Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights
‘Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book – baffling all regular criticism’ wrote one early reviewer of Emily Brontë’s novel following its publication in 1847, a comment which seems just as applicable to Emerald Fennell’s recent film adaptation judging by the contending wuthers of praise and criticism it has generated.[1] Embarking on an adaptation of a famous novel is not for the faint hearted, and especially so when that novel has achieved almost mythical status in the cultural imagination. Fennell has been alternatively admired by some for her ‘brazenly unfaithful’ adaptation, with its ‘sexy, dramatic, melodramatic’ take on Brontë’s work, whilst others have derided its bodice-ripping approach, its ‘small mindedness’ and its ‘failure of romantic imagination’. [2] Whatever its achievements and limitations, Fennell’s film has at least succeeded in being as divisive for contemporary viewers as its literary inspiration was for its early readers.
I admit to being initially reluctant – very reluctant in fact – to see this film. I fell in love with Wuthering Heights at 14, the same age as Fennell was when she first read the novel, and I have struggled ever since to put into words the effect it had, and continues to have, on me. Like Catherine Earnshaw’s dreams in the novel, dreams that she tells Nelly Dean have ‘gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind’, the power of the book is as visceral as it is emotional and psychological for me, and I know that can never be replicated on the screen. But nor, of course, should it have to be. The film, as the subtitles assert, is ‘based on’ Brontë’s novel, and so doesn’t overtly claim to be a very faithful adaptation. Adaptations bring their own ideas and their own energies which can sometimes complement and even enhance the enjoyment of the source text, but which at other times need to be taken on their own terms. Fennell’s film is, for me, very much in the latter category.
Whilst recognisable scenes, characters, conversations and incidents from the first half of Brontë’s novel inform the film from beginning to end, Fennell often uses them as a springboard for her own creative imagination, elaborating, adjusting and developing them to produce something, as she describes it, ‘that made me feel like I felt when I first read it’.[3] Perhaps that is why the film often feels like an adolescent fantasy – in both interesting and problematic ways. The novel’s Gothic ambience, for example, is cranked up several notches in the often nightmarish environment of the farm house at Wuthering Heights, whilst the lavish materialism of the scenes at Thrushcross Grange with Cathy’s elaborate gowns, banquet tables worthy of Miss Havisham (thankfully with fresher food), recurring Christmas tableaux and Isabella’s grotesquely large doll’s house means the film wanders intriguingly at other times between fairy tale and pantomime. We are never allowed quite to lose touch with reality, however, in that the filth and brutality of the farmyard are uncompromisingly presented, as are the medicinal practices of the period – although Fennell does at least ensure the leeches perform aesthetically. It is something of a relief therefore to be taken out periodically onto the Yorkshire moors, the stark beauty of which feels cleansing and restorative after such visual excess. Those of us from Yorkshire are tutored from an early age to think of it as ‘God’s own country’ – and to ensure anyone not from there is regularly reminded of that fact – and the landscape is for me the real star of the show. Yes it rains quite a lot and it can get a bit foggy out there on the heath, but anyone from Up North, like Cathy and Heathcliff, would regard these as minor inconveniences.
The threat of inclement weather is certainly not inconvenient enough to prevent a rather startling range of what might politely be called erotic episodes, some of which take place amidst the moorland whilst others occur in various rooms and on carriage journeys (what else were those carriage curtains for?). It is the sex – and there’s quite a bit of it – that most seems to have annoyed some viewers and critics, and it is here that the adolescent-informed vision is less quirky and innovative and, in truth, a little tedious. There is no such sex of course detailed in Brontë’s novel – Victorian censorship would certainly have put paid to that – and it’s probably a good job, because Heathcliff would surely have had neither time nor energy left to plot his ingenious schemes of revenge and Cathy would have been far too exhausted to work herself up into a self-destructive rage had such frequent encounters occurred. The issue is not, however, that there are no direct descriptions of sex in the novel – the popular neo-Victorian genre of our own day has taught us to read between the lines of Victorian fiction and to consider the importance of what isn’t shown or said as much as what is, and Cathy and Heathcliff certainly have some secret encounters whilst she is married to Edgar Linton, though with Nelly usually close by. But the sheer power, intensity and enigma of the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff is, I would argue, at least partly informed by the fact that they don’t ever consummate their relationship – a relationship that transcends all the conventional expectations and outcomes of a love story. Love, for all the enormity of the word, is in fact an entirely inadequate term for what Cathy and Heathcliff feel about each other; Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte described it as something ‘fierce and inhuman’, whilst Cathy tells Nelly that Heathcliff is ‘more myself than I am’ and Heathcliff despairs of the life he will have to live after Cathy’s death with his ‘soul in the grave’.[4] Whatever it is between Cathy and Heathcliff, it is far more compelling, far more enduring, far more ineffable than the giggling illicit encounters in the film suggest. Sometimes less really is more.
