'Her poetry gets so deep into your soul, into your heart'

A columnist from The Guardian considers a trip to Haworth and the talk Emerald Fennell gave at the Brontë women’s writing festival a 'crash course in Brontëmania'.

It’s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I’m drinking a pint of Emily Brontë beer in The Kings Arms. Other Brontës are on tap – Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte an IPA, Branwell a porter – but the barman says Emily, an amber ale with a “malty biscuit flavour”, is the most popular. It’s the obvious choice today, anyway: in a few hours, Oscar-winning film-maker Emerald Fennell will be at the Brontë women’s writing festival in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily’s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

The film, to be released just before Valentine’s Day next year, is already scandal-ridden. It all started with Fennell’s casting of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (“Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Barbie”) Robbie causing uproar. [...]

Since my visit to Haworth, the full trailer has been released, showing Fennell’s brand of anachronistic sets and costumes (think sugary, eye-popping interiors and red latex gowns), some suggestive licking and bread-kneading, and Elordi’s (admittedly quite good) Yorkshire accent: “So kiss me – and let us both be damned!”

Such a wild response was only to be expected. As I drink up and step out into the cobbled streets of this village built on a hill, Wuthering Heights’ potency is still palpable.

“I sometimes feel, in the morning, that I could just walk around the corner and the sisters would be there talking to each other,” Diane Park tells me over a coffee in Wave of Nostalgia, her award-winning feminist bookshop. “They are still so alive here in this village.” Park’s shop sits near the top of the hill, on a road lined with terraced stone houses and quirky independent businesses. Seconds away is a lane leading to the church where the Brontës’ father Patrick was reverend. Behind it is a cluttered graveyard and the Brontë parsonage, where the family lived.

When Park moved here more than a decade ago, she had only read Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. Today, she reads one of Emily’s poems to me on the shopfloor: “Hope, whose whisper would have given / Balm to all my frenzied pain …” How did she feel when she first read Wuthering Heights? “I was blown away by Emily’s insight into the soul.”

The world was scandalised when Emily published it, under a male pseudonym, in 1847. It is the story of fiery Catherine Earnshaw and her relationship with outcast orphan Heathcliff, in whom she finds her match as they roam the Yorkshire moors: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

When Catherine marries Edgar Linton and dies, it sets haunted Heathcliff on a path of vengeance, as the second half of the novel becomes a story of control, abuse and digging up graves. While some critics admired its unique strangeness, many echoed one review that said: “The reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate.”

This didn’t stop Wuthering Heights from becoming a classic. It was made into a silent movie in 1920, with locals crowding around the shoot in Haworth and playing extras. The story later moved to a Hollywood studio and enjoyed the romanticised Golden Age treatment with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, minus that more problematic second act. And at least 15 big and small screen adaptations have followed, from Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1988 retelling in medieval Japan, to Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version with James Howson as the first black actor to play Heathcliff. (The main criticism levelled against the casting of Elordi is that Heathcliff is widely considered not white in the book.)

It was the BBC’s full-story 1967 series, starring Ian McShane as a brooding Heathcliff, that inspired Kate Bush to write her otherworldly hit, which brought Wuthering Heights into every home. “I just managed to catch the very last few minutes, where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass,” she has said, admitting she wrote the song before reading the book.

So why does this story of passion-ravaged lovers on rain-ravaged moors have such a hold? “I think Wuthering Heights endures because the relationships between Cathy, Heathcliff and Edgar aren’t easy to quantify,” says author Juno Dawson, who grew up in Bingley and calls the Brontës “the pride of Yorkshire”. Dawson was inspired by Wuthering Heights to write a short story for an anthology called I Am Heathcliff. “They don’t fit into traditional notions of a romance novel or a ghost story,” she continues. “And each character is frustrating, unfathomable. If there’s something I take from it, it’s that ambiguity can be as satisfying as neat resolution.”

I stroll over to where the Brontës lived, mingling with fellow visitors – mostly solo women whom I later spot at Fennell’s talk. “People have always come to make a pilgrimage,” says Rebecca Yorke, director of the parsonage and the Brontë Society, which opened in 1928. “If you look at the visitors book, there’ll be a mixture of UK, USA, Australia, Japan and Europe. About a third of our visitors are from overseas.” There are famous signatures too, from Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith.

This is actually my third visit, or pilgrimage, to the parsonage with my mum. It just keeps pulling us back. Today we learn that the trees in the garden separating it from the graveyard only grew after the Brontës’ time here. So the family would have had views of death on one side and endless moors on the other. The rooms are quite claustrophobic and downstairs is where they wrote their novels, on a table that has an “E” etched on it. In the corner is the sofa on which Emily died, most likely of tuberculosis, aged just 30. The life expectancy in Haworth was a mere 24, partly due to the overcrowded graveyard contaminating the drinking water. Such details from this place’s past still feel compelling in the present, especially when it comes to the author of Wuthering Heights.

