Daily Star is a bit mixed up about the dates but reports that Red Nose Day 2026--Friday, March 20th--will see a spoof version of Wuthering Heights 2026.

Comic Relief bosses have made a spoof of Hollywood film Wuthering Heights which will air on Friday night (March 19) [sic] as part of the charity fundraiser

A spoof version of Wuthering Heights has been made for Comic Relief.

TV favourites Katherine Ryan and Jon Richardson play iconic characters Cathy and Heathcliff in a wacky sketch dubbed Withering Heights. It is a parody of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's saucy Wuthering Heights adaptation.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The cultural phenomenon gets the Red Nose Day treatment as Katherine Ryan and Jon Richardson’s audition tapes for Wuthering Heights are set to be uncovered.

"Have you ever wondered who else may have auditioned for the leading roles in smash-hit film Wuthering Heights? Or rather, why Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi ended up in the role?

"Fret no more, as this Red Nose Day we are set to get a sneak peek at the exclusive audition tapes as Katherine Ryan takes on the role of Cathy, and Jon Richardson gives it his best Heathcliff, in ‘Withering Heights’.”

It will air as part of Comic Relief: Funny for Money, which kicks off tomorrow at 7pm on BBC One. (Ed Gleave)

However, the film has renewed discussions about the book that has inspired several adaptations across the world, including Bollywood.  

For Aathira Suresh, a physics student and film buff, the latest film by director Emerald Fennell may be imperfect, but has spurred conversations about the many shades of Brontë’s characters.

“I read ‘Wuthering Heights’ a year ago. I can vividly remember the descriptions,” she says.

“At a time when characters were usually black and white, stories were about good and bad, she offered something raw. That people could be grey, love is not always pure. And though many nowadays call it a romance, it was actually about obsession and revenge, the often unexplored side of love. Brontë showed how wounded pride and obsession can destroy lives.”

Notably, Brontë wrote at a time when women were often treated as little more than possessions. Within the haunting, windswept moorland setting, she also explored themes that resonate with feminist thought, Aathira believes.

Cathy herself is an unlikeable character, full of human flaws and feelings. She is not the typical heroine of the time, someone striving to carve a place in society or seeking goodness in humanity. Instead, she is as imperfect as any other human.

“Selfish, in love, and brimming with desire. Well, both were obsessed, weren’t they?” Aathira smiles.

The story unfolds non-linearly and follows two families through the eyes of two outsiders: Ellen “Nelly” Dean and Mr Lockwood. They are unreliable narrators. One is a long-serving housekeeper who witnessed the lives of both families, the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights and the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange. The other is a new tenant renting one of the houses.

“This narrative approach makes the story intriguing. Readers do not see much direct interaction between Cathy and Heathcliff. That makes it all the more interesting,” says Archana Gopakumar, founder of The Reading Room in Thiruvananthapuram.

The often-projected image of the gentry is also questioned here. Nelly, the housekeeper, becomes the one narrating their turbulent lives.

“However, beyond a study of characters, their motivations and their breaking moments, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is an atmospheric horror,” Archana says.

“Brontë describes everything — the environment, the moor, the dogs (I love them!), the supernatural, the candlelit dark rooms and the dark corners of the two castle-like homes. That itself makes this book a beautiful read about a ‘beautiful’ disaster.”

The tragedy that hangs over every page unfolds slowly. The art of smothering one so seductively is what has made her pick up the book no fewer than three times.

“And it’s witty when you don’t expect it. The satire shines through when the families interact, while the horror unfolds through a toxic love story,” she smiles.

In today’s language, it would be called a “red flag” relationship. It is a story about “two people we pray never get together”. [...]

“It is an unapologetic, raw, wild story that examines patriarchy without any reservation,” says Archana.

This is perhaps what keeps the novel relevant even today. Tania Mary Vivera, associate professor of English literature at St Teresa’s College, believes the book’s enduring relevance is reflected in the many adaptations it has inspired.

She highlights another important aspect: Heathcliff’s origins. “He is a foundling whose identity cannot be fully established. He has been portrayed variously as white, wheatish and black in different film versions, none of which satisfied audiences,” she points out.

