Wuthering Heights: evergreen bestseller

The Guardian reports that 'Sales of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights skyrocket ahead of film adaptation', which is something the naysayers always struggle with.

Sales of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, as anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s bold and highly anticipated film adaptation, figures from Penguin Classics UK show.

In January of this year, 10,670 copies were sold, compared with 1,875 in January 2025, in what Penguin has described as an unusually large boost.

Sales of the book increased by 132% after the release of the first teaser trailer for the film last September. Between the trailer’s release and the end of the year, Penguin sold 28,257 copies in the UK, compared with 12,134 over the same period in 2024.

Jess Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics, said: “I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book. Wuthering Heights is one of our evergreen bestsellers, but I do think the film is coming out at the perfect moment.

“There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories,” Harrison added. “We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged – an extreme book for extreme times.” [...]

“I don’t think an adaptation needs to be completely faithful to the book: many of the best ones – like Clueless riffing on [Jane Austen’s] Emma – aren’t,” Harrison said. “But what you hope for is that an adaptation will capture the spirit of the original. With Wuthering Heights, it’s the extreme intensity of emotion that matters the most.” (Emma Loffhagen)

That's what people should bear in mind before penning a letter to the Brontë Society outraged at how they can 'allow' a film like Emerald Fennell's to be made (all before having even seen it, too) or leaving comments on social media calling for it to be boycotted. This is how the Brontë legacy is kept alive. No point in keeping a story immaculately preserved if no one reads it anymore.

Similarly, a contributor to The Yorkshire Post is 'excited that a new generation might come to love Wuthering Heights like I did'.

My copy of the book was cheap and flimsy because I preferred spending my hard earned wages from my Saturday job at Topshop on booze. Most importantly, my heart had just been broken for the very first time.

It was, of course, the end of the world, in the way that being dumped at 17 has been the end of the world for millions of teenagers since time immemorial. And in between angsty phone calls to friends and cryptic MSN status updates (if you don’t know what MSN was, it was a noughties cross between Facebook and WhatsApp), I found Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

If you haven’t read it, you might be dimly aware of the two main characters, Cathy and Heathcliff. The pair - raised together in the crumbling hall, Wuthering Heights - have a mutual obsession with each other which destroys both their happiness and that of many around them.

Aged 17, their doomed romance seemed to me to be the height of what it meant to be a human. What was the point in life if I couldn’t be loved in an all-possessing way, like Heathcliff loved Cathy?

When - and I must warn here, despite the book being published while Queen Victoria was on the throne, I’m about to spoil a plot point - Cathy dies, Heathcliff moans in agony. “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I genuinely fantasised about having that quote tattooed on my ankle. Thank god my frontal lobe cortex developed in time to talk myself out of it.

From the vantage point of a 17-year-old girl, it was like Emily Bronte had reached her hand through the book to take mine, just as Cathy’s smashes through the windows of Wuthering Heights.

I’m not 17 any more, but I still love Wuthering Heights. It is a wild book, in every sense of the word. Far from being a conventional romance, the plot veers from passionate obsession to vengeance. Like the boxed in narrative of the book, it’s complicated. I love it because on every re-read, it takes me back to being that girl, one I remember so fondly even though my age has doubled.

But I also love it now because it’s not the uncomplicated love story that it was to me at 17. Now it’s a dizzying exploration of revenge, ownership, anger, servitude, landscape. There’s love, yes, but it’s also a book about hatred.

It’s an imperfect book - not nearly as ‘neat’ from a plotting perspective as Jane Eyre, written, of course, by the older Bronte sister Charlotte. I like to imagine that Emily wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but that her pen wrote what she needed it to write in a kind of fever dream.

And now it’s set to capture new fans via the film adaptation released later this month. So far, I’m nervous. Director Emerald Fenell’s last film, Saltburn, was perverse and gothic and frankly bonkers, so I think she’ll capture the spirit of the book well. The landscapes are set to be stunning, with filming having taken place across the Yorkshire Dales. I’m also excited for the soundtrack, masterminded by Charli xcx. If ever a book fits her vibe of insouciance mixed with glamour, it’s Wuthering Heights. Cathy Earnshaw is, in my eyes, the original ‘brat.

But, famously, adaptations of Wuthering Heights are so hard to get right (though, for my money, Emma Rice’s stage production at York Theatre Royal a few years ago came as close as it gets). It’s too complicated, there’s a death every five pages, and half the characters have virtually identical names. And I feel very rude in saying this, but given I’m the same age as Margot Robbie, who stars in the film, I hope it’s forgivable to point out that she’s almost 20 years older than Cathy’s character in the book, and that matters. Lovestruck teenagers do and say awful things in ways we can forgive, in a way that we can’t of those in their mid-thirties. I should know.

