Zoe Whitman)

The Triangle:

Robbie and Elordi’s overindulgent (but fitting) performances would have become unbearable if it was not for the refreshing ice-cold chill given by Chau’s performance.  She dominates every scene she is in with an enigmatic vindictiveness that makes her next moves unpredictable but empathetic. She is the daunting voice of reason that is the antithesis to the indulgences the rest of the story takes. 

Directors need to be less afraid of humiliating themselves in a world where online dialogue is attached to success. A director who is unafraid of making bad movies will always be appreciated by certain movie-goers. Film is Fennell’s freedom to make her shameless art, a quality that produces the most dynamic artists.  It is what has the power to turn the passive experience of watching a movie into experiencing a confessional. 

Those who want a movie like Fennell’s debut film, “Promising Young Woman”, will have mixed feelings. “Promising Young Woman” was clinical and heavy. “Wuthering Heights” is the levity in her career, one that allows herself to lean into the fantasies that “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn” rejected. 

For all its political incorrectness, it is well-meaning and devoted to making the audience love Cathy and Heathcliff as much as Fennell does. It is a tender and frustrating ode to the stories that inspired teenage fanfiction careers. (Maddie Dort)

Folio Weekly:

But the greatest sin “Wuthering Heights” commits is that, despite the promised eroticism that the film was made and sold on, it’s just not remotely hot and, instead, surprisingly tame. I can accept and enjoy a film where the romance takes a backseat to more simplistic, lustful needs, but if that’s the case then you need to take a bigger swing than Fennell does here, where the most charged imagery she can muster is a repeated motif of Heathcliff’s sweaty, scarred back and of a slimy white snail slowly trickling down a window Cathy gazes longingly out of. I’m not saying that the film needed to have scenes of full penetration to fulfill its promise of being a sexually charged epic romance, but at the very least, Elordi could have hung some dong or something. (Harry Moore)

The Argonaut:

As a movie rather than an adaptation, the movie was entertaining though it exaggerated the dark romance elements to an uncomfortable degree, using lust as a selling point rather than a narrative to tell a deeper story. The cinematics were beautiful, showcasing the green misty moors and elaborate gothic manors, whose gloom adds to the narratives depressing tone. At the same time, this overshadowed the plot to the extent that the only take was that the directors preferred vibes to substance. 

The costume design was strikingly beautiful but unfitting for the 19th century  

setting. Elordi alone wore clothes fitting of the setting compared to Robbie whose elaborate outfit looked like it belongs at the MET Gala. The worst offender of Robbie’s outfits was a dress that looked like colorful plastic wrap. 

For such a bad plot, the actors were able to spin so much tension into every moment they appeared on-screen together. This movie wants to be the next dark romance obsession of the young women, and may be for some, but like “Saltburn,” another story about unhealthy obsession gone wrong from the same director, this movie will fade from cultural memory in a couple of years. (Andrea Roberts)

The Collegian:

Now, if Fennell had chosen to create an original film inspired by “Wuthering Heights,” à la “50 Shades of Grey” to “Twilight,” there wouldn’t have been so much to complain about. “Wuthering Heights” is, understandably, one of the hardest novels to adapt to film. All adaptations so far have lacked at least some important aspects of the novel because there is so much content and symbolism to sift through that it’s hard to pin down what is most important to focus on. 

But choosing a story known for its criticism of institutionalized classism and racism and turning it into a horny romantic drama will never be appealing. 

If media literacy is dead and buried, Emerald Fennell is among those holding a shovel. (Gimena Baez Baez)

And yet sales of the novel went up by 469% as reported above, so perhaps she's shining a light instead.

A contributor to Her Campus reviews the film. The Tab discusses Cathy's mother.

The Montclarion reviews Charli XCX'S Wuthering Heights album.

Though a few of the tracks can feel similar to each other at times, Charli’s lyricism and modernized theme bring forth the need for feeling in an epic drama such as this film. Each song focuses on the tensions seen between the two characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

While some of the repeated tempos and lyrics bring some tracks down, the album is still able to shine and makes the most sense when seeing the film, as it creates the world Fennell is attempting to give audiences.

The “Wuthering Heights” soundtrack is a triumphant pivot for Charli xcx, who is only just getting started in her work on films. Its gothic, modern-pop sound marks a new beginning in the singer’s undebated discography, and will push her to new heights no matter what she does next. (Diego Baez)

The Telegraph and Argus reports that Northern Ballet is returning to the stage.

Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Wuthering Heights will open in March 2027 at Leeds Grand Theatre before performances at venues including Sadler’s Wells in London. [...]

Artistic Director Federico Bonelli said: “Northern Ballet has a history of transforming classic novels into blockbuster ballets and Wuthering Heights is no exception. The combined might of David Nixon’s choreography and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music is an unstoppable force of emotion which carries the audience through this tumultuous and tragic love story. We began our trio of Northern stories with a Jane Eyre revival in 2025 and Gentleman Jack in 2026, so it feels only fitting to bring back Wuthering Heights, a ballet I know is a fan favourite with many of our loyal audiences.” (Emma Clayton)

Far Out Magazine looks into 'Cliff Richard’s utterly bonkers ‘Wuthering Heights’ musical'.

Was it a dare? A mistake? A figment of this writer’s imagination? None of the above. I have seen all two hours of this cultural artefact, and trust me when I say that it is the most memorable feature-length adaptation of the novel that has ever been made. It may also be the worst, but that is beside the point.

Vanishingly minimal choreography, plastic rocks, two very bad wigs, and an incongruously jaunty soundtrack make this production what it is. The acting excels at loudness. The makeup excels at the colour brown. Richard does a lot of arm tossing, like a mime who’s been tasked with depicting the slow, excruciating death of a rapidly deflating blow-up doll, but unlike a mime, however, he makes a lot of sounds, some of them musical, some of them not. He is fully committed, and it is one of the bravest performances I’ve ever seen.

Richard has been obsessed with Wuthering Heights ever since he read the novel as a kid, but it wasn’t until he hit his fifties that he had time to do something about it. Emily Brontë’s 1847 story follows the destructive love story between Cathy Earnshaw and her adopted foundling brother Heathcliff. After she marries a wealthy neighbour, he dedicates his life to seeking revenge on everyone in her family. It’s dark, violent, and nasty, three words that do not come to mind when thinking of the crooner behind ‘Miss You Nights.’

Still, by the early 1990s, Richard was itching to get back into acting. Those who only know him as the Christian-adjacent chart-topper might not be aware that in the 1960s, he was consistently beating James Bond at the box office with his series of promotional musicals. In the ‘80s, he took his acting qualifications to the theatre to appear in the intergalactic space musical Time, which was roundly panned by critics but was a hit with his voracious fanbase.

Ready to tread the boards once more, Richard finally acknowledged what had been lurking in his heart since boyhood. “There was one dream role that I longed to play above all others,” he wrote in his memoir. “I wanted to be Heathcliff.” He wasn’t completely delusional. He knew that no one in their right mind would cast a 55-year-old white Englishman as a teenage “gipsy”. But he had a solution. It wasn’t to cast someone younger or dial up Tom Cruise and ask for some of the fetal stem cells he’s been stockpiling. His solution was to produce the thing on his own so that he had the last word on casting.

He assembled a stellar crew. His former bandmate and Olivia Newton-John collaborator, John Farrar, composed the music, Tim Rice, who co-wrote several of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most successful musicals, penned the lyrics, and Frank Dunlop, who founded the Young Vic, took directorial duties. The casting choices were less important because this was no regular Wuthering Heights adaptation. This version was to be called simply Heathcliff, and despite a lot of scripted wailing from Helen Hobson, who plays Cathy, none of the other characters register.