“Heathcliff is a mixed-race foundling, and that gave him freedom from the shackles of social identity, family name and regional identity. However, above all, it adds to him being misunderstood and mistrusted by everyone.”

Though tragedy lingers, Tania adds, the book ends on a hopeful note. It brings to closure the long line of generational abuse and trauma, and the progression of lonely, isolated, orphaned individuals whose lives toggled between intense love and extreme hatred.

She hopes future readers and the current generation — who will “undoubtedly” fall under the Gothic spell woven by Brontë — will carry that hope after they turn the last page. (Krishna P S)

Opposed to BRAT's focus on dance and club music, Wuthering Heights is a dizzying array of sprawling orchestral strings and heartfelt melodies, carrying with it a profound understanding of Brontë's prose. The theme of finding oneself through romantic and platonic connections is channeled through Charli, as it was with Cathy in the 1847 literary classic. Much of this search for identity correlates with the pop star's real-life experiences, marrying her longtime partner George Daniel (of The 1975) in July 2025. This milestone, in turn, is indicative of the project's greater contemplative qualities. Where BRAT felt like escapism, Wuthering Heights feels like facing one's emotions head-on. While a massive departure from her 2024 smash hit, Wuthering Heights is Charli at her most emotional and experimental – truly an engaging middle ground for the literary truthers and film defenders. (Nathaniel Clark)

   

The world premiere of Lucy Gough's new adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens tomorrow, March 20, in Aberystwyth, Wales:

Theatr Gymunedol Aberystwyth Community Theatre presents

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

by Lucy Gough. Based on Anne Brontë's novel

Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth SY23 3DE, UK

Fri 20 Mar - Sat 21 Mar

Who is the mystery woman that recently moved into Wildfell Hall? The Hall is isolated and semi-derelict. She is an artist and a single woman with a child; both frowned upon in 19th-century society. As the mystery unfolds, a life of struggle and courage is revealed. This is a story of resilience, survival, and an uncompromising need for truth and creativity. The play is framed by Anne Brontë’s reasons for writing this powerful, starkly honest, early feminist novel.

   

The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton has been awarded £1,271.92 through a grant from the 2024/2025 Lord Mayor’s Appeal, headed by the then Lord Mayor of Bradford, Councillor Bev Mullaney.

The funding comes from a series of fundraising events and donations.

Nigel West, fundraising co-ordinator for the Brontë Birthplace, said: "We are entirely self-funded and depend on grants such as the Lord Mayor’s Appeal to help continue our work.

"We are so grateful for this donation, it will help us to keep the Brontë story alive and ensure it remains an inspiring and welcoming space for generations to come." (Harry Williams)

St Oswald’s Church is one of Guiseley’s key historic buildings, known not only for its medieval fabric but also because the parents of the Brontë sisters, Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell, were married there in 1812.

A copy of their marriage certificate is displayed inside. (Claire Lomax)

It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that I have not sufficiently dwelt on that feeling; I have erred in making horror too predominant. Mrs Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane but sin itself is a kind of insanity; the truly good behold and compassionate it as such.

Emerald Fennell’s new film, Wuthering Heights opens with sounds of moaning and heavy breathing, which are revealed to be emanating from a man being executed by hanging, rather than in the throes of sexual ecstasy. His post-mortem erection causes an outpouring of emotion, including sexual arousal, in the rambunctious crowd. Among the audience witnessing the bizarre spectacle is the young version of the heroine of the film, Catherine Earnshaw.

As Fennell explained in an interview: “it was important to acknowledge early on that arousal and danger are kind of the same thing, and it was important that the first thing we see is Cathy, this young girl, seemingly frightened but then actually delighted. It tells us so much about who she is, but so much about Brontë, too…”

Notably, this scene is not in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but it is uniquely Fennell, and also ensures the film falls squarely into the genre of Gothic Romance. The Oxford-educated Fennell is additionally making an allusion to another novel of Gothic Romance, Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which opens with the narrator looking back on a moment as a seven-year-old when he witnessed a man who had just been hung. “See what a moment of passion can bring upon a fellow,” his guardian tells him.