But for all my reservations, I’m excited that a new generation might come, via the film, to the book. That they will choose to inhabit Emily’s strange, twisted world. That she will, like she did for me, reach out from 1847 and grab their hands to give them permission to be wild, and passionate, and angry. That maybe, like I’ve done so many times since, they’ll decide to visit Haworth to see for themselves the landscape that inspired such a poetic tale.

I don’t think I could have loved Wuthering Heights half so much now if I hadn’t read it for the first time then, and I’m so jealous of anyone who gets to experience it for their first time. The best literature not only reflects the way we think, it shows a mirror up to the way we feel. And if any of its new readers come to it heartbroken by the ends of their first loves, as I did all those years ago, so much the better. (Victoria Finan)

We are lucky today too as we have another article by a big name. Lucasta Miller writes about 'The mystery of Heathcliff’s race in Wuthering Heights' ('Is Jacob Elordi too white? Would Emily Brontë care?') for The New Statesman.

Emily Brontë’s genius was not for self-promotion. She hid her true identity under a pseudonym and agreed to pay £50 – more than the annual salary of a governess at the time – to get Wuthering Heights published in 1847. In contrast, the pre-publicity for Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation, due for release on Valentine’s Day, has reached carnivalesque levels rare even in Hollywood. Few have so far seen it. But the trailer alone has already generated a babel of online response. Critiques have ranged from objections to anachronistic costumes – Margot Robbie in what looks like an Eighties wedding dress – to complaints that Jacob Elordi is “too white” to play Heathcliff. The film has been compared unfavourably to Andrea Arnold’s gritty, arthouse adaptation of 2011, which cast a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff.

But who really is Heathcliff? Emily Brontë’s original text does indeed make it clear that his racial identity is supposed to be different from that of the Yorkshire-born characters. Picked up as a foundling on the streets of Liverpool, he’s brought to Wuthering Heights by old Mr Earnshaw, who tells his family to “take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark as the devil” in a seeming allusion to the child’s skin colour. That neuter pronoun “it” suggests that Heathcliff is already being othered at the moment of his adoption. 

And yet no one in the novel ever discovers his origins. Edgar Linton thinks he might be either a “Lascar” – a term usually applied at the time to seamen from the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia – or “an American or Spanish castaway”. Perhaps, proposes the housekeeper Nelly Dean, his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. Elsewhere, he is described as “a dark-skinned gipsy”; and yet in one scene his face is depicted as being “as white as the wall behind him”. 

Andrea Arnold’s film recast Heathcliff as a survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, for which Liverpool was indeed a hub in the 18th century period in which the novel, though written in the 1840s, is set. She turned that imagined backstory into an eloquent portrayal of cycles of abuse. Yet there’s nothing in the text to suggest Heathcliff is black African. On the contrary, Nelly Dean specifically implies that he is not, when she tells him (with a casual racism that will make the modern reader flinch) that “a good heart will help you to a bonny face” even “if you were a regular black”. 

The success of Arnold’s film comes not from its slavish “respect” for the text but from its openness to treating it as an imaginative springboard. Over the years, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for stage and screen countless times, with spin-offs ranging from a now lost silent film to the unlikely Cliff Richard vehicle, Heathcliff: the Musical. And yet the truth about the original book is that much of what makes it a literary masterpiece is unfilmable. It’s an inscrutable text, probably intentionally so, that baffled critics when it first came out and continues to baffle scholars, not least because so few personal writings by Emily Brontë survive to explain what she intended, though the book itself hints at its literary context.

That Heathcliff’s race and origins are left purposely ambiguous reflects the destabilising techniques, clearly drawn from the gothic tradition, on which the novel relies for its uncanny effects. Another is the frame narrative: the way it’s told as a tale within a tale, sometimes within another tale. We’re held at a strange distance, while paradoxically, the vivid descriptive writing makes us feel as though we’re only inches from the action.

This is a tale of the supernatural – it’s a ghost story after all – couched in the language of naturalism. Domestic interiors offer themselves up with all the detailed solidness of their oak furniture. But even the realism over-reaches itself in the novel’s famous scenes of physical violence, which are so graphic as to teeter – perhaps intentionally – on the Tarentinoesque edge of parody. If you realistically filmed a grown man forcibly rubbing a child’s wrist to and fro over a broken windowpane until the blood ran down, it would be unwatchable.

Wuthering Heights remains a completely uncategorisable novel, whose unique voice can’t be assimilated to the norms of Victorian fiction. And yet both it and Heathcliff do have literary forebears. Behind his character lies the Byronic anti-hero “linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes”, to quote Byron’s own Corsair.

