I’d never read the old copy of Wuthering Heights on our bookshelf, with the cover frayed and soft at the edges and the pages thin as tissue. But when I heard the movie was coming out I decided to give this novel a read.
Published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is an early example of a Gothic novel from the Victorian period. Unlike its contemporary Jane Eyre—a more popular and conventional novel written by Emily’s sister Charlotte Bronte— Wuthering Heights is violent and morally ambiguous, and its characters are obsessive, abusive, selfish, and driven by revenge. With its isolated setting, family dynamics, and emotional drama, it has all the ingredients that defined the Gothic genre.
Given the antiquated style of the writing and an odd nested narrative structure—one character tells almost the entire story to another—the novel wasn’t easy going at first, but I settled into a smooth reading experience and began to steadily and carefully turn the delicate pages.
The story follows the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the orphan Heathcliff, whom Catherine’s father brings home to live at Wuthering Heights. Their intense bond is damaged by class divisions when Catherine marries the refined Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff. Bitter and humiliated, Heathcliff disappears, and later returns wealthy and driven by revenge—a revenge that continues into the next generation.
I haven’t seen Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation that just came out staring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. In the novel, Heathcliff is described as dark-skinned and a gypsy, but Elordi as Heathcliff is a white dude. And the film centers almost entirely on Catherine and Heathcliff’s early relationship, completely omitting half the novel and its second generation of characters. These choices are not surprising for an adaptation, which often must trade off structural complexity for visceral immediacy and delivering a coherent story within time constraints. I’ve seen the trailer and can assure you the film is sensual, provocative, and stylized—and every bit as over-the-top emotional as the book.
I haven’t read many novels from the mid-nineteenth century, and with a towering pile of books on my to-read list, this one might have satisfied my curiosity about that era. As for the film, I probably won’t see it. Early reviews have been meh, and I know what happens.
