The ghosts have vanished into thin air

The Guardian claims that Wuthering Heights 2026 is 'set to ravish Valentine’s weekend box office'.

The titillating trailers and method-dressed promotional tour appear to have paid off: early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will earn back its $80m (£59m) production budget on the first weekend of release.

Projections estimate the three-day frame, which falls on Valentine’s weekend, should recoup around $50m (£37m) at the US box office – where it opens across 3,600 screens – and a further $40m (£29m) overseas. (Catherine Shoard)

In The Times, Sharon Wright looks at what Wuthering Heights 2026 gets right and wrong.

As a Bradford-born Brontë expert, here’s my guide to what Fennell gets right — and wrong.

1. No, Cathy wouldn’t have had a cut-glass accent

Cathy’s accent is a plummy throwback to Merle Oberon in the 1939 film adaptation of the Brontë classic, with Charlotte Mellington (as the young Catherine Earnshaw) and Margot Robbie voicing the heroine’s lines in RP. The queenly pronunciation serves to throw the Yorkshire voice of Heathcliff, played by Owen Cooper and then Jacob Elordi, into suitably lower-class relief.

This is Fennell’s idea of “othering” Heathcliff — swapping Brontë’s layered examination of his “dark-skinned” outsider status for simply making him sound different from Cathy and his “betters”.

Brontë’s heroine lives in an isolated house on the moors. She calls her dad Father, not “Papa. In a mellow moment he asks: “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” The Earnshaws do not speak in cut-glass, prewar BBC English.

While Elordi says he practised his admittedly good accent in the bath, his fellow Australian Robbie told British Vogue that she was disappointed to find she didn’t need to. “I was very excited to have a crack at the Yorkshire accent,” she said. Fennell soon put her straight.

2. Mr Earnshaw wasn’t a brutish drunk

Martin Clunes plays Cathy’s father, Mr Earnshaw, as a drunken, upper-class brute who brings the street waif Heathcliff home from a trip to Liverpool. More ruined blue blood than gentleman farmer, he’s the best thing in the film but nothing like his character in the book. In the novel, the kindly Mr Earnshaw protects Heathcliff, while it is Cathy’s brother, Hindley, who hates the “beggarly interloper” and mistreats him horribly after his father’s death.

With no Hindley character, the film skips the origin of the true malice and mania of Brontë’s Heathcliff. He hates Hindley and plots to humiliate him by taking Wuthering Heights, wielding power though dispossessing his childhood nemesis. So we’re left with a screen Heathcliff with none of Brontë’s “imp of Satan” about him.

True to 14-year-old Fennell’s vision, he follows Cathy around like a puppy, happy when they are having it away, hangdog when they aren’t. Elordi’s glowering from beneath gorgeous eyebrows can only achieve so much.

3. Nelly is pivotal to the plot, but she’s not posh

The film gets Ellen “Nelly” Dean’s crucial role right. The faithful rural Yorkshire servant who lives at the Heights is the chief, if unreliable, narrator of the tumultuous novel. She knows everyone’s secrets and is the witness and storyteller who relays it all later to Lockwood, who rents Thrushcross Grange.

Unfortunately the film’s most laugh-out-loud liberty also comes with her reinvention as the secret illegitimate daughter of a lord. She is a local woman, often referring to “bairns”, and deemed “a cant lass” (feisty female) by Mr Earnshaw. Instead, a ludicrous Mills & Boonesque backstory makes Nelly — played by an excellent Hong Chau — a refined lady’s “companion” to Cathy.

4. Cathy doesn’t have a sexual awakening in the stables

In the book Joseph is a servant and religious zealot whose utterances are written in broad Yorkshire dialect. He is a horrible and “very old” man hated by Cathy and Heathcliff for his evangelical fervour and puritanical wrath.

In the film, step forward the handsome young actor Ewan Mitchell to unwittingly give a fornication floorshow involving a horse bridle and a maid as Cathy sneaks a peek through the floorboards and later repairs to the moors to, ahem, relive the moment.

There is no sexual awakening in the book. Cathy and Heathcliff’s devotion is entirely chaste — there is no evidence of a sexual relationship. And the only thing Joseph bangs is his Bible.

• Wuthering Heights — by the stars who tried to sex it up before

5. Isabella Linton does marry Heathcliff — but isn’t into BDSM

There are no aristocrats in Brontë’s novel, only suggested ones in Fennell’s film. When Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) marries Cathy he lives in a stately home more suited to a Jane Austen flick. Thrushcross Grange is an old manor house, a step up from the Heights but not by much. And Linton’s sister (not ward) Isabella, played by Alison Oliver, is not a simpleton who shares Fennell’s fascination with BDSM.

