'Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel'

Among all the Wuthering Heights 2026 news stories told and retold ad nauseam, there are always small gems. Today's is an article by John Mullan on 'How Wuthering Heights seduced its readers' in The New Statesman.

Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel

"Drive me mad” implored the first billboards advertising director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming film. So proverbial for passionate extremity is Emily Brontë’s novel that Wuthering Heights did not even need to feature on the adverts, which loudly proclaimed the film as a story of erotic compulsion. Is this what Brontë gave us? Is it why teenagers with a literary bent still love her novel?

‘“Drive me mad” is a phrase that does come from the book; it is spoken by Heathcliff, immediately after his beloved Catherine’s death, as he begs her ghost to haunt him. “I know that ghosts have wandered on Earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad!” As he finishes speaking, he smashes his head against the trunk of a tree, already stained with “splashes of blood” from earlier acts of self-violence. Maddened is just what he is.

Is Wuthering Heights a story of sexual obsession that we can still recognise? Fennell has said that she wants to do justice to the “primal, sexual” aspects of the novel. Yet the book is unusual in its depiction of sexual desire, which is obscure or unsatisfied or sublimated into anger. You might not guess from all the passionate embraces in film adaptations, but the love between Heathcliff and Catherine is never consummated. It is rooted in their shared childhood and early adolescence: she is only 15 when she becomes engaged to Edgar Linton, and the spurned Heathcliff, overhearing her say that “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now”, leaves Wuthering Heights, in the Yorkshire moors where they live, for three years. Only on his return, finding her married and mortally ill, does he, observed by housekeeper Nelly Dean, get to grasp her and give her “more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I dare say”. The fact that she is five months pregnant by her husband is mentioned only six chapters later, when, aged just 18, she dies a few hours after the premature birth of her daughter – as if the reality of her marital sex life is to be ignored.

Nelly Dean, with the privileged access of a servant to the Earnshaw and Linton families, narrates most of the novel to a prim gentleman called Lockwood, who has rented Thrushcross Grange, the Lintons’ former home. Everything is filtered through these two, and the accounts of other characters that they report. The stories within stories can be dizzying. At one stage, for instance, Lockwood is telling the reader of what Nelly Dean has told him of what Isabella told her of a violent quarrel between Hindley Earnshaw and Heathcliff. What we see and hear is utterly removed from any authorial judgment. Who knows what Emily Brontë thought of how her characters behave? Film adaptations have been powerless to replicate the novel’s complex business of narrations within narrations.

Lockwood’s narration, which opens and closes the novel, holds within it a story that goes back 30 years – a family saga reaching across generations. With him we look into a world where characters are driven by passions that are extreme and sometimes unintelligible. The attentive reader will surely share his fascinated incomprehension. Heathcliff’s emotional expressions sometimes verge on absurdity. Comparing his love for Catherine to Edgar Linton’s, he declares, “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in 80 years, as I could in a day.”

As well as being a vehicle of passion, the novel is a thing of great formal intricacy. Time is Emily Brontë’s element, and her novel has the most beautifully elaborate time scheme of almost any 19th-century novel. (Like Jane Austen, the author worked with calendars, or almanacs, to ensure a consistent internal chronology.) Events take place in times distant from its Victorian readers. First published in 1847, it begins with a date, “1801”, that thrusts the story back into the past, even for its original readers – for most, beyond their own memories. Once Nelly Dean begins narrating, it then travels even further back, for the unfolding of the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, to the 1770s and 1780s – the equivalent of a novel of today setting its main action in the 1950s and 1960s. We are removed to a time as well as a place cut off from the world. This is a Victorian novel designed to escape its times, with less connection to Victorian values than any other novel of the period.

The novel’s narrative structure enacts the way in which the present is sucked back into the past, but we are also sometimes jolted into the present tense of Lockwood’s confused processing of what he has been hearing and seeing. Present jars against past. Interruptions keep reminding us we are listening to a narration by Nelly Dean – “The clock is on the stroke of 11” – even as Lockwood urges her to continue. The reader shares with Lockwood the experience of waking up from a different time – the shock of re-entering the present.

