A woollen sculpture created by an artist whose installations feature in the latest Wuthering Heights film is to go on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Time's Scythe, a "site-responsive installation" by artist Nicola Turner, uses wool from the British Wool Board in Bradford and will be on display from Saturday.

Turner is putting the finishing touches to the work, which will see an 18th-Century chapel at the Wakefield park covered in wool and horsehair.

She said she was inspired by the landscape and "energy" of the chapel and its rural surroundings.

"My material, which includes locally sourced wool, will pull, weave and grasp through the space with the final form emerging as I work in situ with the YSP team," she said. [...]

Turner's works appear in the Emerald Fennell version of Wuthering Heights, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and was released in February.

Her large woollen sculptures hang from the walls and roofs of Wuthering Heights, the moorland house in which Cathy and Heathcliffe [sic] are raised. (Grace Wood)

I left Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” feeling nothing. It was a visually pretty movie with unconventional costumes and two attractive leads, but it did not address race, class and gender roles the way the novel masterfully does.

Fennell stripped away what made the book so compelling and instead created pallid fanfiction. The fact that many others feel the same goes to show that we want stories to meaningfully engage with us.

Despite my negative feelings toward Fennell’s adaptation, the movie left me with hope. This decade has brought notable movie adaptations of classic novels — Emma, the Dune series, and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”, to name a few.

“Wuthering Heights” reminds audiences what made those previous adaptations successful. The directors kept the essence of the novel while adding a few authentic touches. Fennell’s failure to do this sets a higher standard for adaptations of classics that online discourse has made loud and clear: Get the themes right. (Paula Milian)

Emerald Fennell’s unhinged version of “Wuthering Heights” is surely to be divisive. There’s a reason why the film’s poster displays the title in quotation marks. Those who are loyal to the novel might be jarred by the composition of this rendition, while casual movie watchers might be enthralled by the overall spectacle. What’s certain is that this is a dark, tragic and overwhelming experience. Amidst the highly stylized presentation is a story of dangerous and toxic love that envelops everything around it. I found it haunting me for days after I saw it. (Zach Murphy)

Perhaps, to avoid losing the meaning in adaptations, we might expand our definition from one of fidelity to one that includes artistic license. Those who are inspired by a work of art and set out to adapt it to a different medium or reimagine it in a new context have the discretion and freedom over what they produce. That’s the beauty of inspiration. However, I do also argue that it is necessary for creatives to be intentional about why portions of this story are appealing to them and what they are adapting. Purposefully cutting around central themes to the original almost defeats the purpose of adapting it (unless perhaps the changes help subvert and critically comment on the source material).

The original and adaptation can then be viewed as companion pieces, but that doesn’t mean that critical thinking stops outside the metaphorical door of the source material. Some people will definitely be watching this movie without the lens of the original. Saying the adaptation was bad doesn’t get to the deeper parts of the movie where the choices of creative liberty become under scrutiny as well.

The new work can be judged both alongside and outside the original work. This form of the adaptation, created with intentionality, becomes a way to let the story resonate with another person or different audience. It’s just important to realize which parts are resonating.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) takes advantage of the aesthetics and narrative of the Gothic novel to market a highly romanticized and unconvincing tragic romance between two characters who are shadows of their literary counterparts. Irrelevant to the novel, this movie still leaves much to be desired emotionally and narratively. Much like its dreamy finish, the movie glosses over the themes of obsession, possession, and even the humiliation, pleasure, and pain found in sadomasochism and erratically jumps to a sudden erotic tone. At the end of it all you’re left with an empty and unsettled feeling, which is surprisingly close to how the book leaves you.

This film will no doubt be the introduction of many to Brontë’s story, maybe even inspiring some to pick up the physical book since they loved this movie so much. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Reading is good! But, after you see this movie or any of the many adaptations in theaters this year, expand your analysis to criticize both the adaptation and whether the resulting work is compelling in its own right. (Hadley Blodgett)

If you want to recreate the video accurately, you’ve got to get down to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, which is where you can also find Stonehenge; that’s two bits of history for the price of one. Specifically, an area called Baden’s Clump near the Sidbury Hill area of the chalk plateau was the very spot that Bush floated about like a possessed Cathy, pretending to be up in the wily, windy moors. (Aimee Ferrier)

Brontë Lounge with Eliza Goodpasture

Thu 26 Mar, 7:30pm (Online via zoom)

Becoming Cathy and Heathcliff: Edna Clarke Hall’s Wuthering Heights drawings 

Dive into the strange, magnetic drawings of Edna Clarke Hall (1879-1979), whose drawings inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights offer a glimpse into the way one woman found solace in the story of Cathy and Heathcliff. Clarke Hall, a friend of Gwen John’s, drew hundreds of drawings, and eventually made dozens of etchings, inspired by Wuthering Heights. 