If the constancy of Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is his “one virtue”, it comes with overtones of sibling incest as the two have been brought up together as brother and sister. That too channels Lord Byron, refracting the transgressive love at the heart of his gothic tragedy Manfred, and also his notorious real-life affair with his own half-sister. Even the famous scene in which Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly that it would degrade her to marry him echoes a similar scene in Thomas Moore’s 1830 Life of Byron (a copy of which the Brontës owned) in which the teenage future poet overhears his first love tell her maid that she could never care for that “lame boy”. 

If Emily Brontë took these Byronic hints, she transmogrified them into something that was – and still feels – totally new and strange. Popular culture has since conventionalised Wuthering Heights into the archetypal world’s “greatest love story”, but it is far from that. No film version so far has fully represented the extent to which Heathcliff becomes a manipulative psychopath. And, despite the Byronic connections, one of the oddest things about the novel is the almost complete lack of sex. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s works, which pulsate with frustrated sensual desire, it is often physical but never erotic.

Early reports have, in contrast, called Emerald Fennell’s version “a whole other level of hot”. Judging from the trailer, its sexy, operatic production values and pounding soundtrack couldn’t be more different from Andrea Arnold’s downbeat version, which was filmed without music or make-up and seemingly with a handheld camera. I admired Arnold’s take, but I’m looking forward to Fennell’s. I’ll be judging it not on literal fidelity to the text – which is impossible – but on whether it creates its own convincing world.

I’d also like – perhaps mischievously – to refer the Instagram costume cavillers to Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights, in which the young Cathy returns from Thrushcross Grange newly and smartly dressed. According to the timeline of the book, it is 1777. However, her outfit is the obviously early Victorian combo of tartan and pantaloons: a “plaid silk frock” with “white trousers”. Emily Brontë wouldn’t have cared about fashion anachronism. But she would have been amazed to discover how many people care about Wuthering Heights.

Please make this article compulsory reading for every X-pert.

Mental Floss lists 'Everything 'Wuthering Heights' Says About Heathcliff's Race'.

Coincidentally, a contributor to BBC writes about how ''The hostility has been relentless'.

Ever since it was announced, Emerald Fennell's version of the torrid Brontë classic has been the subject of furious online discourse over everything from its casting to its costumes.

The most controversial film of the year? Usually that accolade is reserved for an edgy political thriller or a taboo-busting horror movie. But the film that is currently prompting the most "discourse" – to use a polite term for it – is an adaptation of a 19th-Century novel. Ever since Emerald Fennell declared that she was following Promising Young Woman and Saltburn with her own take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, commentators have not been short of opinions – mostly negative ones.

"Fennell has channelled her creative instincts into a disturbing exercise in pointless destruction," wrote Lara Brown in The Spectator – and that was five months before the film's release date next week.

Everything about the film has been pilloried, from its casting to its costumes, from the actors' accents to the inverted commas around the title: it's "Wuthering Heights", not Wuthering Heights, to emphasise that this is Fennell's own interpretation of the book, rather than the book itself. The hostility has been relentless. But could the reasons for this hostility go beyond some scepticism about a dodgy-looking period drama? [...]

But these quibbles raise some big questions, the first one being: So what? Why shouldn't Fennell come up with her own out-there, sexed-up version of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in 1990s California, and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet can do the same with Shakespeare, why should we be fussing about dress design?

There are two obvious answers, one of them suggested by the fact that, in the trailer, Robbie's Cathy sounded posher than any screen character since, well, the toffs in Saltburn.

Fennell's last film, Saltburn, was set in a stately home, and one of the best things about it was that the writer-director seemed to know her upper-class characters intimately. There is no mystery as to how she managed it: as the daughter of celebrated jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To quote Patrick Sproull in Dazed, "Not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting." In short, Fennell is posh. Indeed, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now better known as Queen Camilla – she didn't have to sound any grander than she does in ordinary life.

This hasn't endeared her to everyone. As popular as Saltburn was, some reviews argued that it was too forgiving of its posh characters because Fennell was so posh herself. "It's a satire that never bares its claws, never lifts a finger to criticise these people," said Sproull. Other people have grumbled that Fennell's connections and advantages gave her directing career an unfair head start. This meant that many commentators were primed to dislike "Wuthering Heights" from the very beginning. The antipathy had as much to do with their feelings about Fennell as their feelings about the film.