It is in what is absent however, rather than what is added, that for me is the main failure of Fennell’s adaptation. In adapting a book for the screen, difficult decisions inevitably have to be made about what can and can’t be retained from the source text – and indeed what does or doesn’t serve the artistic vision of the director. Devotees of the novel will no doubt continue to quibble over the film’s omission or misinterpretation of several things that seem central to its purpose and achievement: the lack of the frame narrator Lockwood, for example, who tries to make sense of a wild and strange world he can barely comprehend, or the fusion of Mr Earnshaw and his son Hindley into a composite character, or the rather two-dimensional representation of Nelly whose complexity as a character is pared down to a rather spiteful figure, or the transformation of Joseph from a fire and brimstone preacher of perdition into a young man more interested in – yes, you’ve guessed it – sex than religion. The side-stepping of the novel’s ambiguity regarding Heathcliff’s ethnic and biological heritage is also notably problematic, with a brief invented scene slotted in to explain how he came to be brought home by Cathy’s father.
The most staggering omission is, however, that of the entire second half of the novel. Fennell is not, in fairness, alone in ignoring 18 of the book’s 34 chapters and stopping at Cathy’s death in Chapter 16 – other directors have done so, and their films are similarly impoverished by the decision. Cathy’s and Edgar’s daughter Catherine, together with Hindley’s and Frances’s son Hareton, and Heathcliff’s and Isabella’s son Linton, are crucial agents in Emily Brontë’s story, playing out in various ways the anger, suffering and trauma of the first part of the novel before achieving, in Catherine and Hareton’s case, a resolution of those destructive energies in what promises to be a fair chance at happiness. These are interesting and important characters in their own right, but even if directors prefer to focus on the more memorable Cathy and Heathcliff, the second half of the novel is crucial to our understanding, as far as it can ever go, of that relationship too. Heathcliff lives on for years after Cathy’s death, his actions motivated by a loss with which he can never come to terms. Whilst Fennell’s film is fond of showing them in passionate embraces whilst alive, it chooses to overlook the fact that Heathcliff later gets a grave digger to remove the earth from Cathy’s coffin so he can open it and gaze on her face again before knocking out the side of the box in anticipation of his own future burial next to her; as he gleefully tells Nelly afterwards, by the time her dead husband Edgar reaches them both in the grave ‘he’ll not know which is which!’[5] Throughout the long years without her, Heathcliff’s days are tormented by memories and a desperate desire to be haunted by Cathy who proves as unpredictable in death as she was in life, seemingly happy enough to appear to Lockwood at the window of Wuthering Heights but wilfully refusing to appear to Heathcliff. ‘I am surrounded by her image!’, Heathcliff tells Nelly not long before his own death, the profundity of his grief expressed in his protest that ‘the entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and I have lost her!’.[6]
All of this is absent from the film, and thus for all its merits – some excellent acting, striking sets and evocative scenes – by finishing the story halfway through, Fennell’s film can only conclude by looking backwards with an admittedly moving recapitulation of scenes from Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s childhoods. Brontë’s novel however looks forward, not only in the preparations for the forthcoming marriage of the younger Catherine and Hareton, but also in the suggestion that Cathy and Heathcliff are united as adults after death and at home on the moors again – a little shepherd boy cries to Nelly one evening that he dare not cross the land by the Heights because ‘they’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder’.[7] That is one of the main reasons the novel continues to haunt and entrance its faithful readers, in that through Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s refusal to live by the rules of the social order when alive, and their apparent refusal to lie quiet in their graves after death, Brontë challenges us to find a different way of being in the world at once more vital and enduring. And I’m not sure any adaptation can ever quite capture that.
- [1] Unsigned Review, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper January 1848.
- [2] Robbie Collin, ‘Wuthering Heights is a bosom-heaving, gasp-inducing thrill ride’, Telegraph 13 Feb 2026 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2026/02/13/margot-robbie-jacob-elordi-wuthering-heights/ [accessed 27 February 2026]; Caryn James, ‘Wuthering Heights Review’, BBC Website 10 Feb 2026 https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20260209-wuthering-heights-review [accessed 27 February 2026]; Adrain Horton, ‘Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a big movie with a very small mind’, Guardian 16 Feb 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/16/emerald-fennell-wuthering-heights-review [accessed 27 February 2026].
- [3] Ian Youngs, ‘“Primal and sexual”: Wuthering Heights director on bringing Brontë to life’, BBC website 27 September 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0nnrr48ko [accessed 27 February 2026].
- [4] Charlotte Brontë, Preface to Wuthering Heights (Smith, Elder and Co., 1850); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Edition, 2003), pp. 63 and 126.
- [5] p. 220.
- [6] p. 247.
- [7] p. 257.
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