“There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book,” Fennell has claimed. Well, there’s a great deal of sadism, certainly, meted out by Heathcliff to Cathy’s sister-in-law.

In the novel Isabella elopes with Heathcliff, learning too late that she is part of his twisted revenge on Linton. Heathcliff hangs her dog in the book but Fennell has him chaining Isabella to the stove like a dog.

Brontë’s naive Isabella was conned into a brutal marriage — she did not go knowingly into an abusive relationship or come to enjoy it, as she does in the film. She calls Heathcliff “a monster, and not a human being!” and is a victim of horrific domestic abuse, making her willing submission on screen a titillating travesty.

6. The ghosts have vanished into thin air

Where are all the ghosts? Brontë conjures the supernatural on the South Pennines, with Cathy’s ghost pleading “Let me in!” at the window in the novel (and in Kate Bush’s enduring song).

Fennell ignores the entire second half of the novel after Cathy’s death, when the next generation suffer Heathcliff’s warped grief and unquenchable thirst for revenge. Surprising, when the necrophiliac potential of him digging up Cathy’s corpse should have appealed to the film-maker, given she had Barry Keoghan’s character in Saltburn humping his beloved’s grave.

If depravity is what you’re after, it happens when Cathy is gone and Heathcliff visits his cruelty on her daughter and his son. But there can be no “after Cathy” in Fennell’s fantasy.

The novel ends with the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff glimpsed on the moors. The film ends in a pool of Cathy’s deathbed blood and a montage of their romantic moments.

An interesting point is made by this contributor to Refinery29: 'Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Whitewashed Heathcliff & Honestly, It Was For The Best'.

Depending on who you ask, Brontë’s Heathcliff is supposed to be Black or Brown, since he’s described in the novel as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect” and a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child.” Another description: “as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” In a piece for Vulture called Is Heathcliff White?, Jasmine Vojdani writes that, “The idea that Heathcliff might be of African descent first entered academic discussion in the 1950s and gained momentum as postcolonial studies became more popular in the ’80s and ’90s. Scholars have argued that the proximity of Liverpool — one of the biggest slave ports at the time in which Wuthering Heights is set — to the Brontës’ home in Haworth cannot be overlooked.” Vojdani interviews scholars and tries to get to the bottom of this mystery surrounding one of literature’s most famous leading men. One scholar says, “He is both based on the boy of an Indian ruler who’d been orphaned because of the East India Company battles. But he’s also based on an Ashanti warrior’s son.” Another: “The feeling that he should be of African heritage, I think that is interference coming in from [Brontë] sister’s book. Because we do know that in Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is born in Jamaica.” Ultimately, Vojdani decides, “By Victorian standards, he’s definitely not white — and likely by ours as well. Is Heathcliff Black? Maybe! It is both historically and textually viable, but he isn’t necessarily Black.” 

We can debate Brontë’s intentions for decades (and clearly, scholars have), but what’s true in this adaptation is that a white Australian man (Jacob Elordi) and a white British boy (Owen Cooper) play Heathcliff. After watching the film, honestly, it’s for the best. I am not encouraging whitewashing, which let’s be clear is exactly what this adaptation and many before it have done, but aside from what implications could be drawn from a movie starring a Black man opening with a lynching, I just don’t think this love story is one I would want to see, or engage in the discourse, if it was a man of color seducing and obsessing over a white woman in this way.

When they are grownups, Heathcliff and Cathy (Margot Robbie) have a tumultuous and toxic relationship. Heathcliff is surly, cruel, and vindictive. He emotionally terrorizes Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) because he can’t have Cathy. So much so that at a certain point, Isabella crawls on the floor like a dog as he holds onto her collar and makes her bark. While Isabella seems to enjoy this roleplay, it’s uncomfortable to watch. It would take skill, care and precision to pull off this kind of sexual deviance and kink between a consenting couple, let alone between one with a problematic age gap, and power imbalance. I like how female desire is depicted through Isabella, but throw race into the mix and to be frank, I just don’t think Fennell has the range.

Based on what scholars have deduced and what Brontë wrote, Heathcliff was probably Brown, which is interesting considering Fennell cast Pakistani-British actor Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, Cathy’s husband, who was definitely white in the books. His race is not mentioned in the movie. And neither is Hong Chau’s Nelly (played in youth by Vy Nguyen), Cathy’s live-in maid and best friend, also a white character who is now reimagined as Asian. There’s a brief mention of Nelly’s race, when Cathy’s father says something that implies she should be grateful he took her in. Otherwise, the way race would factor into their volatile friendship is never explored. In another writer-director’s hands, this story would be rife for mining the racial and class tensions of the era. With the right storyteller, I’m all for showing flawed characters of color in toxic relationships. They don’t have to be perfect representations of their race. But, again, I don’t think Fennell has any intention, or the competency, to tackle all of that in her work.  