But the main reason behind all the rancour is this: people who love Brontë's novel really love Brontë's novel. They're not just fond of it, they're fixated on it. As Hephzibah Anderson wrote in a BBC article, "Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we're wildly impressionable." Many of the book's fans go on to view it as part of their identity – and, for that matter, as part of their love lives. "I remain convinced that the precedent for chasing toxic love stories was one set out for me as a teenager, by Heathcliff," confessed Olivia Petter in British Vogue. And she's not alone. Considering how devoted the novel's aficionados are, it was inevitable that any film which diverged from the text would be taken by some as a personal attack.

The irony is that Fennell professes to adore the book as much as anyone. At the Brontë Women's Writing Festival last September, she said that she had been "obsessed" and "driven mad" by Wuthering Heights since she read it as a 14-year-old. "I know that if somebody else made [the film], I'd be furious."

She's probably not too worried, then, that other people are furious about her. In fact, she may be quite pleased. Every time new information about the film emerges, there are thousands of impassioned words written about it, and while they aren't all flattering, they have undoubtedly helped to raise awareness and build anticipation.

Could "Wuthering Heights" really be as over-the-top as the trailers suggest, we asked. Could it be so-bad-it's-good? Or could it even be… good? Certainly, social media reactions from an early screening have been strong, with one film writer even moved to declare it a "god-tier new classic".

"I personally cannot wait to watch Fennell's Wuthering Heights," wrote Olivia Petter in Vogue. "I'll admit, as a dedicated fan of the book, I was sceptical at first. But now, I no longer care about accuracy."

The old saying about there being no such thing as bad publicity has never been more true. (Nicholas Barber)

Just let us question whether people actually love the novel or, rather, they love the idea of themselves as crusaders for the 'love' of a book.

Many sites are still commenting the fact (not actually factually in many cases) that Margot Robbie wore a replica of Charlotte Brontë's bracelet to the London premiere of the film, so it's a good time to quote the press release by the Brontë Society:

Last night at the London premiere of “Wuthering Heights” Oscar-nominated actress and producer Margot Robbie walked the red carpet in Leicester Square wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu inspired by a bracelet that belonged to Charlotte Brontë.

The intricate, delicate bracelet features hair from two people, believed to be her sisters, Emily and Anne. During the Victorian era hair jewellery was fashionable and widely worn and it was common practice to make mourning jewellery incorporating the hair of a deceased relative. The bracelet is made of a wide band of braided hair with a gold clasp set with garnets and has been owned by the Museum since 1923.

The original bracelet is currently on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum alongside other examples of mourning jewellery.

Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum said: “The museum holds the world’s largest collections of Brontë manuscripts, clothing and personal possessions and we take our responsibility as custodians extremely seriously.

“This event has offered us an unprecedented opportunity to share an item from our collection and tell its story with a global and contemporary audience, and we are thrilled that, thanks to director Emerald Fennell, Margot Robbie and everyone involved with the film, Emily Brontë and her masterpiece continue to be part of popular culture almost 200 years after her death.”

Rebecca continued: “We were delighted to work in partnership with Wyedean Weaving, based in Haworth, to create a faithful and high quality replica bracelet which Margot Robbie wore on the red carpet, and to facilitate visits from Dilara’s team to view the original bracelet.”

Wyedean Weaving has shared a lovely reel of the making of on its instagram account. An article in The Yorkshire Post also features the creative process.

A contributor to Veranda writes about 'the Hauntingly Beautiful Filming Locations in the New Wuthering Heights Movie'

I’m here to see it for myself. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve long dreamed of making, and I begin in York, the city where Emily Brontë’s sisters, Charlotte and Anne, rested overnight en route to seeking a sea cure for the tuberculosis that would eventually take Anne’s life (a small plaque marks the site of the long since demolished inn on Coney Street). Then I travel to the village of Haworth, where the Brontës spent the majority of their too-short lives.

“People have a very strong idea of the landscape when they think of the Brontës,” says Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “They conjure up images of wild, rugged moorland scenery, and of course, that applies mainly to Wuthering Heights.”

She’s exactly right about these romantic notions, I think, as I explore the rooms where these writers lived—the small couch upon which Emily died, the narrow windows from which the sisters saw their world, the tiny books they created in childhood with handwriting so minuscule a magnifying glass is needed to read the words. I’m among those who have romanticized the world of the Brontës, as though I’ve created my own movie version of their landscape in my head.

Certainly, Emerald Fennell must have been aware of how strongly readers like me feel about the world of the Brontës when she set out to make her film. I learn that to find the ideal locations, her team tapped Aurelia Thomas, a veteran of British film and television, to be the supervising location manager of Wuthering Heights.

