A new day, new reviews of Sense and Sensibility taking a dig at Wuthering Heights 2026. From Ready Steady Cut: I knew that the film was going to play it safe, unlike the disastrous Wuthering Heights, which was more of a TikTok event for broken young people happy for English literature to be destroyed for a director’s fantasy. (Daniel Hart) I’ve had three very different experiences with period dramas over the last 12 months, which has made me wonder if the cinematic landscape of this genre has changed for good. The first was Wuthering Heights, a clear assault on the source material. If only they truly thought about what they are writing, though. Wuthering Heights--the original novel--wasn't assaulted or destroyed in any way--it's still there to be read as Emily Brontë wrote it and Emerald Fennell's take on it had no repercussions on it whatsoever, except for the fact that it brought thousand of new readers to it. You didn't like it? Fine, but stop being overdramatic (and that said on a blog about the Brontës is quite something).
A contributor to Her Campus recommends 'Three Fall Reads' and one of them is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë You might have seen the film adaptation of Wuthering Heights this February, but I can assure you the book was nothing like the film. Better, more thought-out, and a direct way to understand the lengths people will go to for revenge, this classic novel makes for the perfect fall read, easy to pick up in a free moment to escape to life in the rainy English countryside, channeling all the fall vibes. (Zara Saliba)
Woman's World recommends '8 Twisty Books' to read if you loved Verity and one of them is ‘The Wife Upstairs’ by Rachel Hawkins This chilling tale—a dark reimagining of the classic Jane Eyre—follows Jane, who is new to Birmingham, Alabama. She spends her days working as a dog walker in a rich neighborhood, hiding her identity and stealing from the homeowners. Then she meets wealthy—albeit mysterious—man named Eddie Rochester and her life takes a dramatic turn. Now she’s living in his house and feeling haunted by his late wife, Bea, who died in a boating accident. As time goes on, Jane begins investigating what really happened to Bea, and deadly secrets emerge. (Carissa Mosness)
Southern Living includes the original novel, Jane Eyre, on a list of '21 Books That Are Even Better The Second Time Around'.
Midi Libre (France) interview Lilia Hassaine, author of JE.
Quel a été le point de départ de Je dont les deux lettres renvoient au roman culte de Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre ? C’est parti d’une situation qui m’est arrivée, du sentiment d’être enfermée dans une histoire, du fait d’avoir douté de ma santé mentale à un moment de cette relation. J’ai repensé alors à Bertha, ce personnage secondaire de Jane Eyre, cette première épouse, cette "folle du grenier" qui hante la demeure de Rochester. En relisant le roman, j’ai eu le sentiment que son histoire n’avait pas été racontée. On n’a que le point de vue de Rochester, et les raisons de son enfermement sont très floues. J’avais envie de comprendre et de décortiquer les mécanismes de destruction d’une femme tels que je les avais vécus et, en même temps, de montrer la triste banalité de tout ça. Les manipulateurs du sentiment amoureux ont toujours existé. En deux siècles, les mécanismes ont peu changé, et c’est pour cela qu’on peut se reconnaître même aujourd’hui dans un personnage du 19e siècle. Qu’est-ce qui vous a frappé à la relecture de Jane Eyre ? D’abord qu’on ne sait pratiquement rien sur Bertha, seulement ce que Rochester veut bien en dire. Ce qui m’a frappée, c’est sa présence fantomatique, et le fait que Jane Eyre commence elle-même à penser qu’elle est folle. Elle entend des bruits étranges, des pleurs… et on ne lui explique rien. C’est frappant ça aussi de constater que cet homme-là, Rochester, qui a visiblement des raisons objectives d’enfermer son épouse chez lui, n’en parle pas ; il la cache, y compris à la femme qu’il dit aimer ou du moins qu’il a envie d’épouser. Il y a dans le comportement de Rochester des choses très troublantes, et même préoccupantes. À la fin, d’ailleurs, il dit "Je voulais être bigame, je voulais avoir deux femmes". La présence diffuse de Bertha dans le roman sert à retranscrire l’atmosphère gothique, mais elle est presque une mise en garde pour Jane Eyre. Elle est aussi le reflet de ce qu’elle pourrait devenir. Cette lecture-là, je ne l’avais pas eue plus jeune, j’étais restée très premier degré, mais en réalité, la version que nous propose Rochester ne tient pas debout… Vous insistez sur le fait qu’il ne s’agit absolument pas d’une réécriture de Jane Eyre. C’est important de préciser que c’est un roman qui ne demande pas d’avoir lu Jane Eyre, ni même La Prisonnière des Sargasses, le livre de Jean Rhys écrit en 1966 autour du personnage de Bertha. Dans Je, il n’y a quasiment aucune scène en commun avec Jane Eyre. Parce qu’en fait, ce n’était pas mon sujet. J’aurais pu écrire ce livre totalement aujourd’hui, cela n’aurait rien changé, et personne ne m’aurait rien dit, bien au contraire. Mais j’ai trouvé que c’était de la facilité et surtout que ça ne racontait pas ce que j’avais vécu. Ce sont les livres qui m’ont aidée à m’en sortir et notamment celui-là, parce qu’il y a eu, chez moi, une sorte de projection sur Bertha. Et en racontant son histoire à elle, j’ai réussi à me raconter. Je est fait du regard que je porte sur le personnage inventé par Charlotte Brontë. Tout comme Jean Rhys a projeté sur Bertha un morceau de sa propre vie et de son époque. Ce qui fait d’un livre un classique, c’est la surface de projection qu’il nous offre et sa capacité à questionner un siècle ou cinq siècles plus tard. Un livre dépend totalement de la manière dont on le lit, de l’époque à laquelle on le lit, et de la période à laquelle on le lit au cours de sa vie. (Francesca Mantovani) (Translation)
Erläuterung und Anleitung finden Nora bei Jane Austen und Anne Brontë. (Regina Bärthel) (Translation) Since yesterday, October 3, a new adaptation of Jane Eyre is being performed in Oklahoma City:
Written by Charlotte Brontë Adapted for the stage by Darcy Blair, Lancia Berglan, and Mikala Novitsky
October 3, 8, 9, 10 at 7pm October 10 at 3pm Storyteller Theatre OKC, 1319 NE 23rd St, Oklahoma City, OK 73111, USA
A sweeping and intimate adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s enduring novel. Jane’s journey of resilience, independence, and love unfolds in a richly atmospheric story of passion and principle.