You realize early on what Fennell is doing. And that this Wuthering Heights is not a straightforward adaptation; it’s her own personal fantasy. She said as much on the red carpet for the LA premiere: “Everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only kind of ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” In Fennell’s fantasy, Heathcliff couldn’t possibly be anything but a tall, white man that looks like Elordi. Heathcliff is an object of desire and Fennell’s desires cannot extend beyond her worldview, and clearly, that world is very white. Which is fine, actually. She can make the movie she wants to. And I’d rather not watch a story told by a rich, white woman about the twisted proclivities of a Black or Brown man. I wouldn’t want to see it, and I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for it. And it's telling that in Fennell's fantasy, the only people of color, Nelly and Edgar, are characters who Cathy uses and discards at her pleasure.

I’m not trying to be condescending, I just genuinely didn’t expect a nuanced rumination on class, race, desire, and abuse from this movie. I watched the trailers, heard Robbie and Fennell talk about the movie, and I’ve seen Fennell’s previous films (which I didn’t hate!). I knew what they were trying to do with Wuthering Heights. It’s the spiritual equivalent to the genre of toxic white mess that unfolds in TV hits like Succession and The White Lotus. It’s a continuation of the recent trend of modern, magically race-bent, colorblind retellings of beloved literary works, like Netflix’s Bridgerton and Persuasion, and Apple TV’s The Buccaneers. It was never going to be that deep. But all art is political, so yes, while white filmmakers should know better and do better, I would rather spend my time championing original work from Black and Brown filmmakers and storytellers than wish for a non-white Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I think that’s a waste of time. There is inevitably going to be an onslaught of thinkpieces and TikTok rants dedicated to chastising this casting. Sure, let’s call out whitewashing, but instead of expending all our energy on begging for scraps from white Hollywood, let’s support our own. [...]

When I settled into Fennell’s Wuthering Heights world, and got over the unnecessary shock tactic of that opening scene, I started to enjoy myself. I was entertained. Elordi and Robbie (who the internet also swore was miscast because of her age) are electric together. I think their chemistry makes the whole thing worth it.

In the story that Fennell is telling, their chemistry is the one thing that needs to work, and it does. I believe that these two people would tear the world — and themselves — apart to be together. I also believe that they want to tear each other’s clothes off. They are so down bad for each other, inanimate objects that are slightly sexual set them ablaze. Chemistry often feels like a lost art and it was refreshing to see good, old-fashioned, horny-ass onscreen attraction. And for the first time, I understood the global thirst for Jacob Elordi. While Robbie’s Cathy is spunky, stubborn, and independent, Elordi’s Heathcliff is brooding, desperate, and clingy. He’s a real yearner and this may mean that I need some serious therapy, but I was into it. [...]

The audiences who show up to the theater on Valentine’s Day hoping for a feel-good romance may leave a bit traumatized (just like I was when I first read Wuthering Heights in high school), but they’ll also buy into the splendor and pageantry of this movie. And they’ll understand why Elordi and Robbie are two of the most in-demand talents of their generation. I do wish that a Black-led, Black-directed film — or one made by and for people of color — was getting the same over-the-top treatment, star-making potential, and budget, but until we start yelling more about why we aren’t seeing those stories greenlit, funded, and released, we’ll be stuck in our own fantasy. Fennell’s warped, whimsical, white-as-hell fever dream may be a compelling watch, but it’s her imagination come to life. I want to imagine a world in which the weird whims of Black and Brown filmmakers are able to be awakened too. (Kathleen Newman-Bremang)

Great British Life asks Dr Amber Regis, senior lecturer in 19th century literature at the University of Sheffield, what she thinks Emily Brontë would have thought os Wuthering Heights 2026.

‘There is always a strong response to modernised adaptations, but this is a book that was bold and audacious in its time and upset a lot of people, so it is quite fitting Emerald Fennell is doing the same. There is an awful lot of sexual and emotional energy in the source material, so having a film that is filled with the same kind of energy seems fitting to me. I feel Emily would approve and would just let us get on with tearing ourselves apart over it,’ says Dr Amber Regis, senior lecturer in 19th century literature at the University of Sheffield. [...]

Regis was equally engrossed and befuddled when she read Wuthering Heights for the first time at a similar age.

‘My parents loved the Kate Bush song [of the same name], so I thought it was just a love story, but it is a complex novel with all these strange characters who are awful to each other. I’m not sure I knew what to do with it,’ says Regis. [...]