The disturbing juxtaposition of sex and death lies at the core of Gothic Romance, and, indeed, Victorian society, as well as our own. In her article “Sex and Death in Wuthering Heights,” Maria Kosikinen observes that both sex and death were perceived as threats to rational Victorian attitudes and thus both were highly regulated and ritualized. Fennell makes her audience as complicit as the onlookers in the perverse opening scene, revealing and shocking our own 2026 sensibilities as well.

Arguably, the most important aspect of Gothic Romance, and the Gothic more broadly, explains its lasting appeal, which can be summed up by the great (Gothic) writer, William Faulker: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” [...]

Say what you will about his character, but the only “ghosting” one can imagine Brontë’s Heathcliff doing is the literal kind, which perhaps explains his lasting appeal, even if the Byronic hero is still being blamed for today’s dating woes. In Olivia Petter’s excellent Vogue article from January, “My Love for Wuthering Heights Is Why I Also Love Terrible Men,” she blames Heathcliff, whom she deems “literature’s original fuckboy,” for inspiring her frustrating pursuit of toxic men: “The bar is absurdly low…men will get a round of applause for texting us back or booking a restaurant. Where are the ones who’ll cry for us on the moors and dig up our graves? They might not be healthy, but at least they’re interesting. [...]

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, like the lauded 1939 adaptation, does not feature the second half of the novel, which deals with the aftermath of Cathy and Heathcliff’s toxic love-story. It therefore delves more into the romance, rather than the Gothic aspects of the plot and the repercussions of the first on subsequent generations. Why only adapting the first half of Emily Brontë’s novel was permissible in 1939 but not now is anyone’s guess. [...]

Love or hate it, any film that revives public discourse, notably among young people, around a Victorian novel written by a woman two hundred years ago can be seen as a win, especially in a time when Humanities and English departments are at all-time low enrollment.

In Gothic fiction, repressed things from the past return to haunt us. In today’s world, amidst new technologies including AI, and a far-reaching digital record, the secrets in our individual and collective pasts have never been more ephemeral, and, paradoxically, more immortal. What could be more Gothic than that? (Joanna Margaret)

   

New Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre has been published in Argentina. In the original Brontë English:

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Del Fondo Editorial

ISBN 9789874886927

March 2026

Set in the West Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights is the story of two gentry families -— the Earnshaws and the Lintons — and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. Although Wuthering Heights is now a classic of English literature, contemporaneous reviews were deeply polarized; it was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes, and gender inequality. The novel also explores the effects of envy, nostalgia, pessimism, and resentment. Published under her male pseudonym, critics were convinced that it was indeed written by a man, as the powerful imagery and unbridled and savage emotions and passions of the characters initially appalled critics. Emily died tragically before knowing the acclaim “his” only novel would eventually receive, now being considered one of the finest literary masterpieces of nineteenth century England.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

Del Fondo Editorial

ISBN: 9789874886910

March 2026

 Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre erupted onto the English literary scene, immediately showing the devotion of many of the world’s most renowned writers. Widely regarded as a revolutionary novel, Brontë’s masterpiece introduced the world to a radical new type of heroine, one whose defiant virtue and moral courage departed sharply from the more submissive and malleable female characters of the day. The immediate and lasting success of Jane Eyre proved Brontë's instincts right. Readers of her era and, even after her time, have taken the impoverished orphan girl into their hearts, following her from the custody of cruel relatives to a dangerously oppressive boarding school and onward through a troubled career as a governess. Jane's first assignment at Thornfield, where the proud and cynical master of the house guards a scandalous secret, draws readers even deeper into a compelling exploration of the mysteries of the human heart. Passionate, dramatic, and surprisingly modern, Jane Eyre is still regarded as one of the world’s most beloved novels.