“It was very much the thing from the outset, how important the landscape was to this film,” Thomas tells me. “So much of the story, and how Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so doomed and bleak in a lot of ways, comes from the setting and this feeling of desolation. The landscapes they walk in almost have a personality of their own. So it was a very important thing to find and to get right.”

Thomas and her team scoured the peat and heather moors of Yorkshire, looking specifically for open, wild land far off the beaten path (and often far from road accessibility). They deliberately sought filming locations that had not been used in previous adaptations of the story, instead spending months searching for places that would, as Thomas says, “feel different and epic.” They passed on anything too flat or too close to a village road, or anything that felt too idyllic or pretty.

Interestingly, this meant refraining from filming in Haworth itself, the village where Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights and the landscape where she would have freely roamed. Dinsdale notes that while Haworth has become “this rather haunting, kind of romantic place” nowadays, the Haworth of the Brontës’ time wasn’t entirely remote or untouched. Rather, it was an industrious, albeit very small, village.

The parsonage where the sisters lived and penned their works was perched at the edge of the moors and the edge of the village, straddled between two worlds. I feel that intensely. The front door of the parsonage looks out onto the graveyard, with enormous, moss-covered tombstones. The back looks out onto the edge of the moor. It’s haunting and eerily beautiful, yet also quite popular, both with tourists and those walking the many paths leading from the village into the countryside.

Instead, Fennell’s crew turned to remote stretches of moorland, specifically Booze Moor and Reeth Moor in North Yorkshire and Bridestones Moor in West Yorkshire, as well as Arkengarthdale Moor and Reeth Estate, two vast expanses of land. The result is a scene that feels otherworldly, epic, and wildly dramatic.

Yet it also feels somehow within reach. “The goings-on in Wuthering Heights are so Gothic and over the top. But the action isn’t happening in a castle in Transylvania—it’s in a Yorkshire farmhouse,” Dinsdale says. The places they filmed feel like real places, because they are. They are places of wildness that I can step into, landscapes I can inhabit.

The great 20th-century literary critic and author Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the moors provide the isolation, the loneliness, and the removal that are essential to [Wuthering Heights].” I’d argue they also provide the central spirit of the story. The eternally restless and wounded feelings aren’t just emotions that Brontë wrote about in her novel or that Fennell depicts in her film. (Madeline Weinfield)

The Yorkshire Post has an article on 'How Yorkshire remains the star of this Hollywood blockbuster'.

The Brontes lived in the Haworth Parsonage - eight miles west of Bradford - from 1820 and remained there until the death of the last surviving family member, Patrick Brontë, in 1861.

Located on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, their life at the Parsonage had a profound impact on their literary works, particularly felt by Emily Brontë.

Charlotte Brontë wrote, “My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was – liberty.”

Emily Brontë was inspired by the real-life locations she would regularly come across whilst walking across the “wily, windy moors.”

For example, located just under three miles from Haworth Parsonage, the abandoned farmhouse, Top Withens, has a strong connection with the novel and is a popular pilgrimage site for literary tourists.

It has been associated with the inspiration for the Earnshaw home, but that has never been confirmed or verified. A commemorative plaque on the farmhouse states: “The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.”

Written almost 180 years ago, Wuthering Heights has become an enduring figure in the pop culture zeitgeist with over 15 movie adaptations, many stage productions and a timeless music video from Kate Bush keeping the legacy of the novel alive and kicking.

Over the years, film productions have realised that one of the best ways to capture the mood and atmosphere which made Brontë’s novel so effective is to retrace the author’s footsteps and film in Yorkshire.

The first adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was directed by A.V. Bramble and filmed in Haworth in 1920. However, the silent movie was considered lost for many years, leading to an appeal by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2005 to trace the film.

Speaking with the BBC, the librarian at the time, Ann Dinsdale said: "The film's makers went to a lot of trouble to ensure the accuracy of the film, shooting it on location.”

Like many filmmakers before her, Emerald Fennell also saw the value of filming parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in its original setting. It was a big task and “huge responsibility” to bring her vision of Bronte’s novel to life and one she described as “an act of extreme masochism.”

Speaking at the Brontë Women's Writing Festival in Haworth, Fennell said: “It's a huge responsibility because I know that if somebody else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think."

She added: “It has also felt like an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. I've actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.”

To capture the “misty and cold” atmosphere of the novel, Emerald Fennell shot her movie across various locations in Yorkshire, including Swaledale. Whilst in the North Yorkshire valley, filming took place at the ruins of the Old Gang Lead Mines, the Grade II listed Surrender Bridge and Melbecks Moor.

The cast and crew also spent time in Arkengarthdale as they filmed on Booze Moor and in Langthwaite Village.

Shazad Latif, who plays Edgar Linton in the upcoming adaptation, told the Yorkshire Post about his experiences filming in these dramatic locations.