‘There is this notion of a love so powerful it can’t be contained, no border or boundary it can’t cross. A love that will endure everything is very compelling as a fantasy and that is the version we are most comfortable with when we think about Cathy and Heathcliff. But the book also recognises the power of that love can be destructive and mixes in acts of violence that we are less comfortable acknowledging. In the case of Heathcliff, we are told he is an outright domestic abuser, so it will be interesting to see how Emerald Fennell handles the representation of Heathcliff as a love interest and antihero,’ says Regis, whose understanding of Emily, and sisters Charlotte and Anne, has evolved with age.

‘I had an image of them as these passionate, windswept moorland creatures, but I’ve discovered they were radical businesswomen who wanted to upset their readers and the critics and shake up the literary establishment. And I really admire that gumption and that ambition.’

Of the four siblings (there was also troubled brother Branwell), Emily, who died from tuberculosis a year after Wuthering Heights was published, remains the most enigmatic as she left so little behind that allows firsthand insight into her life.

‘If Charlotte is to be believed, it was Emily who wanted to use pseudonyms, to do everything cautiously and protect their privacy. But we know from her artwork and biographical accounts that she had a great love for the moorland around Haworth and Charlotte creates this image of someone who would wither if you took her away from the moorland, that she had to be restored to life by being restored to the moors,’ says Regis.

‘It’s clear the wildness of the natural world inspired much of her poetry and setting in Wuthering Heights,’ says a spokesperson for the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote.

‘Of course we’d recommend the museum first, but if you want to feel as though you’re stepping into the world of Wuthering Heights, get out onto the moors around Haworth. There is the walk to the Brontë waterfall and a ruin of a farmhouse called Top Withens, and the fairy cave at Ponden Kirk is thought to have inspired Penistone Cragg in the novel.’ (Susan Griffin)

Public Books discusses at length 'Emily Brontë in Her Smut Era: The Romance Rebranding of “Wuthering Heights”'.

When Warner Bros. released the poster for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the visual language was unmistakable. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff are locked in a tempestuous, back-arched embrace. Her head is thrown back, and he is gazing down at her upturned mouth. This pose—known colloquially as “the clinch”—is not merely a promotional still, but, also, a genre signal. For decades, this clinch posture visually identified mass-market romance novels known as “bodice rippers” of the 1970s and ’80s: promised readers explicit passion, historical spectacle, and a very specific fantasy of male dominance and female surrender. Cementing this 19th-century gothic novel pivoting into the genre of a commercial “bodice ripper,” the new Wuthering Heights poster is also the cover image for the movie tie-in editions of the novel; Brontë’s text, therefore, is literally wrapped with the visual markers of mass-market erotic romance.

The film’s trailer amplifies this branding, moving beyond the static image to feature anachronistic costuming, febrile scenes of the protagonists licking pink tufted walls, and transforming the mundane task of kneading dough into a sexual metaphor. The trailer declares the film to be “inspired by the greatest love story of all time” and an “epic tale of lust, love, and madness,” before culminating in a dramatic, non-canonical ultimatum: “So kiss me. And let us both be damned.”

Rather than dismissing the film purely as an “inaccurate” adaptation, we can read it as a culturally specific interpretation that filters Brontë’s Victorian text through the lens of contemporary digital desire. In the age of viral BookTok smut and “spice,” Wuthering Heights is being reclaimed as the original “morally gray” romance.2 However, this transformation requires significant aesthetic and narrative renegotiations, specifically regarding race, age, and genre, that threaten to obscure the radical and anti-romantic core of the original text. Even the most “pitch black” dark romances fulfill the promise of a happily ever after for their main characters. This narrative certainty creates a safe container for readers to explore dark themes. Brontë was not writing within these constraints or offering readers such catharsis.

It is simply a mistake to mislabel Wuthering Heights as a romance. To do so ignores the visceral horror that greeted the book’s publication in 1847: critics recoiled from its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” warning that it was a book that should never have been written. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—which satisfies the romantic contract with the famous declaration “Reader, I married him” and the eventual softening of its Byronic hero—Emily Brontë’s text functions as a staunch anti-romance, explicitly devoid of a happily-ever-after or a redemption arc. In the original novel, Heathcliff is not a misunderstood lover, but a domestic tyrant: he hangs his pregnant wife’s dog, physically abuses the younger generation, and exhumes Cathy’s rotting corpse in a frenzy of necrophilic obsession. Meanwhile, Catherine’s “love” is depicted not as desire, but as a grotesque madness, a terminal slide into delirium, pillow-biting, and self-starvation.

The novel charts a descent into hell rather than a path to the altar. And this, ultimately, is what makes its repackaging as a Valentine’s Day date movie so perverse, a cynical distortion of a text where the only union is found in the dirt of a shared grave. (Shawna Lipton) (Read more)

The Telegraph discusses 'Why Gen Z are too dumb to read Wuthering Heights'.

The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.