The company presents the production on KFOR, Looking out 4 You! Oklahoma’s News Channel 4 ScreenRant recommends the '3 Best Movies To Watch On Prime Video This Weekend (October 3-4)' and one of them is Wuthering Heights (2026) Over the years, there have been several adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the iconic 1847 novel by Emily Brontë. The latest high-profile release was this 2026 version starring Margot Robbie as Cathy Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Directed by Emerald Fennell, the new take on Wuthering Heights is sexy, intense, surprising, and utterly haunting. (Felipe Rangel)
Reviewing the new film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, a contributor to The Critic says that, The visual palette was truer to my vision of Austen than could perhaps be expected in the world of Bridgerton and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, even if there were a few more stray strands of Elinor’s hair (Daisy Edgar-Jones) than suited her character. (Felice Basbøll)
More films, as La Presse (Canada) reviews Verity. Autrice d’ It Ends with Us, de Regretting You et de Reminders of Him, tous trois adaptés à l’écran, la prolifique Colleen Hoover aime traiter de sujets graves sous le couvert de la romance ou du thriller psychologique. C’est dans ce second camp que se situe Verity, thriller domestique où l’on retrouve de (très) faibles échos de Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë, de Rebecca, de Daphné du Maurier, et de Gone Girl, de Gillian Flynn. (Manon Dumais) (Translation)
In fact, an article in The Wrap shows the current soaring popularity of book adaptations, claiming that The latest adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” won over young women. When it comes to building a guaranteed hit, a library card just might be the most valuable asset in town. (Christofer Hamilton) The Observer has an article on Amy Winehouse's personal library, which can be viewed (sort of) at a flat on Chelsea Embankment in the centre of the capital, where more than 400 of the books the performer owned are on display at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Or, nearly; the library, assembled by the artist Alex Margo Arden, comprises volumes of the same age, edition and condition as Winehouse’s ones, though none of them were actually ever in her possession. Arden calls them “parallel objects”. [...] Most of the volumes are out-of-print paperbacks with glossy, candy bright covers. They have little resale value so Arden struggled to track them down online. There are themes: books about Hollywood (biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Dean Martin, Alfred Hitchcock); about music (Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley, Peggy Lee); about gangsters (Ronnie Kray); and a few literary choices: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. (Evan Moffitt)
And as for favourite books that have helped shape her as publisher and would feature on her desert island reading list? “The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Going To Meet The Man, by James Baldwin, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,” she adds. (Dan Carrier)
Another contributor to ScreenRant finds echoes of Wuthering Heights in a new graphic novel: The Cutting Garden, written by Darcy Van Poelgeest; art by Erin Connally; letters by Aditya Bidikar. The perfect combination between Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Darcy Van Poelgeest's Little Bird is the perfect read for fans of gothic dramas. Gothic drama thrives on psychological torment bred inside desolate, storm-swept estates. The oppressive interplay between isolated spaces and human madness is vividly captured by the classics born from the English countryside. Set against an untamed Yorkshire landscape that directly mirrors the destructive obsession between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights pursues vindictive cruelty within a haunted family line. Romantic devotion leads to ruin, while familiar domestic walls offer no escape from misery. (Nicolas Ayala) A contributor to Unherd thinks that 'Jane Eyre could inspire a youth rebellion in China'. A contributor to Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross's newspaper The Observer, discusses 'Control, obsession and desire' in Wuthering Heights.A Brontë-related event in the current Lincoln Book Festival:
Sun 4th Oct, 2pm Lincoln Arts Centre, The Blue Room, The Lawn, Union Road, Lincoln, UK
Gothic fiction fans are in for a treat as we revisit the timeless works of Emily Brontë. Led by gothic fiction specialist Dr Tim Rideout, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature Dr Claire O’Callaghan will be in conversation with bestselling author Essie Fox. O’Callaghan, who is also Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the Brontë Society, examines the enigmatic author through an accessible, modern lens in her biography, Emily Brontë Reappraised. And Fox will be introducing her latest novel Catherine – a hauntingly beautiful retelling of Wuthering Heights from the perspective of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost.