Seasons revolve throughout the novel, each marker of the time of year usually a description of the weather:

On an afternoon in October, or the beginning of November, a fresh watery afternoon, when the turf and paths were rustling with moist, withered leaves, and the cold, blue sky was half hidden by clouds – dark grey streamers, rapidly mounting from the west and boding abundant rain.

Meteorology had never been so precise in English fiction before. Types of cloud and the weather they portend are exactly described. We are used to hearing Wuthering Heights being called “elemental”, and certainly its characters are closer to the elements than in most novels, closer to the cold and the wet, but also to the occasional blessing of warm days. Everyone is season-sensitive.

The reader may hardly be conscious of the frequent small details of the ever-changing weather, but they accumulate to convince us that this is a real place, with its own special climate. The sense of place is extraordinary, yet also utterly remote. In the novel’s first paragraph, Lockwood marvels at his new-found disconnect from the world. “In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society”. He jokes that it is “a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven”, which is as ill-judged as most of his jokes. Hatred of your fellow human beings does indeed flourish in this place. “My mind is so eternally secluded in itself,” says Heathcliff, near the novel’s end.

This is less a love story than a hate story. Like several other film adaptations of Brontë’s novel, Fennell’s version will apparently stop at its mid-point, with the death of Catherine. We will not have the complicated enactment of Heathcliff’s revenge: his tricking of Hindley Earnshaw out of the property of Wuthering Heights and ensuring his early death (aged 27) through alcoholism; his degradation of Hindley’s son, Hareton; his cunning arrangement of the marriage of Catherine, daughter of Edgar Linton, to his enfeebled son, Linton, ensuring that he becomes the owner of Thrushcross Grange, the Lintons’ family home. Ironically, without its second phase, the story is a grimmer one. It excludes the growing affection and final marriage of Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton. In Brontë’s telling, these two finally escape the bitterness and fury of the older generation.

It is strange that Heathcliff has become a Byronic anti-hero, even sex symbol. He expresses contempt for Isabella Linton’s marrying him “under a delusion… picturing in me a hero of romance”. However abused he was by the jealous Hindley in his youth, his extreme violence is unforgivable. On his first visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood notices that, when young Catherine answers him back, Heathcliff lifts his hand and she instantly springs to a safer distance, “obviously acquainted with its weight”. Much later in the book, we actually see him strike her down. Isabella describes how, when the drunken Hindley confronts him with a knife and pistol, Heathcliff wrenches them from his grasp, slashing Hindley’s arm. He then “kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags”. When Isabella tells him that he would have proved an “abominable” husband to Catherine too, he throws a knife at her head, cutting her beneath the ear. She throws a knife back at him. Violence spreads from one character to another. No film has dared do justice to it.

The first reviewers were both intrigued and repelled. “The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity,” wrote one. Yet the same reviewer added, “The reality of unreality has never been so aptly illustrated as in the scenes of almost savage life which Ellis Bell has brought so vividly before us”. “The reality of unreality” seems a good phrase for the credibility and yet utter peculiarity of this novel, which will always take us to its own remote place and time zone.

Compare that to Helen Coffey's cry in The Independent: 'I’m ready to admit it – Wuthering Heights is an awful, awful book' and 'It’s a shame, then, that it’s such an uncompromisingly terrible read'.

"Believe women” is a phrase we’ve heard a lot in recent times – and quite rightly. But there is one instance in which, I must confess, I don’t believe women. And that is every time one tells me that Wuthering Heights is her favourite book.

Let's stop here for a minute: why only women? 

I still remember the first time I picked up a copy of Emily Brontë’s much-vaunted 1847 literary classic. I’d loved eldest Brontë sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre; I’d developed a soft spot for the quiet radicalism of youngest sister Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Now, in my mid-twenties, it was finally time to take on the most extravagant, gothic of masterpieces, penned by the extraordinary middle child herself.