Despite the supergroup of artists at the helm, things went terribly wrong with Heathcliff from its inception. Where Kate Bush managed to create a sound and lyrics that evoke the tone of the novel (“How could you leave me / When I needed to possess you? / I hated you, I loved you too”), the same cannot be said of Richard’s version. While the lyrics delve into the darkness of the subject matter, the sound of it is, well, the Cliff Richard sound. Nearly all the numbers are shimmery, synth-heavy ballads so benign that they practically wipe your brain clean of all thought or sensation, the sonic equivalent of a very effective lobotomy.

The choreography is more milling than dancing, and even the way the actors move through each scene without the musical numbers is strangely circumspect. At one point, when Heathcliff ventures to India (this is not in the book) and confronts the local monarch with a pistol, the man does a tiny wave of his hands to indicate that he doesn’t want to be shot dead at point-blank range. This is pretty much the extent of the physical work.

The biggest problem of all, of course, is that Richard, who has spent his entire career denouncing the drugs and alcohol-soaked antics of his peers, simply does not possess the darkness required to play a grade A bastard. Even when he beats his wife, he may as well be lightly swiping her with a velvet glove for all the violent rage it imparts. He does take strides to slip, chameleon-like, into his character. The scene in India includes a lot of hookah smoking, which one can assume is the famously drug-averse Richard’s shorthand for utter moral degradation. For his audience, this must have been the equivalent of slapping a sign on his bronzed forehead reading “NOT CLIFF”.

The acting comes into its full glory during scenes of plot-driven drama, such as when Mr Earnshaw falls down dead after lightly cuffing his daughter or when Cathy appears to perish randomly, without ailment. Rocketing up the plastic stone steps of a Yorkshire promontory, Heathcliff delivers what Richard called his most affecting lines of dialogue.

If it wasn’t for this moment, this musical might not be worth remembering, but skip to the end of the trailer (or watch the whole thing if you’re trying to prove something) and wait for Richard’s delivery. “I cannot live without my life,” he hisses, “I cannot live without my sooooooooouuuuuuuuuul.” That last word is bellowed several octaves above comfort, and it’s a choice that turns what could simply be a bad performance into a virtuosic one. Richard is not an actor, but my god, is he a performer.

Heathcliff was predictably panned by critics, who dutifully called out the ropey acting, stilted choreography, and overall tedium. But the pop star knew his audience. Posters for the show featured the heading “When Reviews Aren’t Good Audiences Know Better,” followed by a list of dire quotes from critics and claims that half a million tickets had been sold anyway.

Why this shining example of flamboyant theatrical tosh has been forgotten is a mystery, but it deserves to be celebrated. We don’t have to pretend it’s good, but we should all admire the guts and originality behind it. What other pop star at the peak of their powers would do something so daring and misguided? JLo’s This is Me… Now was a self-serving vanity project in which she burnished her usual persona at great monetary expense.

There was no jeopardy in it, and with Heathcliff, we got to see a pop star try something completely insane that they had never done before… we can only hope that, by excavating this deliriously strange relic from the dregs of the ‘90s, we might inspire James Blunt to embark on a musical version of Oliver Twist in which he plays the titular child, or Susan Boyle to star as the lead character in a genre-bending adaptation of Annie. The possibilities are endless. (Lily Hardman)

Far Out Magazine is impressed by the fact that Kate Bush recorded Wuthering Heights in one take.

Bush explained, “When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong. This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff. Great subject matter for a song. I loved writing it.”

It really is a remarkable performance, and not just because of the palpable emotion that Bush is able to imbue into the song. It’s also because Bush was able to channel those emotions in just a single go: Bush did one take of the song, and that was it. The recording for the song was mostly done in a single night, including taping the guitar solo and mixing the final track. It’s a remarkable feat of efficiency, even 35 years later. “There was no compiling,” engineer Kelly said. “We started the mix at around midnight and Kate was there the whole time, encouraging us… We got on with the job and finished at about five or six that morning.” (Tyler Golsen)

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Wuthering Heights: evergreen bestseller

The Guardian reports that 'Sales of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights skyrocket ahead of film adaptation', which is something the naysayers always struggle with.

Sales of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, as anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s bold and highly anticipated film adaptation, figures from Penguin Classics UK show.

In January of this year, 10,670 copies were sold, compared with 1,875 in January 2025, in what Penguin has described as an unusually large boost.

Sales of the book increased by 132% after the release of the first teaser trailer for the film last September. Between the trailer’s release and the end of the year, Penguin sold 28,257 copies in the UK, compared with 12,134 over the same period in 2024.

Jess Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics, said: “I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book. Wuthering Heights is one of our evergreen bestsellers, but I do think the film is coming out at the perfect moment.

“There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories,” Harrison added. “We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged – an extreme book for extreme times.” [...]

“I don’t think an adaptation needs to be completely faithful to the book: many of the best ones – like Clueless riffing on [Jane Austen’s] Emma – aren’t,” Harrison said. “But what you hope for is that an adaptation will capture the spirit of the original. With Wuthering Heights, it’s the extreme intensity of emotion that matters the most.” (Emma Loffhagen)

That's what people should bear in mind before penning a letter to the Brontë Society, outraged at how they can 'allow' a film like Emerald Fennell's to be made (all before having even seen it, too) or leaving comments on social media calling for it to be boycotted. This is how the Brontë legacy is kept alive. No point in keeping a story immaculately preserved if no one reads it anymore.

Similarly, a contributor to The Yorkshire Post is 'excited that a new generation might come to love Wuthering Heights like I did'.

My copy of the book was cheap and flimsy because I preferred spending my hard earned wages from my Saturday job at Topshop on booze. Most importantly, my heart had just been broken for the very first time.

It was, of course, the end of the world, in the way that being dumped at 17 has been the end of the world for millions of teenagers since time immemorial. And in between angsty phone calls to friends and cryptic MSN status updates (if you don’t know what MSN was, it was a noughties cross between Facebook and WhatsApp), I found Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

If you haven’t read it, you might be dimly aware of the two main characters, Cathy and Heathcliff. The pair - raised together in the crumbling hall, Wuthering Heights - have a mutual obsession with each other which destroys both their happiness and that of many around them.

Aged 17, their doomed romance seemed to me to be the height of what it meant to be a human. What was the point in life if I couldn’t be loved in an all-possessing way, like Heathcliff loved Cathy?

When - and I must warn here, despite the book being published while Queen Victoria was on the throne, I’m about to spoil a plot point - Cathy dies, Heathcliff moans in agony. “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I genuinely fantasised about having that quote tattooed on my ankle. Thank god my frontal lobe cortex developed in time to talk myself out of it.

From the vantage point of a 17-year-old girl, it was like Emily Brontë had reached her hand through the book to take mine, just as Cathy’s smashes through the windows of Wuthering Heights.

I’m not 17 any more, but I still love Wuthering Heights. It is a wild book, in every sense of the word. Far from being a conventional romance, the plot veers from passionate obsession to vengeance. Like the boxed in narrative of the book, it’s complicated. I love it because on every re-read, it takes me back to being that girl, one I remember so fondly even though my age has doubled.

But I also love it now because it’s not the uncomplicated love story that it was to me at 17. Now it’s a dizzying exploration of revenge, ownership, anger, servitude, landscape. There’s love, yes, but it’s also a book about hatred.

It’s an imperfect book - not nearly as ‘neat’ from a plotting perspective as Jane Eyre, written, of course, by the older Brontë sister Charlotte. I like to imagine that Emily wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but that her pen wrote what she needed it to write in a kind of fever dream.