In the wake of China's decision to make Jane Eyre compulsory reading for teenagers, Hannah Betts from The Telegraph thinks that ' Jane Eyre is a dating manual for the modern era – but not in the way you think'.
When Emerald Fennell released her cartoonish take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she explained its squishy, S&M silliness as being an adolescent fever dream. Yet, if teenage rebellion were the aim, that other Brontë novel of 1847 might have made a more likely candidate. I refer, of course, to sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre: that manual for how a young woman might live – and love – independent of social norms. This is why news that the text has been made compulsory for Chinese 14 and 15-year-olds comes as something of a surprise. The Communist Party made clear that this is to steer “the innocent, budding stage of first love”. So Brontë’s classic is now a conformist dating manual. One wonders whether anyone in President Xi’s regime has read the novel. From the moment Jane fights back against her tyrannical male cousin, toeing the party line is emphatically not our heroine’s thing. Instead, Brontë’s tale is one of constant rebellion against the conventions of love, work, society – whatever worldly authority is imposed. Contemporary critics linked the narrative to the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Jane was not only a proto-feminist, but a red under the chaise longue. However, she would be just as likely to rebel against the Five-star Red Flag as she would the domestic autocrat. This, after all, is a heroine who proclaims: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart! … I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!” The man she addresses is rich and powerful; her employer has cross-dressed to flirt with her, while concealing his wife in the loft. It’s complicated, as contemporary parlance goes. Yet, what is never complicated – or compromised – is Jane’s autonomy. The first and foremost lesson our roving rebel gives us is to love – or rather respect – oneself. In her life’s great crisis, beset by the thought “Who in the world cares for you?”, comes the “indomitable” cry: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” A woman who has been haunted by beggary chooses vagrancy rather than terms she cannot accept. Still, Jane determines that she will be loved body, brain and soul – or not at all. When offered the passionless union proposed by priggish St. John Rivers, she refuses to countenance such emotional deprivation. Rivers is what Love Island contestants refer to as “good on paper”, but intolerable in the sack. Instead, Jane’s devotions are to, first, another female (the doomed Helen Burns); second, a man who married for money, abandoned a vulnerable wife, shagged his way around Europe, attempted bigamy, and was rendered maimed and vulnerable. Behold, another love lesson: the right person, may be she/he that society deems wrong. Cathy baulks at Heathcliff. Jane embraces a castrated Byronic hero: mastering her master in a domesticity in which they can at last be equals. When Jane declares: “Reader, I married him,” it is a triumph of radical self-assertion. Chinese educationalists may believe they’re signing up for Victorian values. However, in Brontë’s moral bruiser, they’re getting a counter-cultural heroine who would have no truck with Marxist-Leninist axioms or Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”. And how glorious this will prove: another generation of freedom fighters becoming Eyreheads.
The Indian Express makes a similar point: 'Beijing doesn’t get it – Jane Eyre is no model for domesticity'. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an unlikely heroine for a state seeking to teach young women a moderate face of feminism and the value of domesticity. Plain, financially constrained, lacking in social capital she might be, but Brontë’s heroine wasn’t short on self-awareness. She declares, “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.” It is probably this insistence on equality that has lent the novel such appeal in China since it was first introduced in translation in the early 1920s. Now, however, the Chinese state has made it mandatory reading for ninth-grade students, arguably for quite different reasons: Beijing is waging an uphill campaign against plummeting birth and marriage rates. A 19th-century romance, with its promise of true love and a value system oriented towards home and hearth, could work as useful propaganda. In this modernist state re-reading, Eyre is rebellious, but not irredeemably so; independent, but not averse to settling down; outspoken, but unmistakably feminine. She is proof that a woman can have a mind of her own without turning her back on the domestic. And yet, there are postscripts to this reading. Marriage at the end of Jane Eyre is undergirded by clarity. Eyre walks away from it when staying would have meant becoming lesser, unequal. Only later, with an inheritance of her own and the independence it guarantees, does she return to Rochester. Love becomes, in Brontë’s telling, a choice, not a surrender. Perhaps that is the lesson young readers will take away from it.
But Why Tho? reviews the new adaptation of East of Eden we get the mandatory dig at Wuthering Heights 2026. Where “Wuthering Heights” left me angry, this Netflix Original has restored my faith in adapting classic literature. (Kate Sánchez)
Vulture also reviews East of Eden but mentions Wide Sargasso Sea instead. How could any contemporary adaptation of East of Eden not linger on Cathy? After decades of perspective-shifting literary retellings like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Mists of Avalon and the current trend of feminist Greek myths, Cathy is an enigma begging for some traumatic backstory to staple her flaws together. (Kathryn VanArendonk)
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