“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”

Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy. [...]

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.

Have smartphones ruined our ability to read long books?

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. [...]

That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.

O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Brontë has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.

The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing” in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.

There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”

Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.

But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.

While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”

One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.

That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand? (Liam Kelly)

A contributor to CountryLife hated the novel but is looking forward to the movie.

I spent what feels like eight years studying Wuthering Heights.

It probably wasn't eight years; actually, definitely not, because it was one of my set texts for A-level English. It merely felt that long because I hated the entire thing. The characters, the setting, the language... the whole lot.

You might think that means I'm not excited by the prospect of the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, but you'd be wrong.

I've not seen it yet, but by all accounts it does everything it can to take the best ingredients (Sex! Death! Adorable old houses! The Moors!), skate over the boring bits (everything else), and wrap it up in a movie that sounds like a sort of Inglorious Basterds treatment of Emily Brontë. And the best bit? I'll be able to watch the whole trashy mess in a fraction of the time it'd take to read a single chapter of Nelly warbling on about the Earnshaws and the Lintons. (Toby Keel)

El País discusses 'The enduring enigma of the ‘Wuthering Heights’ hero'.

The devoted lover. The toxic narcissist. The sex symbol. The chaste beloved. The perverted necrophile. The Other. The one who lives among us. The proto‑Marxist rebel. The idealistic lunatic. The unscrupulous psychopath. The victim of the powerful. Or perhaps their ultimate executioner. (Ianko López) (Read more)

Big Issue is more specific and examines him as a landlord:

But is Heathcliff the dashing, brooding hero we sometimes want him to be? Beyond the obvious toxicity of his relationship with Cathy and his violence towards almost every person in his life, Brontë’s leading man is first and foremost introduced to us as… a pretty terrible landlord. 

From the very first line, Brontë wants us to know that Heathcliff rents out property (and he’s not well-liked by his tenant, described as “the solitary neighbour I shall be troubled with”). 

Most adaptations ignore the fact that Heathcliff becomes a landlord by focusing on his and Cathy’s story, ending at the novel’s midway point. They miss key messages Brontë sets out, including Heathcliff’s arc from orphan to vengeful landlord. [...]

Sam Hirst, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, explains that Heathcliff “takes this house, gets rid of the inhabitants and then uses it as an Airbnb, essentially”. 

“He’s hiring it for seemingly short periods on temporary leases to southerners coming to Yorkshire,” she adds. “His whole campaign is to dispossess local families, take over their houses and rent them out to southern people. And he lives in one of the houses that he owns.” 

According to Hirst, he “empties the local area of meaning” and “deliberately tries to disrupt the social structure of the area but not just in a positive way”. 

Heathcliff is described as a “cruel, hard landlord to his tenants” by villagers in the novel. Lockwood is attacked by Heathcliff’s dogs and haunted by the ghost of his landlord’s lost love.  

Simon Marsden, an English Literature lecturer at the University of Liverpool, says Heathcliff’s role as a landlord “gives us the chance to see the adult Heathcliff as this figure who is basically completely inhospitable”.  

“He’s almost willing to let Lockwood wander out into a snowy night where he may well not make it home alive. It gives us that sense of mystery about him, but it also allows us to see him as this very inhospitable figure. Maybe the fact that he is introduced as a landlord just makes that stand out more.” 

In a lot of adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the first time we see Heathcliff he is a penniless orphan – a character we pity rather than fear. Ruth-Anne Walbank, a PhD Candidate at the University of Warwick, says that “part of what makes Heathcliff so terrifying in the book is that he returns all the violence and ill-treatment he receives tenfold”. She explains that he takes the source of his abuser’s power, their land and the wealth it brings, and turns it against them. 

“If you’re looking to Wuthering Heights for guidance on how to be a landlord, look elsewhere,” says Walbank. “Heathcliff may not be a good landlord, but he doesn’t face many repercussions for his actions.

“He dies a wealthy man, owning more property and land than any of his predecessors. Then again, he also dies a miserable death, alone and unsatisfied with his decades-long revenge plot. It really makes you question whether his pursuit of landownership and wealth is worth it.” 

Michael Stewart, director of the Brontë Writing Centre and author of Heathcliff-inspired novel Ill Will and Brontë memoir Walking the Invisible, says that Heathcliff’s property ownership comes from a desire for security. 

“There’s this need to be financially solvent – and not just solvent, but richer than anybody else,” says Stewart. 

“He manages to go from nothing – from a homeless child without even a name – to owning two properties. He’s had revenge on all the people he hates. He’s kind of got what he wants, but it doesn’t bring any peace.” 