And now it’s set to capture new fans via the film adaptation released later this month. So far, I’m nervous. Director Emerald Fenell’s last film, Saltburn, was perverse and gothic and frankly bonkers, so I think she’ll capture the spirit of the book well. The landscapes are set to be stunning, with filming having taken place across the Yorkshire Dales. I’m also excited for the soundtrack, masterminded by Charli xcx. If ever a book fits her vibe of insouciance mixed with glamour, it’s Wuthering Heights. Cathy Earnshaw is, in my eyes, the original ‘brat.

But, famously, adaptations of Wuthering Heights are so hard to get right (though, for my money, Emma Rice’s stage production at York Theatre Royal a few years ago came as close as it gets). It’s too complicated, there’s a death every five pages, and half the characters have virtually identical names. And I feel very rude in saying this, but given I’m the same age as Margot Robbie, who stars in the film, I hope it’s forgivable to point out that she’s almost 20 years older than Cathy’s character in the book, and that matters. Lovestruck teenagers do and say awful things in ways we can forgive, in a way that we can’t of those in their mid-thirties. I should know.

But for all my reservations, I’m excited that a new generation might come, via the film, to the book. That they will choose to inhabit Emily’s strange, twisted world. That she will, like she did for me, reach out from 1847 and grab their hands to give them permission to be wild, and passionate, and angry. That maybe, like I’ve done so many times since, they’ll decide to visit Haworth to see for themselves the landscape that inspired such a poetic tale.

I don’t think I could have loved Wuthering Heights half so much now if I hadn’t read it for the first time then, and I’m so jealous of anyone who gets to experience it for their first time. The best literature not only reflects the way we think, it shows a mirror up to the way we feel. And if any of its new readers come to it heartbroken by the ends of their first loves, as I did all those years ago, so much the better. (Victoria Finan)

We are lucky today too as we have another article by a big name. Lucasta Miller writes about 'The mystery of Heathcliff’s race in Wuthering Heights' ('Is Jacob Elordi too white? Would Emily Brontë care?') for The New Statesman.

Emily Brontë’s genius was not for self-promotion. She hid her true identity under a pseudonym and agreed to pay £50 – more than the annual salary of a governess at the time – to get Wuthering Heights published in 1847. In contrast, the pre-publicity for Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation, due for release on Valentine’s Day, has reached carnivalesque levels rare even in Hollywood. Few have so far seen it. But the trailer alone has already generated a babel of online response. Critiques have ranged from objections to anachronistic costumes – Margot Robbie in what looks like an Eighties wedding dress – to complaints that Jacob Elordi is “too white” to play Heathcliff. The film has been compared unfavourably to Andrea Arnold’s gritty, arthouse adaptation of 2011, which cast a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff.

But who really is Heathcliff? Emily Brontë’s original text does indeed make it clear that his racial identity is supposed to be different from that of the Yorkshire-born characters. Picked up as a foundling on the streets of Liverpool, he’s brought to Wuthering Heights by old Mr Earnshaw, who tells his family to “take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark as the devil” in a seeming allusion to the child’s skin colour. That neuter pronoun “it” suggests that Heathcliff is already being othered at the moment of his adoption. 

And yet no one in the novel ever discovers his origins. Edgar Linton thinks he might be either a “Lascar” – a term usually applied at the time to seamen from the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia – or “an American or Spanish castaway”. Perhaps, proposes the housekeeper Nelly Dean, his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. Elsewhere, he is described as “a dark-skinned gipsy”; and yet in one scene his face is depicted as being “as white as the wall behind him”. 

Andrea Arnold’s film recast Heathcliff as a survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, for which Liverpool was indeed a hub in the 18th century period in which the novel, though written in the 1840s, is set. She turned that imagined backstory into an eloquent portrayal of cycles of abuse. Yet there’s nothing in the text to suggest Heathcliff is black African. On the contrary, Nelly Dean specifically implies that he is not, when she tells him (with a casual racism that will make the modern reader flinch) that “a good heart will help you to a bonny face” even “if you were a regular black”. 

The success of Arnold’s film comes not from its slavish “respect” for the text but from its openness to treating it as an imaginative springboard. Over the years, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for stage and screen countless times, with spin-offs ranging from a now lost silent film to the unlikely Cliff Richard vehicle, Heathcliff: the Musical. And yet the truth about the original book is that much of what makes it a literary masterpiece is unfilmable. It’s an inscrutable text, probably intentionally so, that baffled critics when it first came out and continues to baffle scholars, not least because so few personal writings by Emily Brontë survive to explain what she intended, though the book itself hints at its literary context.

That Heathcliff’s race and origins are left purposely ambiguous reflects the destabilising techniques, clearly drawn from the gothic tradition, on which the novel relies for its uncanny effects. Another is the frame narrative: the way it’s told as a tale within a tale, sometimes within another tale. We’re held at a strange distance, while paradoxically, the vivid descriptive writing makes us feel as though we’re only inches from the action.

This is a tale of the supernatural – it’s a ghost story after all – couched in the language of naturalism. Domestic interiors offer themselves up with all the detailed solidness of their oak furniture. But even the realism over-reaches itself in the novel’s famous scenes of physical violence, which are so graphic as to teeter – perhaps intentionally – on the Tarentinoesque edge of parody. If you realistically filmed a grown man forcibly rubbing a child’s wrist to and fro over a broken windowpane until the blood ran down, it would be unwatchable.

Wuthering Heights remains a completely uncategorisable novel, whose unique voice can’t be assimilated to the norms of Victorian fiction. And yet both it and Heathcliff do have literary forebears. Behind his character lies the Byronic anti-hero “linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes”, to quote Byron’s own Corsair.

If the constancy of Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is his “one virtue”, it comes with overtones of sibling incest as the two have been brought up together as brother and sister. That too channels Lord Byron, refracting the transgressive love at the heart of his gothic tragedy Manfred, and also his notorious real-life affair with his own half-sister. Even the famous scene in which Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly that it would degrade her to marry him echoes a similar scene in Thomas Moore’s 1830 Life of Byron (a copy of which the Brontës owned) in which the teenage future poet overhears his first love tell her maid that she could never care for that “lame boy”. 

If Emily Brontë took these Byronic hints, she transmogrified them into something that was – and still feels – totally new and strange. Popular culture has since conventionalised Wuthering Heights into the archetypal world’s “greatest love story”, but it is far from that. No film version so far has fully represented the extent to which Heathcliff becomes a manipulative psychopath. And, despite the Byronic connections, one of the oddest things about the novel is the almost complete lack of sex. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s works, which pulsate with frustrated sensual desire, it is often physical but never erotic.

Early reports have, in contrast, called Emerald Fennell’s version “a whole other level of hot”. Judging from the trailer, its sexy, operatic production values and pounding soundtrack couldn’t be more different from Andrea Arnold’s downbeat version, which was filmed without music or make-up and seemingly with a handheld camera. I admired Arnold’s take, but I’m looking forward to Fennell’s. I’ll be judging it not on literal fidelity to the text – which is impossible – but on whether it creates its own convincing world.

I’d also like – perhaps mischievously – to refer the Instagram costume cavillers to Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights, in which the young Cathy returns from Thrushcross Grange newly and smartly dressed. According to the timeline of the book, it is 1777. However, her outfit is the obviously early Victorian combo of tartan and pantaloons: a “plaid silk frock” with “white trousers”. Emily Brontë wouldn’t have cared about fashion anachronism. But she would have been amazed to discover how many people care about Wuthering Heights.

Please make this article compulsory reading for every X-pert.

