In a Biographical Notice to a republication of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë writes this about her sister: ‘Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.’ I am almost certain that Emerald Fennell is not the ‘interpreter’ she spoke of and that someone should have stood between her and this IP.
After managing to snag a place on the sought-after Brontës module last semester and labouring for weeks on an essay regarding the afterlives of Catherine Earnshaw, I arrived at the Showroom cinema with my fellow Brontë indoctrinates on opening night, brimming with enthusiasm. Armed with popcorn and my ‘Team Emily’ badge purchased from the Brontës’ Parsonage, I was sceptical but deeply interested, hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I was surprised, by the film’s hollowness and its refusal to intellectually engage with any ideas or themes. I am not a novel purist, book-inaccuracy does not bother me if the alternative is interesting or meaningful, what I am bothered by how remotely uninterested I was by this reimagining.
When asked about her choices regarding the Claire’s accessory-esque tackiness of the film, Fennell reeled off the same answer: that the film replicated her fourteen year-old self reading the book and more worryingly, on Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff: “You can only make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Should you be concerned about these answers? The short answer is, yes. Unlike most, I refuse to believe Fennell is too idiotic to comprehend the fairly short novel; rather, I think the Oxford graduate’s interpretation of the text is far more harmful and insulting to the audience’s intelligence. When one of the highest-grossing female directors flat-out tells you she happily reduced a tale of generation trauma, centred around class and racial struggles to a fantasy in which one protagonist is a self-insert and the other is replaced by an Australian heartthrob because it was too inconceivable that Heathcliff was not an attractive, white man, it should concern the audience.
Emerald Fennell, of previous Saltburn fame, continues to take beloved classics and make them reflections of her comfortable, aristocratic reality. In keeping with Hollywood’s tradition, despite the film’s West Yorkshire setting, northern actors are nowhere to be found. Jacob Elordi and Ewan Mitchell are put through their paces with generic northern accents because, according to Saltburn’s James Catton and Fennell herself, anything above Luton becomes the backwards, behemoth ‘north.’ In the most recent degradation of the northern working class, elderly, religious totalitarian Joseph becomes a young, sexually deviant servant who, from what I could gather, rides another servant like a horse, bridle and all. Fennell seems to have a bizarre notion that inserting graphic sexuality into her movies adds depth or danger whereas I’d label “Wuthering Heights” (2026) as utterly sexless. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have no romantic chemistry and by leaving literally nothing to the imagination, Fennell pushes the film to the point of smashing Barbies together in the hope that they will make her a ‘raunchy’, sexy auteur. In aid of this, Heathcliff is rewritten as a loyal, Yorkshire underdog who Cathy and the audience can gawp at shovelling hay while Robbie portrays a bleach-blonde ingénue equipped with a bustling corset and an RP accent, despite canonically never leaving Yorkshire.
The decision to cast Vietnamese-American Hong Chau and Pakistani-British Shazad Latif as Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton, arguably the antagonists of the piece (especially in Fennell’s interpretation) while white-washing anti-hero Heathcliff is a truly staggering choice. In Brontë’s text, Nelly is complicated; she cares for and sympathises with Heathcliff while helping to facilitate the untimely death of Cathy, she is flawed but largely empathetic and moral. Film Nelly is far more antagonistic, orchestrating Cathy’s confession to her so that Heathcliff hears Cathy admitting that to marry him would ‘degrade her’ for no clear reason other than spite. Similarly, Edgar is limited to a provision of funds and status for Cathy, rather than a man she truly loves as she does in the book:
‘”First and foremost, do you love Mr. Edgar?”
“Who can help it? of course I do,” she answered.’ (Brontë, p.173)
A large aspect of the novel’s complexity lies in the conflict between Cathy, Heathcliff and Edgar. Heathcliff envies Edgar due to his ‘great blue eyes, and even forehead’ (Brontë, p.125.) The social superiority of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lintons compared to brunette, ‘savage’ Cathy and ‘dark face[d]’ Heathcliff (p.207) motivates both protagonists to adapt: Cathy becomes a ‘lady’ and pursues Edgar while Heathcliff becomes wealthy for the sole purpose of annihilating their household. But by Fennell’s hand, both Cathy and Heathcliff undergo lobotomising operations that strip their characters of any nuance: Cathy is bratty and deeply unlikeable; a child literally trapped in a thirty five year-old woman’s body while Heathcliff becomes a stereotypical ‘bad boy.’ Instead of a being Charlotte Brontë described as ‘a man’s shape animated by demon life’, capable of hanging his wife’s dog, Elordi’s Heathcliff simply gets her to act like one. There is no struggle between Heathcliff and Edgar in the film, Cathy accepts Edgar for solely economic/social purposes with no true affection for him so when they meet the animosity has no contextual grounds. In the text, these men represent a choice for Cathy between antithetical selves, both of which she needs and cares for. Ultimately unable to choose between her ambition/duty and savage nature, she starves herself, choosing death. Removing this nuance from the trio while ‘blind-casting’ two of the most controversial characters is not only reductive but actively harmful to both the source material and the actors portraying Nelly Dean and Edgar.