For the first time in 2026, a selection of these works will be published in a new edition of Brontë’s novel by Eiderdown Books, with a new introduction by art historian Eliza Goodpasture. In this talk, Goodpasture will introduce Clarke Hall’s story of early success, her subsequent unhappy marriage, and her Brontëmania. 

The drama mustered just around 17.19 million yuan (about 2.49 million US dollars) as of Thursday, with 2.03 million yuan raked in on its opening day last Friday, according to Maoyan, one of China’s major online ticketing platforms. Although the first week’s ticket sales do not necessarily determine the overall box office revenue of a movie, such disparity is striking, especially given that the source novel, a reading material for many schools in China, enjoys a devoted following among Chinese readers. So what accounts for the film’s tepid performance during its debut week in the world’s secondlargest movie market? Part of the explanation lies in timing. Unlike many international markets, where the film opened around Valentine’s Day, its release in China came during a box-office lull, just after the lucrative Spring Festival holiday had ended.

“I could have told Heathcliff’s history, all that you need hear, in half a dozen words.” We are only a few chapters into Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when Nelly Dean, the servant, foster-sister, and—crucially—narrator apologizes for how longwinded her tale has become. At this point, in fact, she’s barely begun. And just as Nelly is merely one of several narrators in Brontë’s novel, her version of “Heathcliff’s history” is far from the only one. The proliferating narrators set a model for readers’ attempts to adapt and transform Wuthering Heights—attempts that are nearly as old as the novel itself. 

These include, for instance, Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 preface to a new edition of her sister’s novel, in which she sought to explain (or excuse) the “coarseness” that had so shocked its first readers (other critics had deemed it “puzzling,” “baffling,” a work of “naked imaginative power”). At the time, Charlotte was still mourning her sister, who had died, at 30, in December 1848. Her preface can be understood as an early adaptation of the novel—an effort to translate it into a more legible idiom. This version of Emily Brontë, however, is nothing if not contradictory: a “homebred country girl” who was also “hewn in a wild workshop.” A savant that could not be held responsible for her creations: “Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done.”

“A publicist’s masterpiece” is how Anne Carson described the preface, in her 1995 poem “The Glass Essay”: “Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion / crouched on the arm of the sofa.” To be fair, Charlotte had instantly recognized Emily’s gifts when she’d stumbled across her poems several years earlier. It was Charlotte who hatched the idea of publishing the three sisters’ “Poems By Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell,” despite Emily’s initial anger and reluctance. (It was also Charlotte who planned a trip to their London editors to finally expose their true identities; while her sister Anne accompanied her, Emily, typically, refused to go along.) In “The Glass Essay,” Carson’s homage to Wuthering Heights, the speaker is in the throes of a breakup and reads Emily Brontë during a visit to her mother; the poem muses over how many readers have projected onto Emily their own anxieties and desires. 

Carson’s speaker realizes she may be one of them: “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, / my lonely life around me like a moor.” Such lines ironically allude to what critic Lucasta Miller has called The Brontë Myth, but also, inevitably, end up trafficking in the same romanticized idea of a solitary female writer on the lonely moor.  By now it’s well established that the Brontës didn’t grow up in a remote, abandoned setting but rather nearby a bustling industrial town; that their father, Patrick, was hardly the belligerent, cold patriarch he was made out to be in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 The Life of Charlotte Brontë. We know that Emily Brontë’s rich intellectual and literary inheritance included the works of Sir Walter Scott, the stories of James Hogg, and the poetry of Byron and Shelley; in other words, that Wuthering Heights is hardly a work of spontaneous creative genius. Already in 1905, Henry James was ruing what had become the “romantic tradition of the Brontës,” with “their dreary, their tragic history, their loneliness and poverty of life” a myth that “elbowed out” a true appreciation of their work. 

