The first person who dares to tell me that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a love story – I’ll knock their teeth out.
Let’s start again – and pardon my French, by the way.
Wuthering Heights has come back into fashion thanks to the feature film perpetrated by Emerald Fennell, released for Valentine’s Day in February 2026. Margot Robbie (playing Catherine) and Jacob Elordi (playing Heathcliff) are brought together in a film that is nothing more than a filmed version of a very bad Harlequin novel (in fact, all Harlequin romances are terrible, since they rely on worn-out clichés – we’ve already talked about that here).
Emerald Fennell explained in interviews that she translated into images her understanding of Emily Brontë’s novel when she first read it at the age of fourteen.
At this point, several possibilities arise: either Emerald Fennell didn’t read the book in full – it consists of two parts (the first generation and then the second generation, as it is a family story), and she only adapts the first – or Emerald Fennell cannot read, or Emerald Fennell decided to turn Emily Brontë’s masterpiece into a commercial product guaranteed to succeed thanks to its two bankable actors and its dark romance tone, that oh-so-fashionable term that has taken over publishing (the 2026 version of the aforementioned Harlequin romances, don’t look any further) and sometimes cinema (Fifty Shades of Grey, 365 Days).
I’m leaning toward the third option.
The film, which benefited from a worldwide promotional campaign featuring interviews, social media coverage, and method dressing (the actors dress and behave like their characters – a technique already tested during the promotion of Barbie), is already, as I write this, a commercial success but it is highly doubtful that it will leave any mark on the history of cinema.
Kate Bush, who wrote and performed her song Wuthering Heights in 1978 at just eighteen years old, captured the spirit of Emily Brontë’s novel in four minutes and twenty-nine seconds far better than Emerald Fennell does in one hundred and thirty-six minutes of film.
Out on the wily, windy moors
We’d roll and fall in green
You had a temper like my jealousy
Too hot, too greedy
How could you leave me
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you, too
Bad dreams in the night
They told me I was going to lose the fight
Leave behind my Wuthering, Wuthering
Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy
I’ve come home, I’m so cold
Let me in your window”
Emerald Fennell completely misses the point of the novel. Wuthering Heights has never been a love story. It is a bleak and violent story of obsession, possession, ghosts, revenge, race, and class.
And I’m furious for Emily Brontë, whose Wuthering Heights is her only novel, published in 1847. Yes, I’m furious because I don’t understand why Emerald Fennell – who clearly positions herself as progressive and who had the privilege of being born and raised in an ultra-privileged London environment – felt the need to eviscerate the sole work of a born novelist who never had the chance to enjoy the success of her only novel, as she died of tuberculosis one year after its publication, at the age of thirty.
Eviscerated, indeed – and you’ll see why.
Emily Brontë, born in 1818, grew up in Yorkshire in a family that was certainly very cultured thanks to her father Patrick Brontë – an Anglican clergyman who encouraged his children to read and write – but also marked by tragedy: Emily lost her mother at the age of three, and her two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth when she was only seven. Of the siblings, only three girls – Charlotte, Anne, and Emily – and one boy, Branwell, remained.
Apart from a few brief periods at school, Emily was mostly educated by her father and spent most of her life in the family home in the village of Haworth, where she became, according to her sister Charlotte, a solitary, independent, strong-willed, and nonconformist person.
Biographical details about Emily are scarce, because the Brontë family lived in relative isolation and Emily formed very few friendships, and also because her sister Charlotte, who oversaw the second edition of Wuthering Heights after Emily’s death, softened her character to make it more acceptable to the public. As a result, we will never know whether Emily suffered from autism or anorexia, as suggested by her biographers Juliet Barker, Claire Harman, and John Sutherland.
Charlotte, Anne, Emily, and Branwell invented imaginary worlds that they wrote about: Angria, created in 1826 by Charlotte and Branwell, is an imaginary African kingdom colonized by British characters, full of political conflicts and wars, and marked by ambitious and sometimes tyrannical heroes.