Property ownership is something that Brontë was probably thinking about a lot when writing Wuthering Heights, Stewart says. The sisters lived with their father Patrick, a priest, in a parsonage and if he died, they would be homeless. Their brother Branwell was an addict and never managed to achieve his ambitions. So, the sisters became driven to find income for themselves. 

Stewart expresses frustration that Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights is another adaptation that stops with the death of Cathy. 

“It completely misrepresents the book, doesn’t it? The whole point is that that’s the midpoint, and it’s about how we can escape the cycle of trauma and how man passes misery onto man, and how that spell can be broken. That’s only really evident if you tell the story with the second half of the book,” Stewart says. [...]

“I’m really wary and generally distressed by representations of Wuthering Heights as a love story. And I think the advertising of this film as ‘the greatest love story ever told’… I don’t really understand how you read the book and get there,” Hirst says. 

“I don’t love presenting it as a romance, but I also think what happens when you present it as a romance is you diminish a lot of the other things going on in the story, including things about class and land ownership and race as well, in my reading.” 

Wuthering Heights is set at a time when Liverpool, where Heathcliff is found, was still actively involved in the slave trade. Brontë implies that Heathcliff has dark skin (which is why Elordi’s casting has been so controversial). And all this is vital to understand Heathcliff as a character – and a landlord. 

“You can look at Heathcliff and say, basically, he is a landlord who isn’t interested in his tenant and Lockwood is basically a source of income to him,” Marsden says. “There’s no sense that he’s looking for any kind of human relationship with his tenant, or that he’s even interested in kind of getting to know him at all. But at the same time, Heathcliff is a product of the social world he has grown up in. Very few people treat anyone differently to that. 

“I’m sometimes asked to talk about the romance plots in the novel and ideas of toxic romance, but whatever relationship you look at in the novel, it’s very hard to find a good example of that. That’s key to how we think about him as landlord. In a lot of ways, he’s not the problem, he’s an expression of the problem.” 

Landlords of today might claim they are the product of the cruel world they are living in too, but maybe they shouldn’t turn to Heathcliff as an example. 

When you watch “Wuthering Heights”, swoon over Elordi’s Heathcliff all you want, but remember that he grows up to be a pretty horrible landlord. 

“And while that’s not entirely his fault, we don’t want to inspire a new batch of Heathcliffs taking over houses for revenge and turning them into Airbnbs. 

So, to all the landlords out there, Hirst says, just ask yourself: “Are you Heathcliffing Cornwall?” (Isabella McRae)

The Guardian shares pictures of the Australian premiere of the film while a contributor comments on some related goings-on down under. NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour has a 27-minute discussion of the film. An USA Today contributor discusses 'Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi and the smutification of ‘Wuthering Heights’'. A contributor to The York Press writes about visiting Cathy's bedroom. BBC has tracked down the provider of the 'giant strawberries' that Margot Robbie is seen eating in the film. BBC has spoken to Charli XCX's collaborator Finn Keane.

Keane's excited for people to see the "visually stunning" film - which he says is "so dark and just so beautiful".

"I hope when people hear the music, and they see it with the story that they feel really moved.

"I also hope they feel it's a different part of Charli's artistry, to see that she can make this kind of music as well as do something as incredible as Brat."

Even if you've only seen the trailer, or clips on TikTok, you'll probably know two things about the film: it's gothic and it's raunchy.

So if you're planning to go and watch it, Keane's got some advice.

"Go see it in the cinema, just don't go with your parents, take a date." (Eleanor Doyle)

A contributor to Who would like to discuss a particular scene from the movie:

Without giving away any spoilers, one of the most shocking turn of events in the movie is when a female character continues to say yes when another character promises to treat her badly.

In no uncertain terms, the character explains they will treat her badly (even abysmally) and she agrees to it.

It’s a huge plot moment, and it was met with laughter during the premiere as we all slowly continued to watch the scene play out.

Even later, when the full force of the promise is fulfilled in a shocking way, the majority of the audience found it humorous – even as I was whispering “No!” under my breath.

It left me questioning something I’m not sure was intended.

At what length will women say yes when the promise of attention is on the table?

Even in this movie, set in a time somewhere between Emily Bronte’s 1800s and modern-day, it seems like the answer is a lot. The scene and the reaction from the audience reiterated it.

I’ve grappled with the decision because, ultimately, the character did consent. But the portrayal of a woman choosing to degrade herself, blindly eager to please, made me squirm.

Not one person has mentioned the scene to me since. (Sophie Coghill)

FilmInk (Australia) has an article on an Australian TV play of Wuthering Heights broadcast in 1959.

This article is a shameless attempt to cash in on the release of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. In light of that, we thought it was time to remind readers that Australia did its own version of the classic Emily Brontë novel years ago – specifically, in 1959 when the ABC filmed it at its Gore Hill Studios in Sydney. [...]