Mental Floss lists 'Everything 'Wuthering Heights' Says About Heathcliff's Race'.

Coincidentally, a contributor to the BBC writes about how ''The hostility has been relentless'.

Ever since it was announced, Emerald Fennell's version of the torrid Brontë classic has been the subject of furious online discourse over everything from its casting to its costumes.

The most controversial film of the year? Usually that accolade is reserved for an edgy political thriller or a taboo-busting horror movie. But the film that is currently prompting the most "discourse" – to use a polite term for it – is an adaptation of a 19th-Century novel. Ever since Emerald Fennell declared that she was following Promising Young Woman and Saltburn with her own take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, commentators have not been short of opinions – mostly negative ones.

"Fennell has channelled her creative instincts into a disturbing exercise in pointless destruction," wrote Lara Brown in The Spectator – and that was five months before the film's release date next week.

Everything about the film has been pilloried, from its casting to its costumes, from the actors' accents to the inverted commas around the title: it's "Wuthering Heights", not Wuthering Heights, to emphasise that this is Fennell's own interpretation of the book, rather than the book itself. The hostility has been relentless. But could the reasons for this hostility go beyond some scepticism about a dodgy-looking period drama? [...]

But these quibbles raise some big questions, the first one being: So what? Why shouldn't Fennell come up with her own out-there, sexed-up version of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in 1990s California, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet can do the same with Shakespeare, why should we be fussing about dress design?

There are two obvious answers, one of them suggested by the fact that, in the trailer, Robbie's Cathy sounded posher than any screen character since, well, the toffs in Saltburn.

Fennell's last film, Saltburn, was set in a stately home, and one of the best things about it was that the writer-director seemed to know her upper-class characters intimately. There is no mystery as to how she managed it: as the daughter of celebrated jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To quote Patrick Sproull in Dazed, "Not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting." In short, Fennell is posh. Indeed, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now better known as Queen Camilla – she didn't have to sound any grander than she does in ordinary life.

This hasn't endeared her to everyone. As popular as Saltburn was, some reviews argued that it was too forgiving of its posh characters because Fennell was so posh herself. "It's a satire that never bares its claws, never lifts a finger to criticise these people," said Sproull. Other people have grumbled that Fennell's connections and advantages gave her directing career an unfair head start. This meant that many commentators were primed to dislike "Wuthering Heights" from the very beginning. The antipathy had as much to do with their feelings about Fennell as their feelings about the film.

But the main reason behind all the rancour is this: people who love Brontë's novel really love Brontë's novel. They're not just fond of it, they're fixated on it. As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a BBC article, "Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we're wildly impressionable." Many of the book's fans go on to view it as part of their identity – and, for that matter, as part of their love lives. "I remain convinced that the precedent for chasing toxic love stories was one set out for me as a teenager, by Heathcliff," confessed Olivia Petter in British Vogue. And she's not alone. Considering how devoted the novel's aficionados are, it was inevitable that any film which diverged from the text would be taken by some as a personal attack.

The irony is that Fennell professes to adore the book as much as anyone. At the Brontë Women's Writing Festival last September, she said that she had been "obsessed" and "driven mad" by Wuthering Heights since she read it as a 14-year-old. "I know that if somebody else made [the film], I'd be furious."

She's probably not too worried, then, that other people are furious about her. In fact, she may be quite pleased. Every time new information about the film emerges, there are thousands of impassioned words written about it, and while they aren't all flattering, they have undoubtedly helped to raise awareness and build anticipation.

Could "Wuthering Heights" really be as over-the-top as the trailers suggest, we asked. Could it be so-bad-it's-good? Or could it even be… good? Certainly, social media reactions from an early screening have been strong, with one film writer even moved to declare it a "god-tier new classic".

"I personally cannot wait to watch Fennell's Wuthering Heights," wrote Olivia Petter in Vogue. "I'll admit, as a dedicated fan of the book, I was sceptical at first. But now, I no longer care about accuracy."

The old saying about there being no such thing as bad publicity has never been more true. (Nicholas Barber)

Just let us question whether people actually love the novel or, rather, they love the idea of themselves as crusaders for the 'love' of a book.

Many sites are still commenting the fact (not actually factually in many cases) that Margot Robbie wore a replica of Charlotte Brontë's bracelet to the London premiere of the film, so it's a good time to quote the press release by the Brontë Society:

Last night at the London premiere of “Wuthering Heights” Oscar-nominated actress and producer Margot Robbie walked the red carpet in Leicester Square wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu inspired by a bracelet that belonged to Charlotte Brontë.

The intricate, delicate bracelet features hair from two people, believed to be her sisters, Emily and Anne. During the Victorian era hair jewellery was fashionable and widely worn and it was common practice to make mourning jewellery incorporating the hair of a deceased relative. The bracelet is made of a wide band of braided hair with a gold clasp set with garnets and has been owned by the Museum since 1923.

The original bracelet is currently on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum alongside other examples of mourning jewellery.

Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum said: “The museum holds the world’s largest collections of Brontë manuscripts, clothing and personal possessions and we take our responsibility as custodians extremely seriously.

“This event has offered us an unprecedented opportunity to share an item from our collection and tell its story with a global and contemporary audience, and we are thrilled that, thanks to director Emerald Fennell, Margot Robbie and everyone involved with the film, Emily Brontë and her masterpiece continue to be part of popular culture almost 200 years after her death.”

Rebecca continued: “We were delighted to work in partnership with Wyedean Weaving, based in Haworth, to create a faithful and high quality replica bracelet which Margot Robbie wore on the red carpet, and to facilitate visits from Dilara’s team to view the original bracelet.”

Wyedean Weaving has shared a lovely reel of the making of on its instagram account. An article in The Yorkshire Post also features the creative process.

A contributor to Veranda writes about 'the Hauntingly Beautiful Filming Locations in the New Wuthering Heights Movie'

I’m here to see it for myself. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve long dreamed of making, and I begin in York, the city where Emily Brontë’s sisters, Charlotte and Anne, rested overnight en route to seeking a sea cure for the tuberculosis that would eventually take Anne’s life (a small plaque marks the site of the long since demolished inn on Coney Street). Then I travel to the village of Haworth, where the Brontës spent the majority of their too-short lives.

“People have a very strong idea of the landscape when they think of the Brontës,” says Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “They conjure up images of wild, rugged moorland scenery, and of course, that applies mainly to Wuthering Heights.”

She’s exactly right about these romantic notions, I think, as I explore the rooms where these writers lived—the small couch upon which Emily died, the narrow windows from which the sisters saw their world, the tiny books they created in childhood with handwriting so minuscule a magnifying glass is needed to read the words. I’m among those who have romanticized the world of the Brontës, as though I’ve created my own movie version of their landscape in my head.

Certainly, Emerald Fennell must have been aware of how strongly readers like me feel about the world of the Brontës when she set out to make her film. I learn that to find the ideal locations, her team tapped Aurelia Thomas, a veteran of British film and television, to be the supervising location manager of Wuthering Heights.

“It was very much the thing from the outset, how important the landscape was to this film,” Thomas tells me. “So much of the story, and how Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so doomed and bleak in a lot of ways, comes from the setting and this feeling of desolation. The landscapes they walk in almost have a personality of their own. So it was a very important thing to find and to get right.”

Thomas and her team scoured the peat and heather moors of Yorkshire, looking specifically for open, wild land far off the beaten path (and often far from road accessibility). They deliberately sought filming locations that had not been used in previous adaptations of the story, instead spending months searching for places that would, as Thomas says, “feel different and epic.” They passed on anything too flat or too close to a village road, or anything that felt too idyllic or pretty.