“The set design created by Suzie Davies for the houses was unbelievable. Obviously, the moors were amazing. You can feel the echo of Cathy and Heathcliff’s spirit up there,” said Latif. “It’s a stunning place to be and it evokes the spirit of the story that’s been there for 200 years. And it’s bloody windy!”

Providing solace from the long and tiring days filming on the Moors, the cast and crew stayed at Simonstone Hall Hotel - a stately home renovated into an upscale hotel in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The cast also spent time in local pubs after they finished filming and were seen in The Punch Bowl Inn (Low Row), The CB Inn (Arkengarthdale) and Green Dragon Inn (Hardraw.)

“I didn’t have much filming to do [in Yorkshire], so I got to sit in the pub and wait for Jacob and Margot with Alison [Oliver] and Hong [Chau.] We would have drinks and play pool. It was great being stuck in there together. There were peacocks running about and a waterfall where they filmed Robin Hood: 'Prince of Thieves', five minutes across the farm, so it was just an amazing setting to be in.”

Over the years, literary tourism has drawn people from all over the world to Yorkshire as they get the opportunity to explore the natural beauty and unique charm of the region. As Wuthering Heights is released in cinemas across the country, there will inevitably be a renewed interest in the beauty and mystery of the Yorkshire Moors, with people hoping to retrace the steps of Emily Brontë, Catherine and Heathcliffe [sic]. (Adam Davidson)

The Times has an article on Emerald Fennell.

Emerald Fennell isn’t mucking about with Wuthering Heights. “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” roars the trailer for her new film, blasting us with sodden shirts and brutally tight corsets, bloody sunsets and Versailles-worthy interiors. Margot Robbie’s Cathy strides across a moor in a windswept wedding dress and Jacob Elordi’s ripped Heathcliff licks a wall and growls, “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”

Damn Emily Brontë too because in the hands of Fennell, the writer-director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this is period drama at its most transgressive and maximalist. [...]

Timid this ain’t, and it all starts with Fennell. Richard E Grant, whom the director cast as a haughty aristo in Saltburn, salutes her “fearless, jet-black sense of humour and baroque aesthetic”. Wuthering Heights, he says, is another “story of an outsider wreaking havoc on a hermetically sealed world — class, sexual obsession, doomed romance. I anticipate that her vision will be the polar opposite of polite.”

“I like a physical response… and there’s nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights,” Fennell said on the Ruthie’s Table podcast this week. Brontë’s doomed and, yes, kinky romance is “extremely sexy… It makes you cry, it makes you recoil… It makes you question yourself.” Adapting it has been no moorland picnic. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last year. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism [in it]. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published in 1847]. But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back.”

If anyone can pull it off it’s Fennell, 40, whose career has been powered by audaciousness, imagination and the marble-chiselled self-belief of the posh. The woman with a name like a Farrow & Ball paint shade started as an actress but moved with impressive briskness from playing Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and an Emmy-nominated turn as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown to directing darkly glamorous, divisive movies. “In our culture now we get the brakes being put on creatively… We’re afraid of embarrassment,” she told Ruthie’s Table. “I don’t mind being embarrassing.” [...]

Film, though, is her main event and there she owes a debt to her star Robbie — Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were produced by LuckyChap, a company the Australian actress co-founded that specialises in female-focused projects. Wuthering Heights is the first time Fennell has directed her de facto boss, and some have cocked eyebrows at Robbie, 35, playing a character who is a teenager in the book. Fennell shrugged that off, describing Robbie as “the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind.”

She has also drawn flak for casting Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”. That was also smoothly batted away. “You can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell told The Hollywood Reporter. ““There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” She cast Elordi after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day. “He “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. (Ed Potton)

Daily Mail also has an article about her.

People comments on Margot Robbie's appearance on last night's The Graham Norton Show where she said:

“I wasn’t always going to be in it. I was thrilled to be the producer, but at some point, we were talking about Cathy, and I decided to throw my hat into the ring,” [...]

Robbie continued, “I’ve always wanted to be one of Emerald’s actors and fortunately, she felt the same way. It worked out wonderfully.” [...]

“In my opinion, it is one of the greatest love stories of all time and it has a great cast and incredible actors. It’s a great film,” she added. (Latoya Gayle)

Marie Claire looks into ' What Wuthering Heights and the Corset Revival Say About Fashion and Female Agency' while Stylist also discusses why 'Dark Regency is the latest fashion trend'. There are many, many more fashion articles but let us overlook them as this is not really the place for them.

Vogue has an article on 'The Best Wuthering Heights Adaptations Are All About Creative Ways to Haunt Your Ex'.