We’ll be upfront – we haven’t seen the 1959 ABC TV film of Wuthering Heights. It’s entirely possible that no copy survives – but we’ve read a lot about it and reproduce what knowledge we’ve ascertained below. [...]

Burke’s production of Wuthering Heights starred deejay Lew Luton as Heathcliff, Delia Williams as Cathy, Annette Andre as Isabella, and Richard Davies as Hindley. It was shot in Sydney and was mostly done live with some prerecorded segments.

Andre recalled in an earlier interview that Luton “was strange but we got on well. I remember my hair was very blonde. I’d had to colour it for a TV drama I’d just done in Melbourne. We rehearsed up in Kings Cross – there were ABC rehearsal rooms up there I believe. Lew and I went off for lunch one day just at the time when the police were looking for a man who was attacking and killing women. Lew looked somewhat like him and also, he apparently had a blonde girlfriend. People would look at us when we were walking together and somehow, we came to the attention of the police, because Lew had to be interviewed. It was rather scary, but it all turned out OK. It did make us a bit nervous though for a while.”

Burke later told Graham Shirley in an oral history for the NFSA that the production was “unfortunately a little too large for the conditions… It had rain effects and a lot of that sort of thing, and the rain machine didn’t work, things went wrong like that. But also, I’m not sure the adaptation was terribly good.”

Floor assistant David Twiby confirmed the live broadcast was problematic. “The opening scene was in winter and featured snow around the outside of the house. Later in the production, they went back to the same exterior and it was summer. During the intervening time, we had to remove all the ‘snow’. Not an easy task as the ‘snow’ was actually small pieces of foam and in a studio with ‘live’ microphones we could not use a vacuum cleaner so a dust pan and broom were the order of the day. Despite all our efforts, when the action returned to the outside of the house in the middle of summer, I noticed a pile of ‘snow’ around the window frame that had gone unnoticed.”

Tom Jeffrey, later director of such films as The Odd Angry Shot, was a floor manager on Wuthering Heights. He recalled in an oral history for the NFSA done by Nigel Giles that “Dickie Davies [who played Hindley] had to get out this door and there was a shot of him on one side of the set of him pulling the handle and the next shot was him coming out the door.  So what happens [laughs], he goes to open the door, and the door handle comes away, you know, in his hand, he can’t get out the door, but the next shot is there, so he looks at the door handle and sticks it back in and gives it a turn. Meanwhile, I’ve got to the bottom of the door, it was up on a raised-like-three-steps-up-thing, I gave the door an almighty whack from the other side hoping that it would open and fortunately it did. But Dickie said with a bit of surprise ‘ooh’ and the door opened and he went out.”

These things happened on live drama from time to time.

Burke did tell Graham Shirley that Wuthering Heights had “a good cast” and was “nicely designed. A very good interesting set. I think Jack Montgomery was the designer. It had a certain atmosphere but it didn’t work totally, I was not happy with it looking back on it. I can’t think what I would have done differently. Maybe it goes with my misgivings about naturalistic drama. I looked vaguely for symbolism in it and you know, lines like her saying ‘I am Heathcliff’ and I thought, you know, rolls of thunder and things and we might get a nice symbolic level of things, but it didn’t. I think it really died with its leg in the air sadly.”

So basically, Alan Burke pushed to film a local version of a foreign script for no good reason other than he liked Wuthering Heights and wasn’t happy with the end result.

Reviewing the production, the TV critic for The Sydney Morning Herald thought that the play was “straightforward enough in its story-telling and sufficiently wide-ranging in its techniques” but “hardly ever caught the necessary brooding Gothic spirit of the time, the place and the situation.” He criticised Lew Luton as being too often “merely surly, when he should have been daemonic, and in general failed to reconcile his desire to work like a twentieth century actor.” Other actors were praised, and Alan Burke’s direction was called “carefully smooth; but there were moments when the spirit of the production was closer to Stella Gibbons [author of Cold Comfort Farm] than to Emily Brontë.”

Vada Marshall, the reviewer for the Sydney Sun Herald thought it was “good TV in every respect… cast, acting, camera work and the smooth interpolation of film clips with the actual studio telecast” adding Delia Williams “played the part of the wayward, tempestuous Cathy to perfection” and said Luton was “excellent… although his make up and hairdo was rather unfortunately reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed cyclist in The Wild One.” She also thought Richard Davies gave “one of the year’s best TV acting jobs.”

“Janus”, the bitchy television reviewer for The Age said that the play was disappointing and “the atmosphere of bleakness and howling winds was not created with realism. Noises off were much too prevalent. The casting was not up to standard… Luton showed a lack of understanding on the part of both actor and producer.”

