My obsession with Wuthering Heights

The Paris Review publishes a fascinating account of the Edna Clarke Hall Wuthering Heights illustrations (which have been collected recently in a new edition of the novel):

Holed up in their mansion, Great Tomkyns, in Essex, she felt “deserted,” isolated and adrift without her art. It was around this time that she first began to sketch scenes from Wuthering Heights, the book on which she would ruminate for the next three decades of her life.

Edna Clarke Hall was certainly not the first or last sensitive bourgeois girl to be creatively consumed by Emily Brontë’s vision of the North. The author’s fictional Gimmerton, with its heavy Northern vernacular, was quite far indeed from sunny Edwardian Essex, with its polite croquet and cucumber sandwiches. “It held me in its grip as no other book ever had,” Hall wrote. “Was it the long lonely days at home, the isolation of the house in the wider setting of the landscape, the beams of Great Tomkyns which I still felt in my bones and which so reminded me of this book?” But it was the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff that especially obsessed her. At times, Hall would dress up as the characters so as to model their clothes for her sketches. “I lived the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine myself, I simply was them,” she explained. “It was something that had come to pass in a deeply unconscious way. I just had to draw Wuthering Heights.”

Imagining the story awoke something in the long-inactive artist. Brontë’s novel served as both an escape from and a reflection of her own unhappy marriage. (Unsurprisingly, there are no drawings dated after her husband’s death in 1932.) In “Heritage of Ages,” Hall described feeling almost possessed by the need to draw its characters. “I drew them all one evening, I was quite alone, Willie was away. I could not stop,” she wrote. She produced the same compositions in many different styles. “I had such a strong feeling for it, I seemed to work under a spell. I did one after the other, scattering the sketches about like a maniac … My obsession with Wuthering Heights was so persistent that for years these drawings used to slide out of my mind with complete ease.” 

Hall’s devotion to rendering the tortured lovers yielded hundreds of drawings, prints, and watercolors, many of which have been lost or squirreled away in private collections. A selection of her works spent the past decades mostly unnoticed in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Ashmolean in Oxford—until this spring, when a new illustrated edition of the novel united thirty of Hall’s sketches with the text for the first time. (Sarah Hyde)

The Candor joins the chorus of those who consider Wuthering Heights 2026 a failure. Although the first paragraph of the review is a bit bizarre:

Wuthering Heights is a divisive novel. It is, at times, called the “greatest love story of all time,” but rejected as a romance for the depravity of its content at others. At the time of its publication, Anne Brontë (???) often simplified and cushioned its ideas to make it more palatable to the sensibilities of the English audience.(??) (...)

An ideal Wuthering Heights adaptation for the modern audience would aim to convey and draw attention to societal concerns similar to how Emily Bronte did. The Victorian problem of race is not much different than our modern one; how does an immigrant assimilate? What must a person of color do in a hostile environment to be respected? What does racism-driven abuse, or even abuse in general, do to a person? How do we break free of those cycles of trauma and anger? They’re all relevant questions!

The novel’s cyclical nature could also be used to reflect how repetitive our modern lives often feel, and the Catherine-Heathcliff pairing could serve as a vehicle to explore intersectional issues of oppression and expectation. There is meaningful work that can be done with a novel like this; work that isn’t just entertaining romance, but rather something that carries on the legacy of the original author by addressing real problems and issues while still being undeniably beautiful. (Zoha Quadri)

Unsurprisingly, World Socialist Web Site has not love the film:

In other hands, this might be interesting. But Fennell is relatively indifferent to the actual pauperisation of Heathcliff, whose exclusion takes the form of being made a servant. She is more interested in Nelly, because this is an injustice within the middle class milieu she inhabits.

Brontë’s primordial passion plays out often inarticulately in the mechanics of land ownership and household establishment. Fennell wants a passion disconnected from its social context. She is trying to create the impression of significance by a rather desperate recourse to ever more superficial effects.

Is this all that contemporary audiences can hope or look for in Wuthering Heights? Hardly. Brontë’s visceral and astonishing novel is rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives. It is, in this sense, a genuine and exceptional work of art.
Fennell is seeking only the blandest of consolations for a very limited fraction of the upper middle class. Brontë does not exclude consolation, but there is nothing simplistic or simplified in her novel of the emotions. There is far more there than Fennell can find. (Paul Bond)

Esquire lists the film among the "sexiest movies in 2026 so far":

Love it or hate it, Emerald Fennell's visually hearty take on Wuthering Heights is all her own. (The poster refers to it as "Wuthering Heights," scare quotes and all, to convey that this is a conscious take on Emily Brontë's classic—not a canonical retelling.) One of Fennell's most notable insertions is sex, particularly that between Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). We see Cathy's sexual awakening—she watches people have sex through floorboards and masturbates soon after. And then, in the throes of her secret romance with Heathcliff, there's a montage set to Charli XCX's "Funny Mouth."

Cathy and Heathcliff make out in the rain, then in a carriage, and she eventually rides him (in both contexts). He performs oral on her during a sun shower, and she sits on his lap outside among the wily, windy moors. They are almost entirely (and sumptuously!) clothed during these encounters. Later, they have more clothed sex on a table as they discuss Cathy's husband, Edgar, whom she is cheating on with Heathcliff. "This is how you love him?" asks Heathcliff as he thrusts into her. Though brief—and, again, covered up—these scenes were enough to prompt The Economist to blare in a headline: "Sex, sex and more sex." For the stodgy and easily scandalized, Fennell clearly hit a nerve. (Rich Juzwiak)

An alert for today, April 2, in Porto Alegre (Brazil):

Ciclo “Filmes & Livros”  

Sessão de abertura

O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes

(Dir. William Wyler | 1939 | EUA | 103 min | Drama | 12A)

Após ser acolhido por uma família rural inglesa, Heathcliff desenvolve uma relação intensa e destrutiva com Catherine Earnshaw. Separados por convenções sociais, seu vínculo obsessivo gera consequências trágicas que se estendem por anos.

02/04 | quinta-feira | 16h

Sala Redenção – Cinema Universitário 

Rua Engenheiro Luiz Englert, 333 – campus centro da UFRGS (Via El Matinal)

According to InsightTrendsWorld, "Wuthering Heights [2026] Made the Basque-Waist Dress Fashion's Most Wanted Silhouette". The Yorkshire Evening Post has a sponsored article (and most probaby AI written) above cultural events celebrating the Brontë country this spring. Finally, check out this great diorama showing how the Parsonage area could look around 1845, made by Brontë Parsonage Museum volunteer Paul.