Interestingly, this meant refraining from filming in Haworth itself, the village where Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights and the landscape where she would have freely roamed. Dinsdale notes that while Haworth has become “this rather haunting, kind of romantic place” nowadays, the Haworth of the Brontës’ time wasn’t entirely remote or untouched. Rather, it was an industrious, albeit very small, village.

The parsonage where the sisters lived and penned their works was perched at the edge of the moors and the edge of the village, straddled between two worlds. I feel that intensely. The front door of the parsonage looks out onto the graveyard, with enormous, moss-covered tombstones. The back looks out onto the edge of the moor. It’s haunting and eerily beautiful, yet also quite popular, both with tourists and those walking the many paths leading from the village into the countryside.

Instead, Fennell’s crew turned to remote stretches of moorland, specifically Booze Moor and Reeth Moor in North Yorkshire and Bridestones Moor in West Yorkshire, as well as Arkengarthdale Moor and Reeth Estate, two vast expanses of land. The result is a scene that feels otherworldly, epic, and wildly dramatic.

Yet it also feels somehow within reach. “The goings-on in Wuthering Heights are so Gothic and over the top. But the action isn’t happening in a castle in Transylvania—it’s in a Yorkshire farmhouse,” Dinsdale says. The places they filmed feel like real places, because they are. They are places of wildness that I can step into, landscapes I can inhabit.

The great 20th-century literary critic and author Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the moors provide the isolation, the loneliness, and the removal that are essential to [Wuthering Heights].” I’d argue they also provide the central spirit of the story. The eternally restless and wounded feelings aren’t just emotions that Brontë wrote about in her novel or that Fennell depicts in her film. (Madeline Weinfield)

The Yorkshire Post has an article on 'How Yorkshire remains the star of this Hollywood blockbuster'.

The Brontës lived in the Haworth Parsonage - eight miles west of Bradford - from 1820 and remained there until the death of the last surviving family member, Patrick Brontë, in 1861.

Located on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, their life at the Parsonage had a profound impact on their literary works, particularly felt by Emily Brontë.

Charlotte Brontë wrote, “My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was – liberty.”

Emily Brontë was inspired by the real-life locations she would regularly come across whilst walking across the “wily, windy moors.”

For example, located just under three miles from Haworth Parsonage, the abandoned farmhouse, Top Withens, has a strong connection with the novel and is a popular pilgrimage site for literary tourists.

It has been associated with the inspiration for the Earnshaw home, but that has never been confirmed or verified. A commemorative plaque on the farmhouse states: “The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.”

Written almost 180 years ago, Wuthering Heights has become an enduring figure in the pop culture zeitgeist with over 15 movie adaptations, many stage productions and a timeless music video from Kate Bush keeping the legacy of the novel alive and kicking.

Over the years, film productions have realised that one of the best ways to capture the mood and atmosphere which made Brontë’s novel so effective is to retrace the author’s footsteps and film in Yorkshire.

The first adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was directed by A.V. Bramble and filmed in Haworth in 1920. However, the silent movie was considered lost for many years, leading to an appeal by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2005 to trace the film.

Speaking with the BBC, the librarian at the time, Ann Dinsdale said: "The film's makers went to a lot of trouble to ensure the accuracy of the film, shooting it on location.”

Like many filmmakers before her, Emerald Fennell also saw the value of filming parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in its original setting. It was a big task and “huge responsibility” to bring her vision of Bronte’s novel to life and one she described as “an act of extreme masochism.”

Speaking at the Brontë Women's Writing Festival in Haworth, Fennell said: “It's a huge responsibility because I know that if somebody else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think."

She added: “It has also felt like an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. I've actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.”

To capture the “misty and cold” atmosphere of the novel, Emerald Fennell shot her movie across various locations in Yorkshire, including Swaledale. Whilst in the North Yorkshire valley, filming took place at the ruins of the Old Gang Lead Mines, the Grade II listed Surrender Bridge and Melbecks Moor.

The cast and crew also spent time in Arkengarthdale as they filmed on Booze Moor and in Langthwaite Village.

Shazad Latif, who plays Edgar Linton in the upcoming adaptation, told the Yorkshire Post about his experiences filming in these dramatic locations.

“The set design created by Suzie Davies for the houses was unbelievable. Obviously, the moors were amazing. You can feel the echo of Cathy and Heathcliff’s spirit up there,” said Latif. “It’s a stunning place to be and it evokes the spirit of the story that’s been there for 200 years. And it’s bloody windy!”

Providing solace from the long and tiring days filming on the Moors, the cast and crew stayed at Simonstone Hall Hotel - a stately home renovated into an upscale hotel in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The cast also spent time in local pubs after they finished filming and were seen in The Punch Bowl Inn (Low Row), The CB Inn (Arkengarthdale) and Green Dragon Inn (Hardraw.)

“I didn’t have much filming to do [in Yorkshire], so I got to sit in the pub and wait for Jacob and Margot with Alison [Oliver] and Hong [Chau.] We would have drinks and play pool. It was great being stuck in there together. There were peacocks running about and a waterfall where they filmed Robin Hood: 'Prince of Thieves', five minutes across the farm, so it was just an amazing setting to be in.”

Over the years, literary tourism has drawn people from all over the world to Yorkshire as they get the opportunity to explore the natural beauty and unique charm of the region. As Wuthering Heights is released in cinemas across the country, there will inevitably be a renewed interest in the beauty and mystery of the Yorkshire Moors, with people hoping to retrace the steps of Emily Brontë, Catherine and Heathcliffe [sic]. (Adam Davidson)

The Times has an article on Emerald Fennell.

Emerald Fennell isn’t mucking about with Wuthering Heights. “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” roars the trailer for her new film, blasting us with sodden shirts and brutally tight corsets, bloody sunsets and Versailles-worthy interiors. Margot Robbie’s Cathy strides across a moor in a windswept wedding dress and Jacob Elordi’s ripped Heathcliff licks a wall and growls, “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”

Damn Emily Brontë too because in the hands of Fennell, the writer-director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this is period drama at its most transgressive and maximalist. [...]

Timid this ain’t, and it all starts with Fennell. Richard E Grant, whom the director cast as a haughty aristo in Saltburn, salutes her “fearless, jet-black sense of humour and baroque aesthetic”. Wuthering Heights, he says, is another “story of an outsider wreaking havoc on a hermetically sealed world — class, sexual obsession, doomed romance. I anticipate that her vision will be the polar opposite of polite.”

“I like a physical response… and there’s nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights,” Fennell said on the Ruthie’s Table podcast this week. Brontë’s doomed and, yes, kinky romance is “extremely sexy… It makes you cry, it makes you recoil… It makes you question yourself.” Adapting it has been no moorland picnic. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last year. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism [in it]. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published in 1847]. But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back.”

If anyone can pull it off it’s Fennell, 40, whose career has been powered by audaciousness, imagination and the marble-chiselled self-belief of the posh. The woman with a name like a Farrow & Ball paint shade started as an actress but moved with impressive briskness from playing Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and an Emmy-nominated turn as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown to directing darkly glamorous, divisive movies. “In our culture now we get the brakes being put on creatively… We’re afraid of embarrassment,” she told Ruthie’s Table. “I don’t mind being embarrassing.” [...]

Film, though, is her main event and there she owes a debt to her star Robbie — Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were produced by LuckyChap, a company the Australian actress co-founded that specialises in female-focused projects. Wuthering Heights is the first time Fennell has directed her de facto boss, and some have cocked eyebrows at Robbie, 35, playing a character who is a teenager in the book. Fennell shrugged that off, describing Robbie as “the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind.”

