Raw energy, unpredictability and unknowability

The Indian Express takes a look at what Victorian women writers knew about power and rage:

Charlotte Brontë complicates the picture. The character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre has long sparked debate. To some readers, she embodies a suppressed rage that is fiery, destructive, and uncontainable. Yet Brontë’s portrayal is also unsettling. Rochester’s imprisonment of his wife raises questions about Jane’s eventual reconciliation with him. Does her marriage represent dignity found, or a troubling acceptance of a man complicit in another woman’s ruin?

The writings of these women stand as acts of grit and defiance. They capture not only rage but also vulnerability, an acknowledgment of the contradictions inherent in womanhood under Victorian patriarchy. Their work still resonates because it does not offer simple resolutions. Instead, it insists that strength and tenderness can coexist, that subjugation and autonomy can collide, and that women’s voices, once silenced, demand to be heard. (Aanya Mehta)

The Star recommends pretty villages near Sheffield:

Hathersage

Hathersage is a Peak District gem - it is well-connected with a railway station on the Hope Valley line. Robin Hood's sidekick Little John is reputed to be buried here, it inspired parts of Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, and today is home to the David Mellor cutlery factory, shop and café. You can also visit Hathersage Swimming Pool (pictured), a picturesque, heated open air pool. (David Walsh)

Dazed Digital reviews The Summer I Turned Pretty: 

These men are stoic, overburdened with responsibility, but always steadfast in their love, looming tall in the distance like mournful sequoias. They’re thoughtful, protective and practical, doing good deeds but never seeking glory. They’re lovably old-fashioned, shunning DM slides for handwritten letters. They’re poor communicators, withholding just enough to keep your heart rate up. When they do eventually profess their love – and they always do – it pours out like a burst dam, with language so forceful it brings you to your knees. See: Frederick Wentworth’s letter to Anne Elliott, Mr Rochester’s proposal to Jane Eyre, Conrad Fisher’s beach confession. (Dominique Sisley)

Le Journal du Dimanche (France) reviews La Dame aux Oiseaux by François Garde:

On pense à la Rebecca de Daphné du Maurier, aux Hauts de Hurlevent bien sûr d’Emily Brontë, dans cet univers peuplé d’énigmes qui conduisent inévitablement au drame. Mais, en faisant revenir son héros dans ce Hurlevent breton, François Garde prend le parti du drame ordinaire, social et désolant : ce ne sont pas des chevaux de gravures anglaises qui passent sur le chemin des douaniers mais des chignoles branlantes aux essieux fatigués.  (Georges Grange) (Translation)

The Brontë Babe Blog reviews Nowhere Girl by Tracy Neis, the fourth installment in her Rock-and-Roll Brontës series.

The Wuthering Heights 2026 trailer still lingers on:

The Observer goes B-mode: "Brontë meets Bridgerton meets Barbie: purists slate Wuthering Heights trailer". You could use Brat in that phrase. Missing opportunity.

“It seems like Fennell is prepared to tear up the core themes of the book and turn it into something else,” said Wendy Ide, The Observer’s chief film critic. The trailer ticks the boxes of conspicuously cool cultural touchpoints and picks up from where Saltburn’s infamous grave scene left off, but does it shy away from what is truly shocking about Brontë’s work?

It is a novel of “raw energy, unpredictability and unknowability”, said writer and literary critic Catherine Taylor. Adding a glaze of visual perfection could detract from that. (...)

Looking at the Wuthering Heights trailer, Taylor found Cathy’s modern makeup jarring, but points to an audience demand for the homogeneous “Instagram face” of this era. (...)

Ide and Taylor see the trailer as “a provocation” – and one that’s clearly worked. “The fact that we’re talking about it now shows how effective it is,” Ide said.

“I still probably won’t go and see it,” said Taylor. But it has had an unexpected side-effect. “It makes me want to go back to the book for the first time in many years.

“I studied it to death at A-level and hated that book by the end, but I do now want to reread it, so thank you Emerald Fennell.” (Rachael Healy)

The Times goes beyond the trailer and wonders about the appeal of romantic heroes ike Heathcliff nowadays:

A new film iteration of Emily Brontë’s novel, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, points to our unhealthy taste in romantic heroes. (...)

Certainly Elordi — scowling and swarthy, as the book dictates — looks set to do to a new generation of audiences what Timothy Dalton as Rochester (in the 1980s BBC series) and Colin Firth as Darcy (in the 1990s BBC series) did to their mothers and grandmothers. It remains to be seen if Jack Lowden as Darcy can hit the same literary G-spot in Netflix’s coming Pride and Prejudice adaptation, given that he is — handkerchief clutched in horror! — blond, rather than the traditional brooding brunette. (...)

 For Austen, money defined the man, whereas for the less pragmatic Brontë sisters it was having “a dark face, with stern features” (Rochester) and resembling “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman” (Heathcliff). Byronic and baleful, glowering and growling: this has long been the formula for casting this interchangeable Holy Trinity of male sexiness, starting with Laurence Olivier as Darcy in 1940. The formula was followed a little too closely in the 1992 film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with Ralph Fiennes overdoing it on the fake tan as Heathcliff. But it was really Fiennes’s kohl eyeliner that pushed that particular film perilously close to parody.

And so to Fennell’s film. To judge from the trailer, she certainly gets Wuthering Heights’s weirdness right, all those dream sequences backed by an appropriately heady (if not strictly 19th century) Charli XCX soundtrack. What it looks as if she gets wrong is the sex. Robbie’s breasts heave excitedly and Elordi pants, “Do you want me to stop?” Well, every generation gets the Wuthering Heights it deserves, and it’s inevitable that this one should get shots of Catherine eyeing up a muscly and topless Heathcliff (to quote arguably the greatest Austen adaptation, Clueless, “As if!”). Because, much as Wuthering Heights has become a byword for overheated love on the moors, the book itself is far more interested in ghosts and spirits than anything as corporeal as biceps or bosoms. (...)