Ill-fated lovers torn asunder, yearning across bleak northern vistas, desire so powerful it transcends the grave – I was all set to swoon over this “tragic love story” between Cathy and Heathcliff, in which the backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors “represents the wildness of Heathcliffe’s [sic] character” (this information having been gleaned from an episode of Friends in which Phoebe and Rachel join a book group).

And this Heathcliff character sounded like “a bit of me”, as they say on Love Island, a heady mix of Mr Darcy’s brooding, glowering allure and Rhett Butler’s arrogant, magnetic charm. I’ll admit it: I was ready to have my head turned by a sexy leading man in period dress. Sue me.

Yet it wasn’t long before I found myself experiencing the literary equivalent of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Each of the characters, I swiftly discovered, was profoundly and irredeemably unlikeable, by turns cruel, mean-spirited, selfish, wet and/or weak. This cast of misfits ended up dropping dead from all manner of fevers and childbearing and alcoholism and general malaise – which might have elicited some kind of emotional response, had I cared whether any of them lived or died. As it was, the only rational reaction to each demise seemed to be, simply, “good riddance”.

Just to make things even more insufferable, every one of them seemed to be called an unholy combination of the same names mixed together – Linton, Earnshaw, Heathcliff – in a way that scrambled my brain and rivalled only Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude for forcing repeated consultation of the family tree. The piece de resistance is surely Catherine Linton, herself daughter of the infamous Cathy Earnshaw, who marries first one cousin, then another, to become Catherine Heathcliff, then Catherine Earnshaw. It all feels nothing short of elite-level trolling from Emily.

Then there’s the novel’s non-linear narrative framework, which uses multiple narrators telling stories within stories within stories: a kind of early Inception with none of Christopher Nolan’s joyful spectacle. This device, largely panned by critics at the time, has since been held up as a stroke of genius – which just goes to show that you only need wait a sufficient amount of time before something becomes fashionable (as demonstrated by the cursed resurgence of the bucket hat).

Within all this relaying of tales, Emily also saw fit to write swathes of text phonetically to indicate certain characters’ regional accents. The reader couldn’t be trusted to imagine a thick West Riding brogue, and so we’re invited to wade through mind-curdling dialogue such as “T’ maister’s down I’ t’ fowld”, “Yah dunnut loike wer company, there’s maister’s” and, a personal favourite, “There’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll not oppen ’t an ye mak’ yer flaysome dins till neeght”. It’s enough to make me reconsider my stance on book burning.

And, at the heart of it all, that fabled “love story” between Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s been romanticised and elevated as some kind of tragic, star-crossed lovers’ tale across multiple big and small-screen adaptations over the years – the latest being Emerald Fennell’s upcoming “Wuthering Heights”, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, with the quote marks intentionally inserted to stress that this zeitgeisty hot take is likely to stray pretty far from the original. The film’s release date is slated for Valentine’s weekend; the trailer pronounces it to be inspired by “the greatest love story of all time”. To which I can only scratch my head and say, “You what, mate?” I don’t know what Emerald’s been reading, but it surely can’t be the same book that has been consistently disappointing me for more than a decade.

Far be it from me to deny any woman the pleasure of losing her mind over Jacob Elordi sporting a gruff Yorkshire accent and a cravat, but let the record show that the character of Heathcliff, as Emily wrote him, is not a romantic lead. “Grade A a***hole” would be far more accurate a description: a nasty, spiteful abuser who, it’s very heavily implied, commits acts of sexual violence against his wife Isabella after marrying her out of spite. He’s literature’s deeply problematic toxic ex that we keep “hero-washing”, somehow collectively convinced that maybe he wasn’t really that bad, after all. (Spoiler: he was.)

His and Cathy’s doomed romance has about as much in common with love as a writhing pit of venomous snakes, a noxious concoction of possessiveness, jealousy and unhealthy fascination that poisons everything it touches. I suppose one could argue that they’re a perverted version of soulmates, but only in the same way that the two very worst people you’ve ever met were “made for each other”.

