'Don't dress as Heathcliff, you fool!'

Yesterday's blunder(s) of the day came courtesy of Radio 4's Nick Robinson as reported by Daily Mail.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man without possession of the facts, will get a telling off from his wife.

And so it proved for Nick Robinson on Tuesday, who earned the ire of Today programme listeners – and his wife – for seemingly mixing up the author Jane Austen, on the 250th anniversary of her birth, with another literary heroine.

While discussing Jane Austen Day with his co-presenter Anna Foster, Robinson, 62, said he was 'game' to do a live action reading of her works on the Today Programme and would even don some historical clothes for the occasion.

But he seemed to confuse the Pride and Prejudice author with Emily Bronte, as he added: 'I will pop out and get my Heathcliff costume'.

He was soon inundated with complaints informing the presenter, who earns £410,000 for his work at the BBC, that Heathcliff was in fact a central character of Emily Bronte's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights.

The author Adrian Hilton said: 'I'm still trying to work out why for a recital of Jane Austen, Nick Robinson said he would 'pop out and get my Heathcliff'. Does he think she wrote Wuthering Heights?'

Later in the show, Robinson said that one woman in his household was particularly displeased with his mistake revealing that Pippa Robinson, his wife of 34 years, had been in touch.

He said: 'My wife has texted me, along with quite a lot of other people who've messaged, saying 'Don't dress as Heathcliff, you fool!'

Robinson later made a further blunder when he told listeners: 'I should just say that when we're focusing on BBC standards, can you imagine someone on Jane Austen Day would then promise to dress up as a Charlotte Bronte character?'

Mixing up Charlotte, who wrote Jane Eyre, with her young sister Emily.

Robinson then appeared to mock US President Donald Trump's lawsuit against the BBC, when he apologised for the gaffe and said: 'If there is a Jane Austen charity, I promise to pay five billion dollars in compensation to them for the offence that I have caused to them and all her supporters.' (Grant Tucker)

Bustle talks about books with Felicity Jones, who makes a great point about new adaptations of classics.

There’s one film Felicity Jones can’t wait to see next year: Wuthering Heights. “If you are going to do a classic, then it’s [about] finding a new way in,” she says. “I like the way that Emerald Fennell did that with Brideshead Revisited with Saltburn. She takes quite a classic story and then spins it and makes it alienating a little bit.”

Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 classic is one of Jones’s favorite novels — Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is too; more on that later — and the 42-year-old actress increasingly finds herself reading to find “stories that can potentially work on screen.” The key, she says, is finding the why. “You’ve got to find the: Well, what is the reason to tell it now? What is the modernity in it that we need to do it? Otherwise, what’s the point?” [...]

Her third pick, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, nearly didn’t make the list. “I really like the Brontë Sisters and I was actually torn between Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre,” she says. “There’s always a brutality to their writing. There’s an emotional intensity. It’s so impassioned, and there’s a real toughness to it.”

She continues: “Growing up in the moors with that intense family and then the environment they were in, it’s just so unforgiving,” she says. “They managed to distill all of that into their work, particularly in Wuthering Heights. I just was really quite captivated by the book from quite a young age for that reason.” (Charlotte Owen)

Cosmopolitan looks forward to 'The 20 Most Anticipated Movies of 2026' including

"Wuthering Heights"

Release date: February 13, 2026

Everybody's eyes are on Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë's gothic romance for two overarching reasons. One, Fennell's movies tend to be divisive. Two, if there's one thing that people love to do it's critique film adaptations of classic literature to death. Remember the hoopla over that Persuasian [sic] with Dakota Johnson? The knives are out to pick apart everything from the casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff to the costuming and the scare quotes in the title. Some points are valid, others more tedious. But all chatter is good chatter, right? (Leah Marilla Thomas)

Purewow comments on the '12 Classics [that] Ruled the Charts Last Year' and one of them was

3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

If Wuthering Heights only flew onto your radar because of Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation, may I humbly recommend the source material? Where Austen was vivacious and playful, the Brontë sisters were gothic in the extremes—deaths, secret wives, lonely moores—but still managed to deliver some of the most romantic lines ever. Example: "Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" Swoon. That line alone made me want to pardon Heathcliff. Brontë's most enduring work is a tragic story about love and loss as lovers grasp across a social divide, anchored by a boiling quest for vengeance. (Marissa Wu)

Purewow also wonders if we can have a 'Horny Lit Girl Winter'.

Per The Cut, we have cruised into a "Horny Lit Girl" winter that has catapulted beloved literary works into sexy screen adaptations. Prime example: Wuthering Heights. I never knew I could look at an egg like that. But also, Frankenstein, Hamnet, The Housemaid and Hedda. Don't get me wrong—I loved Frankenstein, PureWow Editor-in-Chief Jillian Quint raved about Hamnet. But I really must ask, can we not with Horny Lit Girl winter? [...]

A prime example of an upcoming adaptation would be Wuthering Heights. Thus far, media coverage has led with words like "provacative," "latex" and "steamy." As an incensed Redditor (whose sentiments were widely echoed) aptly put it: "As a person whose favourite era of literature is Victorian because of how they portrayed intensity and passion and angst and sexual tension WITHOUT explicit sex, it annoys me to no end that they just want to shock people with as much explicit stuff as possible. (I have no issue with explicit sex at all, just saying that the Victorian era was very puritanical). Also they are clearly rage marketing because people will now go to watch and see how far she has gone. It might not even be about the source material at this point."

It's the last sentence that gets me. That in the tizzy of egg yolks and sweaty skin, sensual bread dough and anachronistic latex, we've lost the actual plot. Granted, the film's creators promise that provocation isn't front and center, but the general problem is that provocation is an attention hog, no matter which way you slice it. And if someone hasn't actually read Wuthering Heights, they'll lose the nuance of conversation that made Brontë's book the coarse and shocking work it was. Love, rage, abuse, grief and, importantly, the sticky questions of social class, race and England's colonial legacy.

I don't want or need an orgy. I want sex to underline the connection between the characters and the emotion they feel—be it anguish, passion, fear, rage, euphoria. I want it to have a purpose instead of being the purpose. If that makes me a prude, so be it. (Marissa Wu)

AnneBrontë.org had day three of its series of posts on The Twelve Days of Brontë Christmas.