Since its publication in 1847, the great, canonical novel Wuthering Heights has inspired more than 35 film and television productions, beginning with a silent movie in 1920 and growing louder and louder over the course of a century until reaching its 2026 Emerald Fennell–directed crescendo.

In this succession of adaptations, each filmmaker has gradually softened the original form—a dark and twisted story of obsession, generational trauma, and self-destruction—into something that more closely resembles a wild, cinematic love story. These adaptations, more often than not, have given credence to the saying, “Those who don’t create, destroy”—a saying that is also, ironically, the story of Heathcliff. Though Hollywood has continuously sought to portray him onscreen as a sexy, tormented, romantic hero, Heathcliff is really more like an awful boyfriend with a personality disorder who destroys the hearts and lives of innocents.

It is a testament to our culture’s tendency to confuse toxicity with the heights of romance that when we read Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, we yearn to be loved so intensely that it might actually kill us. It’s a fantasy—and, moreover, a misunderstanding—that many of us take years to unlearn: In fact, love is not measured in units of suffering. [...]

6. Wuthering Heights (1939), directed by William Wyler

This film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, is debatably the most romanticized adaptation. It also only covers the first half of the novel, which is the half where none of the haunting takes place.

5. Wuthering Heights (1998), BBC Television adaptation

Directed by David Skynner, this adaptation may be the most faithful to the novel, although the logline feels like it should really be “a legitimately crazy man takes revenge on a nice guy who did nothing wrong besides care for the woman the crazy man claims to love.” Heathcliff acts like a whiny little baby throughout this film, constantly throwing tantrums, running away, and slamming doors. Simply put, he’s insufferable. And I’ve definitely dated him. Fortunately, Cathy does an amazing job of haunting him later, appearing as a literal ghost he can see on the moors and as a little girl in constant flashbacks.

4. Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” music video (Version 1)

In the infamous music video for the verified ’80s banger “Wuthering Heights,” camp and pop culture icon Kate Bush whirls her arms around in a white dress, repeating Cathy’s desperate cry to “let me into your window” over and over and over, her huge eyes staring into the camera. (I don’t think she blinks even once.)

She translates the gnawing, pining feeling in the novel, setting it to music that repeatedly crescendos, reaching a slightly higher pitch every time—which is sort of how it feels to be in a toxic relationship. Every time I hear it, it gets stuck in my head for at least three days. Come to think of it, becoming a musician might be the ultimate haunting tactic.

3. Wuthering Heights (2012), directed by Andrea Arnold

A raw and devastating adaptation—easily my favorite one to date. Arnold’s Heathcliff is much more fully developed as a character, in part due to the more restrained performances and Arnold’s highly sensory style. But the filmmaker also incorporates one of the driving struggles of the original Heathcliff that every other adaptation cuts out: i.e., the racism he faces. By not whitewashing the narrative, Arnold allows for greater pathos to emerge from Heathcliff and Cathy’s entangled backstories.

The movie ends almost immediately after Cathy (played by none other than Effy from Skins) dies, so the posthumous haunting is limited, but bonus points for Heathcliff being rendered as a real human rather than a cartoonish villain or heartthrob, which contributes to the melancholy atmosphere of the film that personally haunted me for days after.

2. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992), directed by Peter Kosminsky

Sure, Heathcliff (played by Ralph Fiennes) is seen giving Cathy (Juliette Binoche) a piece of paper on which he’s written down every day she has spent with the Lintons versus with him, and that’s super toxic, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is that Cathy haunts the shit out of him in the second half of the movie. With Peter Kosminsky using the same actress to play Cathy’s daughter (also named Catherine) after she dies, Heathcliff is forced to lay eyes upon her exact face day after day. Unfortunately, this method of haunting does require you to get pregnant and have a lookalike daughter that lives with your toxic ex while you roam around the moors screaming and disturbing everyone. While that is clearly not advisable, I do admire the commitment.

1. Wuthering Heights (2009), ITV miniseries

This two-episode miniseries stars Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, but you may find yourself getting confused by who Tom Hardy is playing and what movie you’re watching, given he looks nearly identical to both Professor Snape and Edward Scissorhands. The brooding is so over the top you can’t help but laugh every time he slowly appears from behind a pillar. But Cathy (Charlotte Riley) running out of her home, pregnant, in the pouring rain to search for her childhood crush felt relatable. And Cathy and Heathcliff’s chemistry is actually amazing—which makes sense, as the two actors who played them later got married.