The world of Gondal, created by Emily and Anne when they were thirteen and eleven respectively, is a fictional kingdom located on a cold and wild island, shaped by tragic passions, power struggles, and betrayals. Its atmosphere strongly resembles the wild, dark, and passionate world of Wuthering Heights.
The stories written by the Brontë siblings were anything but sentimental; they were infused with themes of colonialism, power, domination, race, and class, as well as emotional themes of loyalty and betrayal.
Branwell, the only son, initially interested in writing and painting, became a tutor for the children of a couple, the Robinsons, and began a secret relationship in 1843 with Mrs. Robinson. The affair was discovered in 1845, caused a scandal, and Branwell, naturally dismissed, became obsessed with his lover, imagining she was madly in love with him and would leave her husband. None of this happened – Mrs. Robinson cut off all contact – and Branwell descended into alcohol and opium addiction. His physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly, and he died in 1848 at the age of 31.
Emily began writing Wuthering Heights in the Autumn and Winter of 1845 and completed the manuscript the following Spring. Her work is partly influenced by her brother’s experience, whose erratic behavior weighed on his sisters’ lives, but it is above all deeply inspired by her own adolescent writings, namely the imaginary world of Gondal.
There may be something of Branwell in Heathcliff – but above all there is something of Douglas, the anti-hero of Gondal, both being of unknown birth, cruel and deeply Machiavellian.
Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, at the author’s expense under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell, after many difficulties.
Let’s now talk about the novel itself, which clearly belongs to the Gothic tradition of English literature.
Emily Brontë’s work is narrated through analepses by multiple narrators – Mr. Lockwood and the housekeeper Nelly – whose reliability is questionable. Lockwood is the archetypal urban dandy viewing the countryside with condescension, while Nelly often casts herself in a favorable light when she remembers past events.
These events begin around the year 1770, with Mr. Earnshaw.
Mr. Earnshaw is the owner of the rustic estate of Wuthering Heights in Yorkshire. One day, he returns from a business trip to Liverpool with a dark-skinned child whom he found wandering the streets and decided to adopt. The child, named Heathcliff, meets Mr. Earnshaw’s two biological children: Catherine, who is roughly his age – six years old – and Hindley, who is fourteen.
While Catherine and Heathcliff grow very close, Hindley soon develops a fierce hatred toward Heathcliff, whom their father regards as his favorite son.
Mr. Earnshaw’s death leaves the three adolescents orphaned. Hindley reduces Heathcliff to the status of a farm servant and subjects him to endless humiliations, while Catherine continues to regard her adoptive brother as her soulmate, until the moment she meets the very wealthy Edgar and Isabella Linton, who are her age and live nearby in the valley, in a refined and sophisticated estate, Thrushcross Grange.
Edgar falls in love with Catherine.
Catherine, soon torn between her love for Heathcliff and her desire to move up the social ladder, ultimately decides to marry Edgar.
This decision shatters Heathcliff. Humiliated by Catherine’s choice, he disappears for three years, at the end of which he returns mysteriously rich. He is also determined to avenge the injustices he has suffered since childhood.
He first takes revenge on Hindley, who has sunk into alcoholism and gambling after the death in childbirth of his wife Frances, who gave birth to a son who survived, Hareton.
Heathcliff buys up Hindley’s gambling debts and, thus becoming his creditor, settles at Wuthering Heights. Repeating a destructive pattern, he reduces Hindley’s son, Hareton, to the rank of farm servant and subjects him to endless humiliations.
The parents of Edgar and Isabella die, leaving by will their estate of Thrushcross Grange to the male heir Edgar might have – or, failing that, to the male heir Isabella might have.
Realizing that his obsessive love for Catherine finds little response in her, even after he has made his fortune, Heathcliff decides to seduce Isabella Linton – Catherine’s sister-in-law – and marry her. He mistreats her so badly that Isabella flees while pregnant and secretly gives birth to their child, a frail boy named Linton.