In fact, it seems to me that the only good thing to have come out of Wuthering Heights is the near-perfect 1978 Kate Bush song of the same name, which captures all of the novel’s best bits – and allows you to wail, “It’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home!” like a banshee while attempting an interpretive dance – without actually having to read the damn thing.

Of course, we’re all going to have different opinions and different tastes – what a world it would be if we were all the same, etc etc – but I’m afraid I simply refuse to give credence to the idea that anyone has ever derived genuine pleasure from trudging their way through this endlessly maudlin tale.

Yes, that's why it's 179 years after it was first published and we are still talking about it while it keeps on inspiring artists all over the world.

Onto more people who actually get the book: The New York Times wonders, 'Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?'

Catherine and Heathcliff. Since 1847, when Emily Brontë published her only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” those ill-starred lovers have inflamed the imaginations of generations of readers.

Who are these two? Definitely not the people you meet on vacation. The DNA of “Wuthering Heights,” set in a wild and desolate corner of Northern England, runs through the dark, gothic, obsessive strains of literary romance. Heathcliff, a tormented soul with terrible manners and a worse temper, may be the English novel’s most problematic boyfriend — mad, bad and dangerous to know. What redeems him, at least in the reader’s eyes, is Catherine’s love.

As children growing up in the same highly dysfunctional household, the two form a bond more passionate than siblinghood and purer than lust. (I don’t think a 179-year-old book can be spoiled, but some plot details will be revealed in what follows.) They go on to marry other people, living as neighbors and frenemies without benefits until tragedy inevitably strikes. In the meantime, they roil and seethe — it’s no accident that “wuthering” is a synonym for “stormy” — occasionally erupting into ardent eloquence. [...]

This all-consuming love, thwarted in the book by circumstances, has flourished beyond its pages. Thanks to Catherine and Heathcliff — and also to the harsh, windswept beauty of the Yorkshire setting — “Wuthering Heights,” a touchstone of Victorian literature, has become a fixture of popular culture.

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon played Heathcliff and Catherine in William Wyler’s 1939 multi-Oscar-nominated film adaptation.c

Since then, the volatile Heathcliff has been embodied by a succession of British brooders: Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy. At least for Gen X, the definitive Catherine will always be Kate Bush, dancing across the English countryside in a bright red dress in an indelible pre-MTV music video.

Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll have Emerald Fennell’s new R-rated movie version, with Margot Robbie (recently Barbie) as Catherine and Jacob Elordi (recently Frankenstein’s monster) as Heathcliff.

Is theirs the greatest love story of all time, as the movie’s trailer insists? It might be. For the characters, the love itself overwhelms every other consideration of feeling. For Brontë, the most accomplished poet in a family of formidable novelists, that love is above all a matter of words. The immensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion is measured by the intensity of their language, which of course is also Brontë’s. [...]

But the point of their attempts to justify their love is, finally, to show the inadequacy of words to capture the tidal movements and volcanic explosions of their souls.

They — and Emily Brontë — are giving voice to a shared experience that defies articulation, pushing language to the very limit of its expressive capacity and beyond.

Which is what romance lives to do. It’s a genre often proudly unconstrained by what is possible, rational or sane, unafraid to favor sensation over sense or to pose unanswerable questions about the human heart. How could Catherine love a man like Heathcliff? How could he know himself to be worthy of her love?

We’ll never really have the answers, which is why we’ll never stop reading. And why no picture will ever quite match the book’s thousands of feverish, hungry, astonishing words. (A.O. Scott)

Airbnb Newsroom announces that you can stay at a replica of Cathy's bedroom in Wuthering Heights 2026.