Only unmarried 19th-century women could conceive of Darcy, Rochester and Heathcliff as romantic figures, because anyone else would see them as the moody nightmares they were — you certainly don’t get this kind of nonsense from George Eliot. At least Austen has Elizabeth admit she fell for Darcy “from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”, a blunt truth that modern adaptations generally mute in favour of romance. But Rochester (blind and broke by the end) and Heathcliff (a lunatic) have no such charms. They are human versions of the Beast, and Jane Eyre and Catherine Linton the Beauties who must learn to see past their faults, and given that Rochester locked his first wife in the attic and Heathcliff married Catherine’s sister-in-law out of spite, that takes some doing. But, of course, they manage.

The real mystery is why modern women are still so entranced by these men when there are far better options in 19th-century literature. (Hadley Freeman)

Claire & Jamie think that the teaser totally misses the mark with Brontë fandom:

The teaser does feel very 50 Shades of Gray-themed, undermining the concept of a deep love that exceeds infatuation and lust. The love that the two main characters have for each other becomes suffering, madness, and pain when they’re not together. Capturing the story adequately feels like an impossible task, but I’m still willing to give the movie a try. (Bianca Woods)

SheFinds goes with a different approach. Here, the star is the bridal gown:

Margot Robbie Dazzles In Off-The-Shoulder Wedding Dress In 'Wuthering Heights' Trailer

The trailer features a closer glimpse of the 35-year-old Barbie actress, who is playing the role of Catherine Earnshaw alongside Jacob Elordi's Heathcliff, in her dreamy wedding dress that featured in those pap pics a few months ago. And seeing it in more detail, as it was intended for the movie, has made us fall in love with it even more!

The dress featured an off-the-shoulder corset bodice and voluminous puff sleeves, and a princess-style ballgown skirt. It was accessorized with a white veil and some multicolored flowers for the bridal bouquet, alongside natural and glowing makeup. (Maria Pierides)

The Federalist goes all the way in maganist-induced hate frenzy:

Emerald Fennell remakes ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the image of bookstore bargain bins and terminal late-stage feminism. (...)

Now, Fennell has reimagined a nineteenth-century novel as BookTok smut and given it access to a Hollywood budget and costume department, complete with original songs by Charli XCX (yes, really), and wrapped it up in what looks like a Gone with the Wind poster with “Wuthering Heights” plastered on it in the Godfather font. It would be comically bad if it didn’t represent a lie that millions of women have bought into. (Elle Purnell)

Which is not-at-all biased, as you can read just at the beginning of this... thing:

I realize, despite my age and sex, that I am probably not the target for the new Wuthering Heights movie. I haven’t read the book and have a mild distaste for Gothic British lit in general. What’s more, I’m a happily married woman with no deficiencies in my real-life happiness that require erotic fiction to compensate.  (Elle Purnell)

And she is quite full of herself. 

Tahira Ali in the Daily Express shares the hate of the movie and thinks it is a total disgrace for three reasons: A soundtrack by Charli XCX, a Valentine's special, and the white-washing of Heathcliff. The whitewashing monotema is also prominently shown by the X-perts on Cinemablend.

GQ (Spain) makes a classification of the hotter Heathcliffs around:

Desde entonces, es como si el medio audiovisual diese por hecho que, ante la imposibilidad de hacer justicia a la miríada de Grandes Temas –como, por ejemplo, la asfixia de clases, la hipocresía moral, la otredad o la persistencia de una suerte de espiritualidad daemónica latente en la Inglaterra victoriana– que su autora conjuró en la página escrita, las pelis y series inspiradas en Cumbres borrascosas debían centrarse primordialmente en lo buenísimo que está el tiarrón de Heathcliff. En ese sentido, el tráiler de la nueva película de Emerald Fennell entronca por completo con la tradición: su apuesta por el placer sensorial y la inapelable presencia de Jacob Elordi, a quien la directora ya objetivizó con sumo deleite en Saltburn (2023), la consolidan como una temprana, pero firme, candidata al título de Película Más Cachonda de 2026. Con todo, esta última reencarnación de Heathcliff tendrá un listón muy alto que superar. Décadas y décadas de hombres altos, oscuros y misteriosos recortándose de repente contra el cielo sobre los páramos. Repasemos, pues, a sus antecesores más distinguidos en la pequeña y gran pantalla, capaces de arrebatarte la razón antes de lo que tardas en exclamar “It's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home”. (Noel Ceballos) (Translation)

Creative Blog is more creative, saying: "The new Wuthering Heights trailer is pastiche done right. It feels like Pinterest come to life."

Film Music Site is one of the only websites that mentions the soundtrack of the film is by Anthony Willis. Charlie XCX is the author of the songs. NME highlights that Charlie XCX seems to embrace the "matcha dubai chocolate labubu of film" definition of Wuthering Heights 2026,

Also in Scroll.in, Roger's Movie Nation, SoapCentral, Entertainment Weekly, The Statesman, People, Inkl, Sensacine (México), TV Azteca (México), Diario de Mendoza (Argentina), Actualidad Literaria (Spain), El Debate (Spain), Pijamasurf (Spain), The Indian Panorama, Plunge Daily, Gamereactor, 4Filming, Hola!, Hindustan Times, The New Daily,  Metro, The Times of India, Daily Star, Evoke, Que Ver (Spain), La Revista Peninsular (México)...