She has also drawn flak for casting Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”. That was also smoothly batted away. “You can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell told The Hollywood Reporter. ““There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” She cast Elordi after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day. “He “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. (Ed Potton)

Daily Mail also has an article about her claiming that "the making of Wuthering Heights was more of a cosy stitch-up than Margot Robbie's bodice - with casting done on WhatsApp".

People comments on Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's appearances on last night's The Graham Norton Show where she said:

“I wasn’t always going to be in it. I was thrilled to be the producer, but at some point, we were talking about Cathy, and I decided to throw my hat into the ring,” [...]

Robbie continued, “I’ve always wanted to be one of Emerald’s actors and fortunately, she felt the same way. It worked out wonderfully.” [...]

“In my opinion, it is one of the greatest love stories of all time and it has a great cast and incredible actors. It’s a great film,” she added. (Latoya Gayle)

Marie Claire looks into ' What Wuthering Heights and the Corset Revival Say About Fashion and Female Agency' while Stylist also discusses why 'Dark Regency is the latest fashion trend'. There are many, many more fashion articles but let us overlook them as this is not really the place for them.

Vogue has an article on 'The Best Wuthering Heights Adaptations Are All About Creative Ways to Haunt Your Ex'.

Since its publication in 1847, the great, canonical novel Wuthering Heights has inspired more than 35 film and television productions, beginning with a silent movie in 1920 and growing louder and louder over the course of a century until reaching its 2026 Emerald Fennell–directed crescendo.

In this succession of adaptations, each filmmaker has gradually softened the original form—a dark and twisted story of obsession, generational trauma, and self-destruction—into something that more closely resembles a wild, cinematic love story. These adaptations, more often than not, have given credence to the saying, “Those who don’t create, destroy”—a saying that is also, ironically, the story of Heathcliff. Though Hollywood has continuously sought to portray him onscreen as a sexy, tormented, romantic hero, Heathcliff is really more like an awful boyfriend with a personality disorder who destroys the hearts and lives of innocents.

It is a testament to our culture’s tendency to confuse toxicity with the heights of romance that when we read Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, we yearn to be loved so intensely that it might actually kill us. It’s a fantasy—and, moreover, a misunderstanding—that many of us take years to unlearn: In fact, love is not measured in units of suffering. [...]

6. Wuthering Heights (1939), directed by William Wyler

This film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, is debatably the most romanticized adaptation. It also only covers the first half of the novel, which is the half where none of the haunting takes place.

5. Wuthering Heights (1998), BBC Television adaptation

Directed by David Skynner, this adaptation may be the most faithful to the novel, although the logline feels like it should really be “a legitimately crazy man takes revenge on a nice guy who did nothing wrong besides care for the woman the crazy man claims to love.” Heathcliff acts like a whiny little baby throughout this film, constantly throwing tantrums, running away, and slamming doors. Simply put, he’s insufferable. And I’ve definitely dated him. Fortunately, Cathy does an amazing job of haunting him later, appearing as a literal ghost he can see on the moors and as a little girl in constant flashbacks.

4. Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” music video (Version 1)

In the infamous music video for the verified ’80s banger “Wuthering Heights,” camp and pop culture icon Kate Bush whirls her arms around in a white dress, repeating Cathy’s desperate cry to “let me into your window” over and over and over, her huge eyes staring into the camera. (I don’t think she blinks even once.)

She translates the gnawing, pining feeling in the novel, setting it to music that repeatedly crescendos, reaching a slightly higher pitch every time—which is sort of how it feels to be in a toxic relationship. Every time I hear it, it gets stuck in my head for at least three days. Come to think of it, becoming a musician might be the ultimate haunting tactic.

3. Wuthering Heights (2012), directed by Andrea Arnold

A raw and devastating adaptation—easily my favorite one to date. Arnold’s Heathcliff is much more fully developed as a character, in part due to the more restrained performances and Arnold’s highly sensory style. But the filmmaker also incorporates one of the driving struggles of the original Heathcliff that every other adaptation cuts out: i.e., the racism he faces. By not whitewashing the narrative, Arnold allows for greater pathos to emerge from Heathcliff and Cathy’s entangled backstories.

The movie ends almost immediately after Cathy (played by none other than Effy from Skins) dies, so the posthumous haunting is limited, but bonus points for Heathcliff being rendered as a real human rather than a cartoonish villain or heartthrob, which contributes to the melancholy atmosphere of the film that personally haunted me for days after.

2. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992), directed by Peter Kosminsky

Sure, Heathcliff (played by Ralph Fiennes) is seen giving Cathy (Juliette Binoche) a piece of paper on which he’s written down every day she has spent with the Lintons versus with him, and that’s super toxic, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is that Cathy haunts the shit out of him in the second half of the movie. With Peter Kosminsky using the same actress to play Cathy’s daughter (also named Catherine) after she dies, Heathcliff is forced to lay eyes upon her exact face day after day. Unfortunately, this method of haunting does require you to get pregnant and have a lookalike daughter that lives with your toxic ex while you roam around the moors screaming and disturbing everyone. While that is clearly not advisable, I do admire the commitment.

1. Wuthering Heights (2009), ITV miniseries

This two-episode miniseries stars Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, but you may find yourself getting confused by who Tom Hardy is playing and what movie you’re watching, given he looks nearly identical to both Professor Snape and Edward Scissorhands. The brooding is so over the top you can’t help but laugh every time he slowly appears from behind a pillar. But Cathy (Charlotte Riley) running out of her home, pregnant, in the pouring rain to search for her childhood crush felt relatable. And Cathy and Heathcliff’s chemistry is actually amazing—which makes sense, as the two actors who played them later got married.

Best haunting moment: When Heathcliff brings Isabella Linton home and tells her she has to sleep in a separate bedroom. This is because Heathcliff must sleep in his ex’s childhood bedroom, alone, next to a drawing of her. This is ideally how haunted I want my ex to be when he brings home a new girl for the first time. (Cazzie David)

Buzzfeed has a quiz where you can 'Choose Your Gothic Aesthetic To Reveal Your "Wuthering Heights" Sensory Landscape'.

Eleanor Houghton's much-awaited book Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes was published this week among all the Wuthering Heights furore but The Telegraph and Argus features it:

In the almost two centuries since the Yorkshire sisters wrote their passionate and brave novels, the light of Brontë mania has barely dimmed.

It’s shining brightly with anticipation now with Emerald Fennell’s ‘racy’ Wuthering Heights film landing in cinemas next week, and a fascinating biography of Charlotte’s life told through her extensive surviving clothing.

Dress historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton’s book is as riveting as Charlotte’s iron-busked corset and reveals the story of her ordinary life in Haworth, forbidden love, and fashion choices when fame came calling. Eleanor has worked as a costume consultant for film and TV, including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible and Gentleman Jack, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.

“The amazing thing about Charlotte’s clothing is that so much has survived,” says Eleanor, who researched and studied for her PhD, what she calls ‘the surviving witnesses to Charlotte’s life,’ through the gowns, bonnets, shawls, corset and boots that made up her wardrobe, along with letters and documents. Many exist because of a tradition of make-do and hand down.

“When Charlotte died, she left everything to her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls and he and her father Patrick and housekeeper Martha Brown treasured many items as keepsakes.” Some items that were dispersed to families and souvenir hunters have migrated home to Haworth with 150 pieces housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Charlotte’s garments and accessories play a vital part in joining the dots of her history in intimate detail from her birth to her death. “They have been active participants in a remarkable life - one that was both extraordinary, public and private, obscure and famous,” says Eleanor. “Secrets have been found within their very fibres. They challenge a lot of myths and preconceptions that we’ve had about Charlotte and her family.”