   

7 The Professor (written 1846; published 1857) by Charlotte Brontë

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

6 Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë

In 1846, the three Brontë sisters had – at their own expense – published a joint poetry collection under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It sold just two copies. Realising that fiction was more saleable, they decided that each should write a novel under the same pen names. While Charlotte toiled over The Professor, the youngest sister, Anne, was working on Agnes Grey. It also sought to portray everyday life, but the result has a more authentic ring since she drew so directly on her personal experience working as a governess in well-to-do families. The first-person heroine is initially excited at the thought of earning her own living. But she finds herself underpaid and unappreciated by the snooty parents, while her tantrum-prone charges include a vile little boy who likes pulling the legs off baby sparrows. Had it not been overshadowed by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when it came out in 1847, it might perhaps have caused more of a stir as a Nanny Diaries-style exposé.

5 Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë

This flawed follow-up to Jane Eyre was written under trying circumstances. Charlotte’s brother Branwell and both her sisters sickened and died in quick succession during the writing of it, so it was abandoned for a while before being resumed by the bereaved author. That’s not, however, the only reason why this “condition of England” novel – which announces itself on page one as “something unromantic as Monday morning” – has failed to entrance readers as much as its predecessor Jane Eyre. Its third-person narrative does not focus on a single hero or heroine and as a result the book feels comparatively diffuse, though Charlotte herself might have defended it on the grounds that real life is diffuse. Set during the Luddite riots of 1811-12, it explores social unrest, capitalism and the “woman question”. Because of her proto-feminism, Charlotte’s ideological position has often been called progressive, yet she was in fact a political conservative.

4 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)

In feminist terms, Anne’s second novel is the most radical and socially engaged of all the sisters’ books. The eponymous tenant, Helen Huntingdon, is hiding out at Wildfell Hall with her young son after leaving her abusive husband. At the time, unequal marriage laws meant that it was very hard for a woman to get a divorce at all and nigh impossible for her to get custody of her children. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte had made Mr Rochester a sexy Byronic rake; Anne, in reply, exposed the toxic masculinity behind that character type. Despite the novel’s strong Christian message, its unvarnished portrayal of addiction and adultery shocked Victorian readers more than any of the other Brontë books. More interested in the real than the ideal, Anne was drawing on her experience as a witness to Branwell’s chaotic behaviour.

3 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

The first of the Brontë novels to be published, Charlotte’s melodramatic tale of the poor plain governess and the madwoman in the attic became a bestseller on first publication. Its genius, in fact, lies less in the plot than in what George Eliot’s future partner GH Lewes, who was one of its first reviewers, called its “strange power of subjective representation”. Ditching the distancing device of a male narrator for a female voice proved Charlotte’s creative breakthrough: it enabled her to inject a then unprecedented first-person intensity into the novel form. However, Jane Eyre proved controversial at the time among sexist critics. Correctly surmising that the author behind “Currer Bell” was a woman, they decried the book as “coarse” and the heroine as too assertive for a female.

2 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

It is mind-boggling to think that Wuthering Heights was written alongside The Professor and Agnes Grey, quite literally on the same dining room table in Haworth Parsonage at which all three sisters sat together working on their first novels. Emily’s masterpiece was called “a strange book baffling all regular criticism” on publication; it remains enigmatic, completely sui-generis and totally outside the norms of Victorian fiction. Justly regarded as one of the greatest works in the western canon, it’s far from the cliched love story it later became in popular culture. Though grisly with violence, it’s oddly devoid of sex. The writing is astonishing: scarcely any adjectives and not a purple passage in sight. The Victorian poet Swinburne was right to compare it to Greek tragedy.

1 Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853)

Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here, she goes back to the Brussels material that she had already used at a tangent in The Professor – and which was rooted in her real-life experience of studying and teaching there in 1842-4. Reworking those memories from a first-person female perspective, she now incorporated her own secret into the story: the unrequited love she had felt for her Belgian writing tutor Constantin Heger. Yet the result is anything but naïve autobiography. Instead, it shows Charlotte push the classic realist Victorian novel in new, artistically experimental directions. The unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe, has intimacy issues and sets a challenge for the reader. Long before Freud, Charlotte was exploring questions about repression and the unconscious in a complex, self-knowing psychological novel whose generic status hovers ambiguously between naturalism, gothic and autofiction. The extent to which Villette mined and refracted her own inner life was only discovered posthumously by her biographers.