Like the majority of Wuthering Heights adaptations, Fennell cuts the second half of the novel, ending the film with Cathy’s untimely death. Subsequently, the most complex aspects of the material: the generational doubling, the paternal relationship between Hareton (who doesn’t exist anyway) and Heathcliff as well as ghostly Cathy are ignored. If I had no prior knowledge of the text before going in, I would struggle to understand why Wuthering Heights remains so culturally iconic, as fourteen year-old Fennell reads the text as a dull rehashing of star-crossed lovers and in doing so condemns her film to forgettable mediocrity. When Fennell does pull from the book (such as Cathy’s monologue to Nelly regarding marriage or Heathcliff’s iconic ‘haunt me!’ speech) it feels contrived and cringe-inducing, the material feels jarring and undeserved in this myopic adaptation.
On Charli xcx’s concept album/soundtrack, I don’t mind it. I think for this interpretation of the source, it works fairly well; I would prefer a stronger vocalist such as Florence Welch (or Kate Bush, obviously) but I think Charli’s surface-level lyrics which tell the audience how the characters feel and therefore how they should feel is in tune with Fennell’s ham-fisted conception. The best part of the album is John Cale’s poem at the beginning of ‘House’ which with the accompaniment of haunting strings, actually captures the off-kilter, dangerous atmosphere of the source material. ‘I am a prisoner to live for eternity’ alludes nicely to Cathy’s ghost who claims she has been ‘a waif for twenty years!’
Quick fire opinions: the settings were disgusting and tonally confused (Edgar’s house looks like a tacky Playboy mansion), though I did love seeing the parts of the ‘wily, windy moors’ that were shot on location. Secondly, the costuming was not touch-in-cheek in the Sofia Coppola, Marie Antionette-having-Converse way that Fennell thinks it is, instead Robbie frequently looks like an aged milkmaid. Finally, the child versions of Cathy and Heathcliff (played by Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper respectively) were by far the best parts of the entire film. This generation of child actors are unbelievably strong, I’m very hopeful for the next couple of years of cinema.
While we await an adaptation starring Dev Patel and a Yorkshire woman, here are some recommendations that may wash Fennell’s attempt out of your mouth, capturing a similar atmosphere to the original text or just discussing Wuthering Heights more eloquently than me:
- Emily Brontë’s poetry: specifically the Gondal poem ‘A.E. and R.C.’ which predates Heathcliff and Cathy but harkens to their intertwined existence in which one can seemingly appear in the shape of the other. An interesting read!
- Audible is coming out with a new audiobook of Wuthering Heights, featuring Daryl McCormack as Heathcliff
- Charlotte Brontë’s (or Curer Bell’s) 1850 Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights provides some beautiful descriptions of Emily’s work alongside some insights into her character.
- Villette by Charlotte Brontë: much longer than Wuthering Heights but similar vibes of crazy ladies and ghost nuns
- Torgerson, Beth, Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire and the Constraints of Culture (Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2005)
- Nikravesh, Negeen, ‘Catherine Earnshaw’s Ghost Story: Wuthering Heights as Narrative of Female Revenge’, Journal of the Brontë Society, 50.1-2 (2025)
- Ghent, Dorothy van, ‘The Window Figure and the Two-Children Figure in “Wuthering Heights”’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 7.3 (December 1952)
- ‘Doomed to decay:’ Endogenic Nature and Impersonal Affect in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights by Emily Martin
Sources
‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, in Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, ed. by Currer Bell (London: Smith, Elder, 1850), pp.vii-xvi.
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, Introduction and Notes John S. Whitley (Wordsworth Classics, 2000)
‘House’, Wuthering Heights by Charlie xcx (2026)
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, on The Kick Inside (1978)
Image Credits: Warner Bros. Pictures