Catherine, for her part torn between Edgar and Heathcliff, dies while giving birth to Edgar’s daughter, who is named Cathy.
Catherine’s death leaves Heathcliff in a state of absolute suffering, and he calls upon Catherine’s ghost to come and haunt him every day.
Hindley, Catherine’s brother, soon dies from the effects of his alcoholism, and Hareton, who has become a completely uncultivated adolescent, inherits Wuthering Heights, of which Heathcliff takes full possession.
Isabella also dies, leaving her son Linton, now a teenager, in the hands of a father he has never known, Heathcliff.
Edgar, who cherishes Catherine’s memory, raises his daughter Cathy lovingly, forbidding her ever to leave the grounds of Thrushcross Grange.
Alas, she does leave. She meets Heathcliff and Linton, with whom she falls in love.
Heathcliff now holds all the cards and is about to preside over the tragic fate of the new generation. Though obsessed with Cathy’s ghost and their thwarted love, he sets about devising a plan of rare Machiavellianism to secure ownership of both estates by manipulating the three adolescents – Cathy Linton, the daughter of Catherine and Edgar; Hareton Earnshaw, the son of Hindley and Frances; and Linton, his own son.
But will the three adolescents allow themselves to be manipulated? Nothing is less certain.
Emily’s novel is simply masterful, because it presents protagonists who are deeply unlikable and complex, and because the plot is utterly Machiavellian.
The severity of some contemporary reviews reflects the profession’s discomfort in front of a novel that offers neither an explicit key to interpretation nor any moral lesson. To paraphrase an American newspaper review, Wuthering Heights is a dark tale told in a dark manner, captivating a reader bewitched by its detestable narrative and protagonists.
Emily Brontë’s novel was soon criticized for its lack of realism, and she was accused of imaginative delirium, even though her work proves that she knew the complex inheritance laws of her time perfectly well and fully understood the issues of class, race, and social change in her era: the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights are peasants who work their land and already belong to an medieval past, whereas the inhabitants of Thrushcross Grange, who also live off the exploitation of their land, do not work it themselves and belong to the English landed gentry of the future. Liverpool, which at the time was England’s largest slave-trading port, is the city from which Heathcliff, that mysterious dark-skinned child, comes.
It would take some fifty years for the novel’s great originality finally to be credited to its author, even though for a long time it remained difficult to reconcile the shy figure of Emily Brontë, living in seclusion in an isolated Yorkshire village, with the cruelty of the scenes and characters she put on the page. Yet Emily Brontë never intended, as her sisters did in their own works, to write a realist novel – she chose instead to remain faithful to her own inner world, which she had been imagining and constructing since adolescence.
The author deliberately loses her reader among the different narratives, whose reliability remains uncertain, and among the various protagonists, whose similar names constantly echo one another: the name Catherine/Cathy belongs to two different people; the name Hareton Earnshaw appears on the lintel of the house at Wuthering Heights even though it is also the name of the heir whom Heathcliff turns into an uncultivated farm servant; and the name Linton – who is Heathcliff’s son – is also the surname of the wealthy owners of Thrushcross Grange, whom Heathcliff despises above all else.
“I saw nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small: Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton”: this is how Catherine is first introduced, and the repetition of the first name attached to different surnames produces a kind of hallucination and summons Catherine’s coming specter. This repetition also raises the recurring question of the characters’ own identity – Catherine’s, Hareton Earnshaw’s, and Heathcliff’s, who is the only character whose first and last name form a single word: Heathcliff.
Emily Brontë leads us into a confusion of names, times, and places ; she also loses us between the narrative arcs of fusion – Catherine believing that she is Heathcliff more than she is herself – and division: the division of the lovers, the division of the estates, the division of the classes, the division of the races.
He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Catherine, speaking of Heathcliff
I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
Heathcliff to Catherine
The wonderful estate that resembles a Garden of Eden, Thrushcross Grange, lies below in the valley, while the dark estate where Hindley’s cruelty and then Heathcliff’s are exercised stands above: Wuthering Heights.
