Emerald Fennell has been haunted by Wuthering Heights for most of her life.
“I’ve had this thing in my heart and my head since I was 14,” she says. “I always knew that if I was ever going to be allowed to, I was going to try to adapt it.”
“Suddenly, you walk into it,” she adds, “and it’s the most uncanny, incredible feeling.”
We connect over Zoom in Los Angeles. Fennell is sitting in a room modelled on her film’s version of the library at Thrushcross Grange: a glossy carmine acrylic floor, a sculpted fireplace formed from a tangle of hands. She is wearing a romantic grey cowl-neck dress. Her accent is deliciously plummy as she flits between girlish excitement and the cool assurance of someone who studied English at Oxford.
Fennell wanted her Wuthering Heights to tap into the primal, obsessive feeling she remembered from reading Bronte as a teenager. Does she think she’s managed it? “Yes,” she says, without hesitation. “I do. I think that’s a testament to the incredible people I work with. Every single person connected deeply to this feeling – the feeling of physical devastation and love and yearning.” [...]
When Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, Victorian reviewers reacted with horror. One called it “coarse”, another “utterly hateful”; another wondered how anyone could have written such a book without taking their own life.
“When you read the first reviews, they’re incandescent with rage,” Fennell says, with delight. “They’re not just saying ‘We don’t like this book’, they’re saying ‘These people are an abomination’.”
Early test-screening responses to Fennell’s film were similarly incensed, with viewers describing it as “aggressively provocative” and “stylised depravity”. The descriptions are not inaccurate. It is certainly provocative. Depraved too. But it is also an all-consuming romance.
“All I ever want is to make things that make people want to talk,” Fennell says. “What we wanted to do was give people that feeling of deep, uncontrollable emotion.”
Some accuse her of needless provocation. She shrugs. “I’m just a goth girl,” she says. “I just like feeling. I want to feel.”
Bronte’s lovers are not easy to admire. Catherine and Heathcliff are cruel, manipulative, vindictive, violent and emotionally catastrophic. In modern parlance, “toxic” does the trick.
“When I read the book, the thing I’ve always come back to is this extremely combustible relationship between two very difficult, in many ways unlikeable, characters,” Fennell says.
“I think that’s the reason the book is so enduring,” she continues. “Because it is shocking. It is sadomasochistic. It is difficult. And it is a love story.”
She is well aware that describing her adaptation as “the greatest love story of all time” has caused what she describes, cheerfully, as “an enormous amount of argument”.
“I love to argue about things,” she says, evidently chuffed.
But does she really think it’s a love story?
“The reason I connected to the material is because of the love,” she says. “I don’t think anyone’s reading Wuthering Heights for the revenge. It’s because the connection between these two people is so intense and deeply rooted and profound that everything else gets destroyed in its wake. I’m really only interested in things that can hold the things that are troubling.” [...]
“It’s like Burton and Taylor,” Fennell says. “Two people who are individually unbelievably talented and beautiful, but together it’s just dynamite.”
Fennell had directed Elordi before, in Saltburn, where he played Felix Catton, an arrestingly beautiful aristocratic university student. When she saw the 28-year-old in costume, she thought he resembled the Heathcliff on the cover of her teenage copy of Wuthering Heights.
“There’s this deep thing in him of complete and utter tenderness,” she says. Because so much of Heathcliff’s behaviour is monstrous – hanging pets, beating children – she needed an actor with “something you’d forgive”.
Robbie, 35, has produced all of Fennell’s films through LuckyChap, the production company she runs with her husband, Tom Ackerley, but this marks the first time she has appeared on screen for her. She had never read Bronte’s novel before Fennell told her she was adapting it, and deliberately avoided the book until the screenplay was finished. She wanted her first encounter with the story to be Fennell’s version, whom she calls “a genius screenplay writer”.
Fennell lights up when she talks about her heroine. “I’ve always felt like Cathy, in particular, is a little spoilt brat,” she says. “She’s manipulative, she’s capricious, she’s spoilt, she’s cruel, she’s kind of a sadist. She’s so many things, and yet she is so loveable. I think people connect to her so deeply.”
In casting Robbie, she knew she needed someone who could carry all of that and get away with it.
“With Margot, I just knew it needed somebody who, in any era, you would never argue with,” Fennell laughs. “Because whatever they said, you’d be like ‘Fair enough. I forgive you.’ ” [...]
This appetite for sensation sits oddly alongside the relentless stream of surveys and think pieces suggesting younger audiences want less sex on screen. Fennell’s films are not prudish.