West Yorkshire’s Brontë Country is having its moment – rapidly becoming one of the UK’s hottest romantic destinations. As anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s new film “Wuthering Heights”, only in cinemas 13th February in time for Valentine’s Day, Airbnb data shows the film is putting West Yorkshire on the map for UK Gen Z, with searches for Valentine’s stays up 67% – signalling a new fascination with romance on the moorlands.1

With 40% of UK adults now travelling to locations they’ve seen in period dramas2, set-jetting is reshaping the travel map – with West Yorkshire catapulted into the spotlight as travellers seek out brooding landscapes, literary passion and timeless romance, as it stars as the backdrop to the classic tale and where most of the film was shot. In fact, searches among UK guests for Airbnb stays in Haworth – the historic Yorkshire village where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote – have surged by over 200% this winter compared to last year.3 

“Wuthering Heights” is a bold and original imagining of one of the greatest love stories of all time, centered on Cathy and Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love and madness – a longing guests can discover as this Valentine’s as Cathy Earnshaw invites couples to step inside her lavish Thrushcross Grange bedroom in West Yorkshire for an immersive overnight stay inspired by Emerald Fennell’s sizzling take on the classic novel, exclusively on Airbnb. [...]

Inspired by Emerald Fennell’s exquisite film, the room channels Cathy’s intensity, offering guests a deeply personal window into her inner world, almost becoming a character of its own – a feverish ode to Cathy as devised by her husband, Edgar Linton. The skin-toned walls and layered textures make the space feel saturated with her presence, from strands of her hair woven into the table to the vein-like patterns that seem to pulse through the cushions. 

The dining room at our Thrushcross Grange is also brought to life, dressed in silver-toned finery and styled to mirror the film’s world. Here, guests will be served rich Yorkshire dishes during an indulgent and themed candle-lit dinner, echoing the opulent meals seen on screen.

Beyond these rooms, couples can fall in love again and again, with the stay also including a horseback ride across the countryside, an indulgent afternoon tea, and an intimate listening experience of Charl xcx’s “Wuthering Heights” – in their own modern, untamed Yorkshire moment. [...]

Cathy’s Bedroom will be available three separate stays for up to two guests each for  stay across multiple days between 27 February and 4 March, completely for free – exclusively on Airbnb. 

This is on many, many sites including Forbes, Ireland Live and Elite Daily.

The Guardian takes a look at the reactions of first viewers on social media and also has some paid content about the film: on the cast, on whether it will work as 'an antidote to today’s lacklustre dating scene' and on its 'captivating looks and sounds'. Inkl claims that Margot Robbie is channeling 'Brontë’s Cathy with unexpected jewellery' during her promo tour while Hello! states that she 'reignites Brontë beauty' (?). The Independent wonders whether 'Wuthering Heights just set the biggest beauty trend for 2026'. Vogue (and many others, of course) has an article on yesterday's London photocall.

According to Time, Jane Eyre 2011 is one of 'The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century'.

Even if you've never read Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance Jane Eyre, you pretty much know the story: An impoverished but unabashedly intelligent orphan-girl governess arrives at the estate of a rich, surly, mysterious gentleman, who quickly realizes that this small, seemingly mouselike creature is the only human being on the planet who can understand him. In one of the most ardent lines ever committed to paper, he welcomes her into his life—"My equal is here, and my likeness"—with a sense of near-mystical wonder. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation of Brontë’s book—starring Michael Fassbender as the brooding man-with-a-secret, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and Mia Wasikowska as the at-first meek but ultimately fiery heroine Jane—is tuned to the beating pulse of that line, without ever resorting to dumb, bodice-ripping cliches. Rochester is a man whose kindness is the cutting kind, and Fassbender, with his straight, even teeth and mocking eyes, knows it. Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous. He’s a feral being who looks as if he could swallow Jane whole, but she stands up to him in every way: Wasikowska’s performance rings with understated fierceness. Jane Eyre, as Brontë wrote her, is a small girl who makes for a big story. Wasikowska steps easily and naturally into those little footprints stamped out nearly 180 years ago, in a movie that makes them seem as if they were made only yesterday. (Stephanie Zacharek)