One such object that still bears signs of Charlotte’s perspiration is a busked corset that she laced excruciatingly tightly like ‘a form of armour that shielded and fortified’ when she was broken-hearted through the unrequited love that she bore for her former teacher Constantin Héger in Brussels. “She’s kind of girding her loins quite literally, giving herself this strength. I think the clothes can tell us so much, very personal detail that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up from a letter.”

Charlotte made most of her clothes with Martha, buying textiles from the mills and accessing fashion plates.

A Paisley print dress she owned dated to the 1840s was bold and bright, with a pattern inspired by silk shawls imported from central Asia. “One of the most astonishing discoveries was the bright colours of fabrics that we have revealed by examining fragments through a microscope and harnessing modern technology,” says Eleanor. “We imagine drab colours, but they simply weren’t. Globalisation is another insight.”

Charlotte owned a pair of beaded, deerskin moccasins made by members of the Mohawk tribe in Canada.

When Charlotte published Jane Eyre, she used the pseudonym Currer Bell to disguise her female authorship. When the cat was out of the bag and her secret identity uncovered, she needed to transition from a provincial clergyman’s daughter and governess to celebrated author, with some trepidation and nervousness. That meant wearing a suitable ‘power’ gown when she was invited to attend lunches, dinners, lectures and parties by enthusiasts, influencers and the literati.

When she met her literary hero William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, in 1850, she wore a two-year-old Prussian blue dress woven at Salts Mill, from alpaca fibres from South America. The fabric was printed in Lancashire, probably in Accrington. Hand stitching by Charlotte and Martha still exists.

“She was in a very nervous state when she went to London for that important meeting in a new environment, a new world and meeting famous people,” Eleanor says. “When we choose clothes, we want to give off the right messages and feel strong, and Charlotte knew that was a potent force. It surprised me how important it was for her to gain strength through her regional identity and wear cloth woven in Yorkshire. She chose to connect to those Yorkshire roots.”

Eleanor has drawn an illustration of the Thackeray Dress, and the altered original is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Poignant items include an ‘ugly’ or wind bonnet - strips of silk were worn over the brim to protect the wearer. They were the height of fashion at the seaside and Charlotte may have worn hers when she was in Scarborough with her sister Anne, who died there during their visit, whilst they were still in mourning for Emily. They had stopped on the way to purchase accessories in York.

“Surviving garments are solid witnesses because you can’t always trust portraits and photographs as they are often staged with props, they are not candid,” Eleanor adds. “The real Charlotte emerges as a woman altogether braver, more vulnerable, less isolated, less provincial and more fashion conscious than anyone ever expected.” (Catherine Turnbull)

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The Gothic Brontës seminar day

 An alert for tomorrow, July 12, in Haworth:

The Gothic Brontës seminar day

Sat 12 Jul, 10:00am

The Brontë Event Space at the Old School Room

Dive into the world of Gothic fiction and explore its impact on the Brontës’ work in this fascinating seminar day during Haworth Festival with Dr Sam Hirst. Sam is a Gothic specialist and Teaching Associate in Romanticism at the University of Sheffield. Together, you’ll investigate the Brontës’ own reworkings of the classic Gothic novel and examine the impact of the three sisters’ writing on the genre. 

The day will be split into five sessions.

Hour	Session	Description
10am-11am	Exploring the Brontës’ Gothic Influences	In this first session, you’ll be introduced to key texts of the early Gothic and some of the early Gothic's key features and concerns. We’ll look at the ways in which the Gothic functioned as more than just a series of skeletons in closets and explore some of the texts that we know the Brontës read and had access to.
11am-12pm	The Gothic and the Brontës’ Juvenilia	The Brontës’ early work shows the strongest influence of the early Gothic with kidnappings, doubles, magic, torture and necromancy all taking place in their early worlds. This session will be an opportunity to explore the worlds the siblings created and trace the development of their relationship with the Gothic. We’ll be looking at a number of stories and poems but we recommend reading ‘The Foundling’ by Charlotte before the session. We will include a discussion of this story in the class.
12pm-1pm	Lunch break	(you’re welcome to bring your own lunch or join us at Cobbles & Clay café in Haworth)
1pm-2pm	The Gothic Worlds of the Brontë Sisters	In this class, we will dive into the Gothic worlds of some of the Brontës’ most famous novels. We will explore how they rewrote and remade the Gothic and reimagined the Gothic hero and heroine. Taking the Gothic from exotic mountain landscapes in Europe to the bleak moors of the North of England, from ruined castles to ‘haunted’ homes, and from a celebration of virtuous heroines to an exploration of passionate, independent women.
2pm-3pm	The Gothic Afterlives of the Brontës	In this session, we’ll look at the Brontës' afterlives, both literal and figurative. We’ll explore the work of nineteenth-century spiritualists claiming to have channelled Charlotte’s new novel, the Gothic films their works inspired, and their influence on later Gothic literature. We’ll finish the seminar with our own explorations of Gothic possibilities – the stories, adaptations, and ideas that your Gothic day in the Brontës home has inspired!
3pm-4pm	Session in the Museum library	See related collection items up close with our Principal Curator.

And also, a couple more of alerts (part of the Haworth Festival 2025):

The Female Gothic – a literary discussion
Saturday 12 July, 5pm – 6.15pm
The Brontë Space at the Old School Room, Haworth

Join Bronte experts and best-selling authors, Dr Claire O’Callaghan and Dr Michael Stewart, in conversation discussing the history of female gothic writing. From Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the works of the Brontë sisters, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, the genre of Gothic Literature has always had a very strong female presence. They will talking about and reading from some of their favourites.

A Gothic Haunted Haworth Ghost Tour
Saturday 12 July, 9.30pm

Step into the shadows of Haworth and uncover the village’s haunting secrets with Haunted Haworth’s Ghost Walks. Led by local storyteller and folklorist Adam Sargant, these tours delve into tales of terror and spectral stories from the historic home of the Brontës. As darkness falls, wander through the narrow, cobbled streets where the spirits of Branwell and Emily Brontë are said to linger. Discover the stories that inspired some of the Gothic elements of the sister’s novels. Feel the lingering presence of a hanged highwayman, still hunting for unsuspecting victims in local pubs. This immersive experience offers a unique blend of history and mystery, spine-chilling stories and unforgettable memories.

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Unforgettable, doomed romance

The Saturday Paper is not much of a fan of Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights.

Anyone familiar with the source material – Emily Brontë’s iconic, heart-rending Gothic novel of the same name – could be forgiven for feeling a little confused. But the apron-wearing Hareton (Matthew Churcher), smiling at the audience like a cross between Martha Stewart and a Mills & Boon cover model, sums up the vibe of Rice’s ironic, tongue-in-cheek, folk-rock adaptation. [...]

Horrified, Rice wrote her Wuthering Heights in the style of a Greek tragedy, as a means of exploring the intergenerational consequences of abuse and xenophobia. In reality though, the production can’t escape its own self-aware humour and suffers from something of an identity crisis. It might as well be an ironic, thoroughly modern comedy right from the prologue when the hapless Mr Lockwood (the superb Sam Archer), in a coat-flapping display of slapstick, slams into Heathcliff’s front door.