“Emily is quite enigmatic,” says Yorke. “We don’t know as much about her as we do about Charlotte. And Wuthering Heights was her only novel – but it’s one of the best-known in the English language.” How, then, to square this woman described as peculiar, introverted and nonconformist, with the literary genius who created a novel so haunting, dark and poetic that it still fires people up today? As Charlotte said of her sister: “An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.” So much so that Charlotte made efforts to “correct” Emily’s reputation after her death, further adding to the mystery.

The siblings have proven almost as popular as subjects for drama as their works, from Christopher Fry’s 1973 ITV series The Brontës of Haworth to Sally Wainwright’s 2016 To Walk Invisible for the BBC. In 2022, Emily got a somewhat reimagined biopic, with a passionate portrayal by Emma Mackey, and a raunchy affair with a curate. With each new film or TV series, fresh hordes of tourists have flocked in to Haworth.

Down the hill, a record shop with a “Never Mind the Brontë” poster is just one of many nods to the local celebrities. Other windows boast a lampshade made from book pages and paintings of the moors. Authors live locally, or come to stay for writing retreats, says Park: “There’s that creative feeling in Haworth.” But does the Brontë effect have any impact on local culture in ways beyond the obvious? It runs deeper, says Park, with things such as the nature sculptures at nearby Penistone Hill Country Park, part of Bradford’s year as City of Culture. “It feels like Emily is in the heather and the trees. You just breathe the air. Wuthering refers to weather and I just feel she’s left her print here.”

It’s not just about tourism. Take last month’s Wandering Imaginations project, which saw two young authors from Bradford and two from Ghana writing stories inspired by the Brontë siblings’ fictitious African kingdom Angria. “We’re here for the people that live here,” says Yorke. The society has just acquired a new building on the main street, where it will focus on “opportunities for local people to get closer to their heritage”. She hopes to further “instil that sense of pride in something on your doorstep, something people across the world think is worth visiting.”

(Read more) Hollie Richardson)

Condé Nast Traveller shares the filming locations of Wuthering Heights 2026.

From Edna Clarke Hall and Sylvia Plath to Kate Bush and Lily Cole, Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë's brooding 1847 novel about destructive love – has long captivated readers and creatives alike. On February 13, 2026, the latest film adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, from award-winning writer, director, and producer Emerald Fennell, will reintroduce the classic 19th-century Gothic tale to the masses once more. And sure to follow? An obsession with the windy heath and wild heather moorlands of Yorkshire, where it was filmed.

Deeply inspired by Brontë’s connection to the landscape of West Yorkshire, where she lived, her only published work of fiction was too disturbing for many when it was released. In January 1848, one critic complained that there wasn’t “a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible” in the entire book. Still, it endured, haunting public consciousness well into the 21st century. First coming to celluloid in a 1920’s silent film, versions throughout the decades have cast Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier (1939), Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche (1992) among many others, each attempting to capture the novel’s most jaw-dropping moments: cruelty and lust for revenge; bitter grief and unrealised longing; acrid betrayals of self, of loved ones, and the intricate remorse and contempt each elicits.

“Because it did defy the conventions of that era, so boldly and so brazenly,” says Murray Tremellen, a curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, “people couldn't ignore it. It's a book that doesn't shy away from exploring some of the darker facets of human nature, but that's where its power lies. In a way, the book is almost more likely to resonate with people who have been through difficult experiences in their own lives.” (Andrea Russell)

Variety has Gwyneth Paltrow and Jacob Elordi talk to each other.

Paltrow: I was watching Hitchcock movies from the ‘50s and people really did speak with that transatlantic thing. I brought that in a little bit. So, the internet is abuzz about “Wuthering Heights.” 

Elordi: They should be. Although, someone will pull their phone up and I’m like, “Get that away from me.” When was the last time you were on stage? [What led me to director Emerald Fennell] was “Saltburn.” What’s interesting is when I read “Saltburn,” my thought on it was, “I have to be Jude Law in this movie because of ‘Ripley’.” But then I realized these aren’t similar at all. I shouldn’t use that as a reference. (Matt Donnelly)

Esquire features Kristen Stewart.

A big thing that makes me happy is reading out loud with my wife and pets. East of Eden, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. To share them outside of yourself is salve. (Anthony Breznican)

Elle looks ahead to 'The fashion and beauty trends expected to rule 2026'.

With all the recent buzz surrounding Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the upcoming theatrical releases of Wuthering Heights and Dracula, we’re delighted to see that gothic beauty will be trending in 2026—but not the least bit surprised. This vampy aesthetic will be defined by dark pouts, smudged smoky eyes and fingertips painted with inky black and oxblood polishes. (Lauren Knowles)

TimesNowNews discusses why 'characters from Classic Books Feel More Real Than People in Our Lives'. A contributor to Her Campus wonders, " Why Can’t We Get ‘Wuthering Heights’ Right?' A contributor to BookRiot describes Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood as 'A Gloomy Jane Eyre Reimagining for Your Inner Wednesday Addams'. The Eyre Guide posts about the recent reunion of Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens to talk about their time filming Jane Eyre 2006.