“I think we’re very out of our bodies at the moment,” she says. “Very detached from things and people. When I see a movie or read a book, I want a visceral reaction. I want to feel something in my body.”
For Fennell, the sex in Wuthering Heights is not gratuitous but a way of getting to the guts of the story.
“The book is extremely sexy,” she says. “That’s why people were so shocked when it was published. To shy away from that felt wrong.”
“You can only really invest in something sexy if you care,” she adds. “People have been surprised by how romantic this film is. What felt really rewarding was how much it makes your heart feel.”
“But also,” she adds, “it’s just life, isn’t it? The stuff that’s interesting is a bit sexy. A lot of that is sex and a lot of it is not sex.”
Her film is not slavishly devoted to Bronte, hence the quotation marks around the film’s title.She cites Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist ending in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as a blueprint.
“There’s a kind of wish fulfilment,” she says. “I’ve always mourned the loss of being able to see what would happen if Catherine and Heathcliff were able to see their love through. That felt crucial to me.” [...]
She places Charli in a lineage of transgressive female artists – the painter Paula Rego, the poet Sharon Olds – women whose work is not comforting but necessary.
“The thing about Charli is she’s a genius,” she says. “A proper genius.”
Their collaboration began casually. Fennell sent her the script for Wuthering Heights, asking only how it made her feel.
“She called me and was like ‘I’ve read it, I love it, what are you thinking?’ And I was like ‘I don’t know, maybe a song?’ And she said ‘How about an album?’
“And I was like ‘Well, yes. Obviously that would be the greatest thing in the world.’ ” (Geordie Gray)
While Brontë’s description of Heathcliff as “dark-skinned” is inarguable, the Victorian use of the term did not mean “black” or “mixed-race,” as there was no such interpretation of the phrase in 1847, when the novel was written. There were other, considerably more robust, references to black-skinned people used by Brontë’s contemporaries. If she had wished to refer to Heathcliff as a person of color, she would have done so in terms that most people would now regard as racist, or in the very least as profoundly unacceptable.
I am usually the last person to rush to the defense of Emerald Fennell, but the furore in this instance seems entirely misplaced. She herself has said of Elordi’s casting that “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it. I don’t know, I think I was focusing on the sado-masochistic elements of it.” The actor, meanwhile, tactfully dodged the discourse altogether and commented that “this is Emerald’s vision and these are the images that came to her head at 14 years old; somebody else’s interpretation of a great piece of art is what I’m interested in — new images, fresh images, original thoughts.”
We live in an age where “race-blind” and “gender-blind” approaches to acting are supposedly the norm, but the furore here shows that this modish approach is only welcomed if it goes in an approved direction. It’s perfectly acceptable to think Wuthering Heights is going to be bad, but the reasons for its potential failure are far simpler than this manufactured contretemps. Let’s have less wuthering nonsense and more clear-sighted common sense, as otherwise these shenanigans will become regrettably commonplace.
Fennell has said, with misguided optimism, “The great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting,” she added. “There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” For the love of Brontë – and our collective sanity – please let this one be the last one for a while. (Alexander Larman)
has talked with Dr Claire O'Callaghan about Wuthering Heights.
Authored by one "Ellis Bell", Wuthering Heights was met with rather mixed reviews when it was first published in 1847. Some were scathing, horrified by its "brutal cruelty" and portrayal of a "semi-savage love". Others acknowledged the book's "power and cleverness", "its delineation forcible and truthful". Many said it was simply "strange".
Despite the popularity of gothic fiction at the time, it's perhaps unsurprising that Wuthering Heights shocked readers in the 19th Century, a time of strict moral scrutiny. "People did not know what to do with this book, because it has no clear moral angle," says Clare [sic] O'Callaghan, senior professor of Victorian literature at Loughborough University in the UK, and the author of Emily Brontë Reappraised. [...]
Some film and TV adaptations have skipped the second half of Wuthering Heights entirely, presumably because of its savagery and complexity – William Wyler's 1939 Oscar-winner ends shortly after Catherine's death, her ghost and Heathcliff wandering the moors. Robert Fuest's 1970 film starring Timothy Dalton also ends with her death, as does Andrea Arnold's 2011 film, which dedicates most of the screen time to the younger Catherine and Heathcliff.