The production is self-referential even in how it evokes its setting. Birds and butterflies are made of fluttering books on sticks, while the Wuthering Heights farmhouse is represented by a flat, front door and a window on castors (Vicki Mortimer’s set design). There is a hilarious literal depiction of the moor’s “screaming winds”. The Yorkshire Moors themselves are personified as a singing, dancing Greek chorus led by Nandi Bhebhe, wearing a brambly headdress and functioning as a sort of Mother Earth-meets-Oprah voice of conscience. She clucks consolingly as she dresses Heathcliff for Christmas, waving away his hesitations with a kindly wriggle of her patchwork bustle skirt (Mortimer’s costuming), reminding him that he must prove himself.

The chorus complains that there are too many characters with similar-sounding names, and other cast members helpfully walk on with chalkboards to clarify. The chalkboards make frequent reappearances, including when the town physician, Dr Kenneth (the delightful T. J. Holmes, also doubling as the band’s cellist), prances on stage in a top hat and rubber gloves to explain the spate of recent deaths among the main characters.

The childhood versions of Heathcliff, Hindley and Catherine are rendered as puppets (puppetry directed by John Leader), before growing into their adult human selves. There are no brooding eyes or pensive sighs from Stephanie Hockley’s energised, devilish Catherine. She’s a wild-haired, pouting teenager tottering around in platform heels, shrieking and grimacing like a poltergeist. In the production’s feted “drop mic” moment, an industrial floor fan is conspicuously placed in front of her so that she can wail into a microphone, hair blowing out, rockstar-style. It’s hard to understand exactly what Heathcliff sees in this Catherine, but perhaps it underscores the point of their lonely co-dependency.

The dandyish siblings Isabella Linton (Rebecca Collingwood) and her brother, Edgar (Archer again), are highlights, capering about in a froth of pink bows and lace. They don’t walk or dance normally like the rest of the cast but traverse the stage by twirling and leaping in an endless foppish ballet. Archer transitions gracefully between the whimsical humour of his character’s early scenes and the grieving, dying father that Edgar later becomes. Collingwood also takes on the role of Isabella’s son, the limp Little Linton, as a pants role. A talented comic artist, Collingwood has some of the best lines in the show: as Isabella she giggles, “I like to slide down the banister – because it tickles my tuppence!” and as Little Linton she harrumphs, “It’s pyjama time!”

As well as being puppetry director, Leader also stars as Heathcliff. A dark, menacing presence, out of all the cast he is the only character bereft of whimsy, tapping into the toxic cruelty so prevalent in Brontë’s novel. Heathcliff is also a vehicle for Rice’s message on racism: he has a strong Caribbean accent and prominent dreadlocks, and rages that his lot in life would be different if he’d been born with straight hair and fair skin. “Go back where you came from,” sneers Hindley (Churcher again) at Heathcliff, before striking him in the face.

It’s not the first time Heathcliff has been multiracially cast in a “race-lift” version of Wuthering Heights: see, for example, Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film version, starring James Howson as cinema’s first black Heathcliff.

Brontë’s descriptions of Heathcliff were purposely ambiguous. He was a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect and a little lascar”, she wrote, referring to the older English word for sailors from India or South-East Asia. But the treatment of racism in Rice’s production takes the vague otherness of Brontë’s Heathcliff – subtle enough to have him adopted and loved by Mr Earnshaw but ambiguous enough to unsettle Yorkshire society – and repaints it in a thoroughly modern and somewhat ham-fisted take. Staking most of the exploration of racism in Leader’s accent and a few stock lines, it works at a superficial level. But this production steers clear of the deeper, gut-wrenching complexities of racism – whether in Brontë’s day or now – and Rice’s well-intentioned message begins to feel as two-dimensional as the cut-out set of Heathcliff’s front door.

Ultimately, as clever as the musical’s whimsy is, it causes the production to become tonally disjointed, which is made worse by a trying three-hour run time. There is only so much folk-rock (Ian Ross’s composition and songs, which seem strangely indistinguishable from each other) and ironic self-aware jokes the production can manage before it undermines the exploration into intergenerational trauma and racism that Rice intended. (Chantal Nguyen)

Wuthering Heights is one of '12 of the Most Unforgettable Books About Doomed Romances' according to Mental Floss.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

This is the sole novel by Emily Brontë, one of a remarkably talented trio of siblings alongside sisters Charlotte and Anne. Wuthering Heights contains all the classic elements of the doomed romance novel: forbidden love, awful misunderstandings, jealousy, revenge, and tragedy. It was initially published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and caused quite a storm amongst contemporary critics thanks to the brutal actions and perceived inhumanity of its protagonists, Cathy and Heathcliff. Yet the strange and dark charm of the book was evident from the start, and it’s gone on to become one of the most revered tragic love stories of all time. Plus, there’s the little matter of Kate Bush’s enduring song and accompanying video. (Chris Wheatley)

According to The Bookseller, 

Layne Fargo’s The Favourites (Vintage), a reimagining of Wuthering Heights set in the world of professional ice dance, was also picked by [TikToker] Alice as one of the most popular new additions to the romance genre. Speaking on sports romances in an interview with The Bookseller, Fargo said: “To be an elite athlete you have to be so driven, so disciplined, so ambitious, and I think, in a lot of cases, there’s not really room for love or relationships. I see this a lot in sports romances where it’s like: ‘I can’t get involved with this person right now because I’m trying to make it to the Olympics, I’m trying to win the championship or whatever.’ So, that creates conflict right away.” (Katie Fraser)

The Atlantic features two memoirs about 'illness realism'.

Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. (Boris Kachka)

A contributor to The Pitt News discusses reading classic novels.

In my junior year of high school, I made a far-too-long list of books I wanted to read before graduating. About 90% of the books on that list were classic novels written in the 19th century. I figured that reading as many books as I possibly could from authors like Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy would be well worth my time because it would mean I’d read a lot of “impressive” books. Honestly, I think my obsession with watching “Gilmore Girls” was probably a major reason why I was thinking that way. I figured that reading a large number of classic novels would make me appear as well read and school smart as Rory Gilmore.

I started with “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, then moved on to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” I was relatively surprised by how much I enjoyed each of these books because I went into them assuming they would have boring plots and nearly impossible-to-understand language. Originally, when I thought about women in the 19th century, I imagined them to be people who never or rarely ever tried to defy societal expectations, especially those placed upon them by men. Reading stories about female characters in the 19th century written by women in the 19th century showed me how independent many women were at this time, despite the expectation that women prioritize marriage and motherhood over anything else. (Evin Verburgge)

A contributor to Gulf News claims that she's a 'love-agnostic'.

While my peers swooned over Danielle Steele’s passionate heroes, I was buried in crime fiction, far more invested in solving whodunnits than in romantic entanglements. While they dreamt of a brooding Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice or a tormented Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, I admired the razor-sharp intellect of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and the cool, calculated moves of Mark Girland from James Hadley Chase’s thrillers. Looking back, that should have been a warning sign — but at the time, I was too engrossed in tracking fictional murderers to notice. (Krita Coelho)

We hope that's tongue-in-cheek because otherwise it's plain silly. It would amount to saying that people who read true crime are would-be murderers.

Another spot that needs saving from developers, as told by The Yorkshire Post:

A farmer and environmental campaigner has said a community’s drive to buy agricultural land on the edge of a village to prevent a potential housing development could become a template replicated across the country.

Farmer and Ouseburn division councillor Arnold Warneken was speaking after a public meeting at Great Ouseburn Village Hall near Boroughbridge heard a scheme backed by Dame Judi Dench to buy 20-acre Town End Field only had until February 28 to secure £300,000 to buy the land.

The beauty spot inspired a drawing by writer Anne Brontë when she worked as a governess for a family nearby and has attracted many visitors, including the father [somehow we don't think that Dame Judi Dench's father is still living] and brother of Dame Judi, who said the green space was "well worth saving". (Stuart Minting

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