Dear reader, this is not just a fundamental misreading. No, this is a deliberate bastardization of the story, which, at worst, serves the purpose of being a fantasy for Fennell, or at best, an extremely shallow take on a very complex story. (Juliet Pieters)

Along with its amazing cinematography, the actors brought the characters to life. Robbie and Elordi did a beautiful job bringing a romance full of toxic obsession into reality. One of my favorite scenes was when Heathcliff grabbed Catherine’s corset and lifted her to be eye level with him. The actors did such an amazing job in creating chemistry between their characters that you could feel the electricity between the two.

Another reason this movie is a masterpiece is because it makes you feel every emotion. You feel anger watching the dominos fall leading up to Catherine’s downfall. You feel the love and the obsession between Heathcliff and Catherine, even when they hate each other. But most importantly, you feel the story’s darkness, like a chill that never fully goes away. (Addie Gerber)

Some love stories are sweet. Some are messy. Then there’s Wuthering Heights.

Few novels are as haunting and emotionally complex as Wuthering Heights, which makes its film adaptation feel distant. By only covering the first half of Emily Brontë’s novel and reshaping the central themes, Emerald Fennell’s movie sacrifices the elements that make the original unforgettable, creating, in essence, a whole different story. Brontë’s novel is not a conventional romance but rather an exploration of the effects of abuse on children and the lasting effects of trauma on their relationships. While the movie appeals to some audiences, booklovers are likely to find it disappointing. [...]

If you came for the film’s sweeping romance, the book might break your heart, but its passion, obsession, and unforgettable story will captivate anyone who doesn’t need a happily-ever-after. (Niya Desai and Lucia Rose)

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys

“She’s mad but mine, mine.”

The madwoman trope can be traced back in literature to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” Readers are introduced to Bertha Mason: the deranged woman locked in Mr. Rochester’s attic and the ghost that frequents Thornfield Hall. But aside from her role in threatening the marriage of Mr. Rochester and Jane and committing acts of destruction, little else is revealed of the haunted character. 

More than a century later, in response to “Jane Eyre,” Jean Rhys wrote “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Rhys’ novel is a reimagining of Bertha’s life, acting as a postcolonial prequel to the popular classic novel. Rhys gives Bertha the name Antoinette Cosway and places her in 1830s Jamaica. We follow her mother’s descent into madness after she’s married off to an Englishman and faces trauma and neglect, knowing that Antoinette is doomed to a similar fate. The novel explores the theme of madness as a consequence of patriarchal and colonial oppression, with Mr. Rochester — an intentionally first-nameless character — being the embodiment of these structures. 

“Wide Sargasso Sea” brings a new perspective to this madwoman in the attic, critiquing the systems that strip Antoinette of her agency and identity while developing a complex and intersectional backstory that has been overlooked. After reading Rhys’ novel, it’s impossible not to view Mr. Rochester, and all that he represents, as the true monstrous figure of “Jane Eyre.”

Monthly Talk: Sharon Wright “Brontë Mother’s Day – The Woman Who Put ‘Birth’ into ‘Birthplace”

Speaker: Sharon Wright

Date: Tuesday,10 March, 2026 in-person at 18.30

Maria Branwell Brontë, who gave birth to Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne Brontë, was an educated, well-heeled Cornishwoman who married a penniless curate for love. She moved to Thornton with two little children – and left with six. Hear how this often-overlooked Georgian gentlewoman was the very heart of the Brontë Birthplace in Thornton from Sharon Wright, author of Mother of the Brontës: The Life of Maria Branwell. Sharon reveals how her research throws light on the remarkable woman who put the ‘Birth’ into ‘Birthplace’. This talk will be followed by a book signing.

Plans for an escape room attraction on a picturesque street near the world-famous Brontë Parsonage in Haworth have been rejected.

The application included converting the upper floors of two Grade II listed cottages into an eight-room venue above a cheese shop but planners said the works would result in "substantial unjustified harm" to the building. (Chris Young)

Last year, fellow Jane Austen fans had a bumper harvest of new shows and audiobooks as part of the 250th anniversary of her birth.

And though the response to Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film version of Wuthering Heights has been pretty mixed, there’s no denying it’s brought about a bit of a Brontë boom; sales of the book have skyrocketed.

(If you ask us, that’s a good reason to adapt the two Brontë novels that have never had a TV or movie version made).

To me, that also means we’re long overdue for an Elizabeth Gaskell revival. After all, the author is said to have been influenced by Austen’s Pride & Prejudice when writing North & South (to great success, IMO).

She also wrote the world’s first controversial Brontë biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë; she had been friends with the subject. (...)

I think The New York Times were right to call her a “very Victorian feminist”. And I reckon fans of Brontë and Austen will enjoy her novels immensely; I certainly did. (Amy Glover)

 Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.

You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.

Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.

With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.) (...)

Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.) (...)