Best haunting moment: When Heathcliff brings Isabella Linton home and tells her she has to sleep in a separate bedroom. This is because Heathcliff must sleep in his ex’s childhood bedroom, alone, next to a drawing of her. This is ideally how haunted I want my ex to be when he brings home a new girl for the first time. (Cazzie David)

Buzzfeed has a quiz where you can 'Choose Your Gothic Aesthetic To Reveal Your "Wuthering Heights" Sensory Landscape'.

Eleanor Houghton's much-awaited book Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes was published this week among all the Wuthering Heights furore but The Telegraph and Argus features it:

In the almost two centuries since the Yorkshire sisters wrote their passionate and brave novels, the light of Brontë mania has barely dimmed.

It’s shining brightly with anticipation now with Emerald Fennell’s ‘racy’ Wuthering Heights film landing in cinemas next week, and a fascinating biography of Charlotte’s life told through her extensive surviving clothing.

Dress historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton’s book is as riveting as Charlotte’s iron-busked corset and reveals the story of her ordinary life in Haworth, forbidden love, and fashion choices when fame came calling. Eleanor has worked as a costume consultant for film and TV, including the BBC’s To Walk Invisible and Gentleman Jack, and Frances O’Connor’s 2023 biopic, Emily.

“The amazing thing about Charlotte’s clothing is that so much has survived,” says Eleanor, who researched and studied for her PhD, what she calls ‘the surviving witnesses to Charlotte’s life,’ through the gowns, bonnets, shawls, corset and boots that made up her wardrobe, along with letters and documents. Many exist because of a tradition of make-do and hand down.

“When Charlotte died, she left everything to her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls and he and her father Patrick and housekeeper Martha Brown treasured many items as keepsakes.” Some items that were dispersed to families and souvenir hunters have migrated home to Haworth with 150 pieces housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Charlotte’s garments and accessories play a vital part in joining the dots of her history in intimate detail from her birth to her death. “They have been active participants in a remarkable life - one that was both extraordinary, public and private, obscure and famous,” says Eleanor. “Secrets have been found within their very fibres. They challenge a lot of myths and preconceptions that we’ve had about Charlotte and her family.”

One such object that still bears signs of Charlotte’s perspiration is a busked corset that she laced excruciatingly tightly like ‘a form of armour that shielded and fortified’ when she was broken-hearted through the unrequited love that she bore for her former teacher Constantin Héger in Brussels. “She’s kind of girding her loins quite literally, giving herself this strength. I think the clothes can tell us so much, very personal detail that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up from a letter.”

Charlotte made most of her clothes with Martha, buying textiles from the mills and accessing fashion plates.

A Paisley print dress she owned dated to the 1840s was bold and bright, with a pattern inspired by silk shawls imported from central Asia. “One of the most astonishing discoveries was the bright colours of fabrics that we have revealed by examining fragments through a microscope and harnessing modern technology,” says Eleanor. “We imagine drab colours, but they simply weren’t. Globalisation is another insight.”

Charlotte owned a pair of beaded, deerskin moccasins made by members of the Mohawk tribe in Canada.

When Charlotte published Jane Eyre, she used the pseudonym Currer Bell to disguise her female authorship. When the cat was out of the bag and her secret identity uncovered, she needed to transition from a provincial clergyman’s daughter and governess to celebrated author, with some trepidation and nervousness. That meant wearing a suitable ‘power’ gown when she was invited to attend lunches, dinners, lectures and parties by enthusiasts, influencers and the literati.

When she met her literary hero William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, in 1850, she wore a two-year-old Prussian blue dress woven at Salts Mill, from alpaca fibres from South America. The fabric was printed in Lancashire, probably in Accrington. Hand stitching by Charlotte and Martha still exists.

“She was in a very nervous state when she went to London for that important meeting in a new environment, a new world and meeting famous people,” Eleanor says. “When we choose clothes, we want to give off the right messages and feel strong, and Charlotte knew that was a potent force. It surprised me how important it was for her to gain strength through her regional identity and wear cloth woven in Yorkshire. She chose to connect to those Yorkshire roots.”

Eleanor has drawn an illustration of the Thackeray Dress, and the altered original is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Poignant items include an ‘ugly’ or wind bonnet - strips of silk were worn over the brim to protect the wearer. They were the height of fashion at the seaside and Charlotte may have worn hers when she was in Scarborough with her sister Anne, who died there during their visit, whilst they were still in mourning for Emily. They had stopped on the way to purchase accessories in York.

“Surviving garments are solid witnesses because you can’t always trust portraits and photographs as they are often staged with props, they are not candid,” Eleanor adds. “The real Charlotte emerges as a woman altogether braver, more vulnerable, less isolated, less provincial and more fashion conscious than anyone ever expected.” (Catherine Turnbull)