But her death comes halfway through the novel and therefore many adaptations have missed out a further 18 years or so of plot, softening the ending and sanitising its darkest parts. A few have attempted to cover the whole story – including the BBC's 1967 series, which inspired Kate Bush to write her 1978 hit. But it's the BBC's 1978 mini-series (aided by its five-hour running time), which is held up as being the most faithful to the whole text.
Ignoring the latter part of the book "doesn't work", says Claire O'Callaghan. "I think love and vengeance are the engines of the book, and that's what so great about it… there's no boundary to the depths to which [Heathcliff] will go to, to make people pay," says O'Callaghan.
Heathcliff lives a life of torment and uncontainable grief, but inflicts that suffering on everyone around him and feels no remorse in doing so. By not righting his wrongs, and letting him die without further punishment, O'Callaghan says, Brontë poses more complex questions to the reader, rather than giving them answers: What is love? Does the marriage system work? What are the limits of violence?
That's part of the complex legacy of the novel. "Popular culture tends to tell us it's this great romance… when [readers] are encountering it for the first time, that jars, because the book is so different. It still has the ability to shock, and I think, like the Victorians, we're still grappling with how to define it and what to do with it," O'Callaghan says.
Another popular misconception of the novel is that it's unremittingly bleak, when, at times, it's quite funny. Nelly and Zillah, the two servants, are major gossips. Linton Heathcliff is a mopey, sickly and bratty child, who provokes an eye roll from the reader. And when you can understand what the farm servant Joseph is saying through his thick Yorkshire dialect, he is often a witty cynic, who never has anything nice to say. When Catherine falls ill after searching for Heathcliff in the rain, he snarkily croaks, "Running after t'lads, as usual?"
Lockwood's snootiness is amusing, too. "He is like a character from a Jane Austen novel who's walked into a Brontë world, and that, for me, is hilarious," says O'Callaghan. "If you read this book and take it as a kind of gothic satire to some extent, it's a completely different book. And I think that's one of the things, though. People take it very, very seriously, don't they? They're absolutely convinced that these are real characters, rather than this gothic, over-the-topness."
Emily Brontë never saw the success of her only novel, but we know that she read initial reviews. Her writing desk is on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, and it contains five clippings of Wuthering Heights reviews, which were largely negative. She died at the age of 30 from tuberculosis, around a year after Wuthering Heights was published. Behind her she leaves a masterpiece.
Whether you are a fierce lover or loather of Brontë's deeply flawed characters, the harrowing and unsettling plot and the toxic romance, Wuthering Heights has possessed its legions of fans throughout history – "driven us mad", you could say. We can be sure that Fennell's interpretation will not be the last. Whether anyone can do this book justice on screen, however, is a whole other question.
Hopefully, at least, we can all agree with one anonymous critic, who reviewed Wuthering Heights in January 1848. "It is impossible to begin and not finish it," they said, "and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it." (Molly Gorman)
Recently inhabited by film stars Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie - who will soon take their turn as Heathcliff and Cathy in Emerald Fennell's long-awaited Wuthering Heights - Holdsworth House transports you to a time and place of rareified luxury. [...]
Holdsworth House was a home to the cast and crew of the new film, offering shelter from the winds of the moors as they prepared to bring Brontë's classic to the big screen. [...]
Two doors were opened, revealing Cathy's room at Thrushcross Grange. I felt like I had been transported into one of literature's most iconic bedrooms.
At first glance, there is nothing out of the ordinary. But look closer, and you'll notice there is something more macabre at work. The plush pink walls have light blue lines running down them, giving the impression you're surrounded by veins leading into a beating heart. Another exquisite detail comes in the form of the three potential names of our heroine- Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton and Catherine Heathcliff - scrawled longingly on the window. I couldn't help but pine with poor Cathy as the sun set on the countryside beyond.
If you're a Wuthering Heights head like me, then you're in luck. Cathy's room has been listed on Airbnb for couples. However, stays are very limited. Requests to book can be made from 12pm on February 20. Three lucky winners will be chosen to live their own Wuthering Heights dream. But fear not. If your name isn't picked out of the hat, you can still stay at Holdsworth House - just in one of the slightly more normal rooms.
After I'd had enough time playing at Cathy, we were taken back to the main house, where we were greeted with a colourful feast, straight out of the film. Then it was a visit to the room Mr Elordi, aka Heathcliff, stayed in. A plush, sage green sofa stood in front of a large bed decorated with red and pink cushions - another nod to the film.
While the professional staff members remained largely tight-lipped, I'm happy to report that the stars were particularly friendly during their stay. (Sophie Corcoran)
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