Neil Hutchison, head of drama at the ABC, called it “a rather uneven production… there were some good things about it, but Heathcliffe as played by Lou Luton was a very pale reflection of what Miss Brontë intended.”

So, basically, reviews were mixed although everyone tipped a bucket on poor old Lew Luton. We’d still love to have seen the production – we’re big fans of Annette Andre and also Delia Williams, who livened up many an early Australian TV drama such as Hamlet and Whiplash. Incidentally, Lew Luton appeared in a few other Australian dramas (including some Whiplash episodes and Alan Seymour’s The Runner) as well as hosting Teen Time and reading the news, then moved to England in 1961, worked there for ten years (sometimes on Australian set TV plays like No Decision and Harp in the South, but also a long stint in the soap Crossroads), returned in 1972 and appeared in various things prior to his death in 2018.

Alan Burke later said that the ratings for Wuthering Heights were tiny but we researched this and discovered that they were weirdly high – a 24% share in Sydney. In Melbourne, it was 14% share, which was more normal for an ABC play. Maybe Sydney was full of Lew Luton fans, who knows.

So, basically the ABC did Wuthering Heights and everyone gave Lew Luton a hard time about it. Jacob Elordi, if you’re reading this, remember that you’re not just walking in the footsteps of Laurence Olivier, Richard Buton, Richard Todd and Cliff Richard, you have to live up to Lew Luton. (Stephen Vagg)

On Airmail, Graham Watson writes about 'The Making of Charlotte Brontë'.

I went back to the origins. I examined Brontë’s and Gaskell’s manuscripts, letters, and papers held in archives all over the world. I read the Victorian newspapers and every book written about the Brontës from 1857 to 1920. Speculation ceded to verifiable data, and a picture emerged that was different from the one history had handed down to us. Gaskell, rather than a gullible propagandist, was a diligent researcher who was unfairly caught in a narrative spun to discredit her and her defense of Charlotte.

During the summer of 1857, the scandal over Gaskell’s book spread details of Charlotte Brontë’s life and death through British and American newspapers. Readers, primed by Jane Eyre, now wept over the suffering heroine Gaskell depicted Charlotte to be. By the end of the year, Charlotte Brontë, the woman, had been replaced by an alternate: a cultural figure who represented, for many readers, wider truths about resilience, suffering, creativity, and passion. In an English magazine published in the winter of 1857, one commentator described reports of her ghost on the moorland, hair undulating in the wind and eyes blazing.

Charlotte Brontë, the myth, had been born.

Mental Floss lists '7 of the Most Scandalous Romantic Plot Twists in Classic Literature' including

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë’s breathtaking classic Jane Eyre sets the stage and then, well before the story is two-thirds over, pulls the rug out from under you. All seems to be going well so far: Jane, a naïve but fiercely intelligent young woman, has escaped her domineering aunt to work as the live-in governess at the grand mansion of the dashing Mr. Rochester, with whom she quickly falls in love. Before long, the couple is betrothed, and with Volume II of the story fast coming to an end, there’s at long last a wedding on the horizon. Let’s just hope no one at the wedding is harboring a terrible secret that could derail the rest of the book, then… (Paul Anthony Jones)

Early Bird Books recommends '8 Haunting Books for Wuthering Heights Fans' such as

Jane Eyre

By Charlotte Bronte

If you loved Wuthering Heights, you’ll surely enjoy a classic by another of the Brontë sisters—Jane Eyre. 

It follows the heroine through her coming of age years and well into adulthood—pining for the brooding Mr. Rochester, who lords over Thornfield Hall and, like Heathcliff, makes for an alluring Byronic hero. 

And like Wuthering Heights, it tactfully examines issues of class and morality, making for a thoroughly enticing read. (Archita Mittra)

Travelhost recommends the 'top places to see in Yorkshire' 'for anyone newly obsessed with Wuthering Heights'. El mundo (Spain) has a travel guide to the area too. Coincidentally, The Telegraph and Argus reports that 'Wuthering Heights boosts Yorkshire staycation interest'. Also on BBC: 'Wuthering Heights expected to bring tourism boom'. Daily Mail says the same but in Daily Mail language: 'Wuthering Heights-obsessed TikTokers flock to Bronte country to see the real-life inspiration for Margot Robbie's movie'. The Hindu recommends a trip to the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Sweety High shares '29 Classic Captions From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Use as Photo Captions'. El Diario (Spain) has an article on Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights. Actualidad Literatura (Spain) looks at the controversy surrounding the film. A contributor to The Stute has read the novel 'In preparation for Wuthering Heights'. Tatler Asia reocmmends '7 must-watch ‘Wuthering Heights’ adaptations'.

Finally, Consequence of Sound, Billboard and others announce that Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album is already available for streaming.