Like Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Noem was aspirational, always trying to move up. Cathy traded up to the big house nearby; Kristi commandeered the Coast Guard commandant’s waterfront residence. (Maureen Dowd)

El enorme mérito de la versión cinematográfica 2026 de Cumbres borrascosas es haber destruido, con una ráfaga de ametralladora de utilería FN SCAR–H color rosada, el malentendido –la maldición bienintencionada– trenzado durante casi dos siglos sobre Emily Brontë y su obra.

El grito de horror propinado por las lectoras de literatura romántica ante la brutalidad –el grado cero de sevicia– del héroe brontëano del film, Heathcliff, es el grito de todas las generaciones que se rehusaron a aceptar la verdad intolerable de la demoníaca novela original.

Ya fuera por razones de marketing, por su asociación con el género de terror, porque las prácticas BDSM exploten las taquillas; ya sea por los motivos más espurios, viles, bajos, antiartísticos y mercantiles, ninguno va a lograr opacar el hecho contundente de que esta versión capturó el espíritu bestial de la novela.

Un espíritu que ninguna de las hermosas –románticas– versiones anteriores pudieron tomar. Aunque Lawrence Olivier haya sido el más grande actor trágico inglés y Juliet Binoche atesore toda la espiritualidad de la que carece Margot Robbi; pese a que Ralph Fiennes –¡un Heathclif rubio!– actuara y transpirara el personaje, cosa que no pudo hacer Jacob Elordi; aun así, las adaptaciones anteriores de Cumbres borrascosas son más infieles a Brontë que la directora Emerald Fennelll.

A excepción, claro, del genial Luis Buñuel, que con el 1% del presupuesto de Fennelll, bajo los chaparrales tórridos de México y en las peores condiciones posibles, con actores de telenovelas con acento polaco –pese a que la productora se llamaba Tepeyac– logró realizar la más embrujada y fantasmagórica versión de Cumbres borrascosas del cine.

El artefacto se llamó Abismos de pasión y, a diferencia del film de Fennelll, el suyo comulga hasta el tuétano con la pasión metafísica, el material del que está hecha la novela. Con sus actores de cuarta categoría, un vestuario lastimoso y los acentos espurios, Buñuel trazó con maestría las tensiones entre una superficie dramática y las profundidades del bien y del mal.

Porque Cumbres borrascosas, y eso Buñuel lo entendió muy bien, es un romance metafísico: trata más de fuerzas que de personas. (Translation)

Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story. (...)

But for most of the film’s running time, I was bored. After about an hour, I began to wonder when, how, and if all of this was going to end. Part of the problem is that for all their strenuous exertions, there’s no chemistry between Elordi and Robbie at all. Elordi is good-looking and swarthy enough, but he doesn’t have the hammy charisma of, say, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. It doesn’t help that, for the first third of Fennell’s movie before he makes his fortune and cleans himself up into Hot Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff resembles a stringy-haired, bushy-bearded hobo (like Charles Manson, but a lot taller). Whenever he kissed Margot Robbie, much less licked her fingers, I recoiled on her behalf. (...)

Nor is Robbie well-served by the movie’s much-praised but actually ugly and unflattering costumes—the handiwork of Jacqueline Durran (who also designed the costumes for Barbie). Nearly every one of Robbie’s frocks features a tight-waisted bodice that makes her look like an opera coloratura instead of a Yorkshire ingenue, and a neckline (if it can be called that) cut to emphasise her heaving cleavage (I don’t know whether it was push-up bras or nursing, but Robbie isn’t that busty). (Charlotte Allen)

 I am a sucker for movie adaptations of literary texts. So, despite the deluge of bad press, I simply had to watch Emerald Fennell’s recent remake of Wuthering Heights. Let’s say, the only good thing to have come out of that experience was my keen desire to revisit Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”, a year before her untimely death at the age of 30.

My singular takeaway this time around is a deep appreciation of the story’s resistance to following a single arc or steady moral compass. The plot is unsuited to quick judgements because it is hard to affix feminist or misogynist labels on the text and be done with it. The psychological complexity of Brontë’s characters creates a slippery cognitive terrain for the reader. The frequent twists and turns in the plot, triggered by the gap between action and intention, leave us confused, unsure of whether to align our feelings with Catherine or Heathcliff, the two central figures. This difficulty also explains Fennell’s Mills & Boons-style interpretation in her movie version. The only way she could attempt to tame, and make presentable, a sublime but rugged masterpiece was by turning it into a Hollywood-style sob story. (Somak Ghoshal)

 What remains largely unacknowledged is the middle ground between these poles – between the “savage” and the over-civilised, between material necessity and aesthetic excess. It is precisely this missing middle that makes the film so revealing. In glossing over labour while amplifying wardrobe spectacle, Wuthering Heights inadvertently mirrors the logic of contemporary fashion culture.

Clothes come and go. Identities shift. Surfaces remain immaculate. What quietly disappears is the work – and the responsibility – that makes such transformations possible.

Wuthering Heights ultimately gestures toward a reality the film itself only partially acknowledges. Beneath the heightened emotions and romantic excess lies a far more persistent force: the clothes that quietly regiment bodies, environments, and outcomes. (Piret Ilves)