Still, there’s a reason the most powerful myths survive long past the moment of their origin. Many have decried Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” as an unworthy adaptation, the scare quotes of the title indicating Fennell’s casual disregard of her source material. The problem, however, is not infidelity. Across over a century of Wuthering Heights adaptations, the best of them have ambitiously transposed the original’s language and setting, as well as its details of plot. In doing so, they’ve rebutted Charlotte Brontë’s fear that the novel must prove “alien and unfamiliar,” its meaning “unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive” to anyone outside Yorkshire. That isn’t because Wuthering Heights is a timeless love story, whatever that would mean, but rather because it is a haunting, though utterly recognizable, portrayal of the modern world’s cruelty, exploitation, and violence. This kind of violence, as Brontë teaches us, obeys no borders; it lies not behind or beyond but well within our pious scripts of love, property, and law. Any poet, screenwriter, or novelist wishing to pay tribute to Brontë’s novel would do well to grapple with this bleaker vision. [...]

Despite Nelly’s best intentions, however, Wuthering Heights rejects the Victorian ideal of domestic bliss implied in the marriage plot. Nelly may choose to believe that the law will win out, and that it is essentially good: “There’s law in the land, thank God! there is,” she warns Heathcliff at one point. In doing so she ignores the fact that Heathcliff’s manipulations, coercions, and acquisitions are perfectly legal.

In that sense, Nelly’s narration uncannily rehearses and anticipates a long history of adaptations of Wuthering Heights—beginning with Charlotte Brontë’s own attempt to translate, and to domesticate, her sister’s novel—that try to manage the intensity of a story more frightening and radical than many would like it to be. To see Heathcliff as a romantic hero, as so many have done, is a novice’s mistake. But to see him as a victim or revolutionary is an equally strong misreading. As the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton once wrote, Heathcliff’s rise symbolizes “at once the triumph of the oppressed over capitalism and the triumph of capitalism over the oppressed.” Or, to put it in Heathcliff’s own words, “The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.”

This, unsurprisingly, is an idea that most adaptations of Wuthering Heights have resisted. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is no exception. The few lines in her film that are culled directly from Brontë—“I am Heathcliff”; “I cannot life without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”; “Why did you betray your own heart?” —sound tinny and flat, even half-hearted, in the mouths of Elordi and Margot Robbie. In the novel, Heathcliff utters the last of these lines in his final scene of reunion with Catherine, hours before her death. In Fennell’s version, he pronounces them just before the infidelity begins. As with the other details meant to shock—the close-ups of viscous fluids; a BDSM-coded dog collar Isabella Linton is made to wear—this latest adaptation translates the novel’s real transgressiveness into the commonplace trespass of adultery.

Still, as a story about how stories are translated and adapted, seized, and reworked, Wuthering Heights set the stage for even these flattening readings. What can we bear to see, and what do we choose not to look at? Why is it so much easier to consent to culturally available scripts? Even Brontë’s novel ends with the promise of a happy marriage between Cathy Linton and Hareton. That ending nevertheless lies beyond the book’s narrative, just out of view. By now, Catherine Earnshaw is dead, and so is Heathcliff— “but the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he walks,” just as we too will continue to be haunted by Wuthering Heights. (Victoria Baena)

Greg reports the trips were a success but even before the new Wuthering Heights film came out, customers started asking about options to visit the Bronte sites, leading him to research the subject over the winter.

The Brontë tour starts in York, with the first stop being Thorp Green Hall, where Anne Brontë where Anne Brontë and her brother 'Branwell' [sic] were employed.

Then, after refreshments, the tour heads to Saltaire and the salt mills to show the backdrop to the life of the Brontës before heading to Thornton and visiting The Brontë Birthplace Museum.

Here, Greg gives a private tour of their birthplace, before moving on to Howarth [sic] to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Then, they explore the town before heading up Penistone Hill, and up towards the beak moors of Top Witherns, the inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

Greg explained: “All through the morning I will tell my guests stories of the lives of the Brontës form their early start right through to their tragic deaths.” (Darren Greenwood)