Many points remain deliberately unresolved – where Heathcliff comes from, how he makes his fortune in three years – and Emily Brontë traps her reader in an endless temporal loop, because she likely understood very well what the burden of intergenerational trauma entails as it passes from one generation to the next.
Heathcliff is the outside element through which the drama arrives. Without him, life might perhaps have been calm and gentle – without him, the Earnshaw and Linton families might never have crossed paths at all.
His presence disrupts everything because of his thirst for emotional and social revenge. First reduced to the rank of farm servant by his adoptive brother, who must have seemed to him the wealthy heir of a rustic estate while he himself was only a dark-skinned orphan, Heathcliff then takes his hunger for social advancement one step further when the Lintons – far richer than Hindley and, above all, far better educated – steal Catherine’s affection from him. His rage for material ascent is thus doubled by an emotional rage.
How can Heathcliff’s obsessive love for Catherine be explained? From a psychoanalytic perspective, the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine strongly resembles a trauma-based survival bond in response to the violence and abuse inflicted by Hindley. Their solidarity and love are, during childhood and adolescence, the only means by which they survive.
This survival mechanism is probably more significant for Heathcliff than for Catherine, who does not face the same challenges as her adoptive brother: she was cherished from birth by loving parents, she has a name and a social position that have been ingrained in her since childhood. This is not the case for Heathcliff, who struggles against two forms of social prejudice. First, he has dark skin – his origins are indeterminate and it is unclear whether he is of mixed race or Romani. Second, he is an orphan who was picked up in the streets of Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw – he therefore has no origins, no family, no fortune. Heathcliff embodies themes of rootlessness, poverty, racialization, and, consequently, illegitimacy in a highly structured social order.
For this child, then this adolescent, and finally this wild and unanchored adult, Catherine becomes the only point of stability in a life marked by mystery, uncertainty, rage, and social revenge.
Catherine becomes the anchor of this tormented soul because she is of the opposite sex, because she is the same age, but also because she may be his half-sister.
The question of the incestuous nature of the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine is rarely addressed. And yet, how can one truly believe that Heathcliff was simply picked up off the street by Mr. Earnshaw? The child, presented as a poor and unknown orphan, is brought into the household and becomes the father’s favorite. Mr. Earnshaw’s wife asks no questions, but the informed reader knows that Liverpool was at the time the largest slave-trading port in England – something Emily Brontë could not have ignored – and that the only plausible explanation for Heathcliff’s arrival in the household is Mr. Earnshaw’s extramarital relationship in the city with a racialized woman.
The love the adolescent Heathcliff feels for Catherine turns into a destructive obsession. He pursues her, harasses her, and even goes so far as to have her coffin exhumed. Catherine, for her part, is torn between her love for Heathcliff and her own desire for social mobility, embodied by Edgar. Perhaps she also understands the obsessive nature of Heathcliff and seeks to distance herself from it in favor of a less passionate relationship.
Only death ultimately reunites these two characters, who never found, or perhaps never sought, the path toward light.
Should one watch the various film adaptations of Wuthering Heights? No. Some works are simply unadaptable – Rebecca is one, and so is Wuthering Heights.
Should one read Wuthering Heights? Absolutely. Emily Brontë’s novel lingers in the mind thanks to its unique narrative structure, its complex and often unlikable characters, and its dark, violent atmosphere.
Emily Brontë may have written only one novel, but it remains to this day a major work of English Gothic literature – and rightly so.
Editor’s note. Here we are, then, in a London cemetery – Highgate Cemetery – rather than the one Emily Brontë looked out upon every day in Haworth, where the parsonage she shared with her family overlooked the parish churchyard. As I wander through Highgate, I cannot help imagining, with a certain dread, Heathcliff having Catherine’s grave reopened to gaze upon her face one last time.
Dôen dress – Repetto shoes – Vintage belt and sleeveless jacket – Ray Ban sunglasses
October 31, 2026
