Emily Bronte’s 1847 tale is said to contain “misogynistic, homophobic and racist attitudes”, according to dons.

It comes after the story was reimagined into a raunchy film released last month starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

The woke warning has been slapped on an English literature Victorian fiction module at Cardiff University, with other greats including Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the reading list.

A handbook has staff warning scholars they may encounter Victorian-era attitudes.

Yorkshire Moors-set romance Wuthering Heights is among the books which may upset snowflakes.

The advisory warns of scenes of “physical and sexual violence, which some students may find distressing” and tells them to seek advice if concerned. (Thomas Godfrey)

On a cold winter’s morning, sufficiently hat-and-scarfed up, I took a train to Keighley before jumping on a BrontëBus for the short trip through the snow-covered fields of Worth Valley to Haworth - the home of the Brontë family, and the jewel in Yorkshire’s literary crown.

By mid-morning the town’s famed steep, cobbled street was beginning to stir. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi featured in some form in the various boutique, antique, and book shop windows that adorn both sides.

At the top of the hill stands the church, rebuilt since the days when Patrick, the Brontës’ father, presided over the parish. A few steps further, past the most gothic-looking graveyard you’ve ever seen, and you arrive at the Brontë Parsonage Museum - the first stop of my visit.

Visitors to the Parsonage can explore the rooms in which the sisters lived, wrote, and died. These rooms have been transformed into a rich repository, offering the opportunity to learn the family’s history, and peruse various manuscripts and personal effects once owned by the sisters.

Upon arrival there was only one topic on the lips of my fellow visitors, which made me consider the film’s potential impact on local tourism.

Sue Newby, Learning Officer at the Parsonage, explained: “We always notice an upturn in visitors when there is a new adaptation on film or TV. The Brontë sisters’ own story is fascinating and there is a real appeal for people in seeing where the sisters grew up and produced their work.

“We are expecting a sizeable and sustained increase in visitors to the Parsonage and the surrounding area.”

Sue also identified a particularly popular Brontë-inspired location nearby: “There is a ruin of a farm known as Top Withens, approximately three and a half miles from Haworth, which anecdotally, is said to have been the inspiration of the house of Wuthering Heights.

“The site itself is a beautiful spot, and is very evocative of the story.”

Exploring Brontë country was certainly on the day's agenda, but not before a brew. Walking back into town I stumbled upon the Haworth Old Post Office. You won’t be able to post your Brontë-themed postcards here, but they do offer a full menu including award-winning brunch, a licensed bar, and great coffee.

The site was a post office when the Brontë sisters were working on their novels, and offers a small glimpse into their world. It is said to have been the location from which the sisters posted their manuscripts to prospective publishers, and Brontë brother, Branwell, even used to crash there after a heavy night of drinking at the nearby Black Bull. [...]

I dipped below and resurfaced above a snowy undulation, and all at once the summit closed in on me.

From a frozen bench I gazed out over the snow-topped trees and white-capped fields - that desolate white expanse in all its haunting grandeur. It is this duality that shapes Wuthering Heights, as Sue Newby said: “The surrounding moorland landscape plays a part in all the Brontë novels, but in Wuthering Heights the whole of the story takes place there.

“Though there aren’t lengthy descriptions of the landscape in the novel, the mixture of its beauty and bleakness is at the very heart of the story.

“It’s very clear that the three sisters had a close sense of connection with the surrounding countryside but Emily especially loved it and knew it intimately.”

Re-reading passages of the novel in the days following my trek - having traced the steps of the Brontës, felt the ooze of the moorland mud beneath my boots and experienced the icy blast of the Yorkshire wind whipping up from the gorse - I understood this entirely. The moors cast new light on the stark, elemental forces that shape Brontë’s characters. It is a must-do pilgrimage for any Brontë enthusiast.

Hike completed and safely back in Haworth, there was only one place I was going for a pre-cinema tipple. The Black Bull makes the corner where the cobbled Main Street branches up towards the church and the Parsonage. Often frequented by Branwell, if his night didn’t end hiding in the post office he was known to escape out of the kitchen window when someone came to fetch him for overindulging. [...]

Some of the landscape shots were incredible, filmed 25 miles from Haworth in Swaledale, but with the exhilaration of the hike and its connection to the story still firmly in my mind, I couldn’t help but ask: what has this film added that the moors have not already said?

Between the Parsonage, the cobbles of Haworth, and the icy summit at Top Withins, I had experienced Wuthering Heights in its true setting. The film had offered colour and spectacle, but the windswept moors gave something deeper: the story’s wild heartbeat - alive in snow and solitude.

In the end, the landscape writes Wuthering Heights more faithfully than any adaptation ever could. (Sam Shakerley Reed)

   

I struggled to write a film review of “Wuthering Heights” because, to be honest, there’s not that much to say about the film itself. We were told ahead of time in no uncertain terms that the film would be an unfaithful adaptation of the beloved novel by Emily Brontë, and it was. We were promised a jaw-dropping collection of costumes and sets, and we got it. We were given a glimpse of Charlie XCX’s pretty-good soundtrack, and the extended music in the film was exactly what it sounded like in the promotional materials. We could see in advance trailers that this was going to be a highly sexualized and romanticized retelling of the novel, and boy was it ever. They told us exactly what kind of film they were making, and then they released exactly that film. (...)

Anyone who has darkened the door of a major bookstore in the last 15 years knows that “romantasy” novels have exploded in popularity. In the theater, watching “Wuthering Heights” (2026), Watching it, I half expected a ticker to crawl across the screen reading: THIS ONE’S FOR THE BOOKTOK GIRLIES. “Wuthering Heights” (2026) is not a retelling of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It’s an adaptation of the original source material into a mass-market romantasy smut fable that would do numbers at airport bookstalls. (Margaret Handel)

 We are in a strange, hybrid place, where the tropes of Victorian England and the Bronte oeuvre – sweeping dark moorlands, tight corseted dresses, the ubiquity of death, the class system and fancy manor houses – are chopped up, set to electronic music, soaked in sickly colours and Tiktok-ified so that while you can’t look away, you wish you could.

I winced in the hanging scene – how could you not? But mostly I winced at the non-subtlety of the thematic set-up. We get it, we get it! Sex and death are fatefully intertwined!

Cathy and Heathcliff, with their mutual obsession, will drive themselves to oblivion.

But just in case we don’t get it, we are subjected to the post-hanging scene, where the filthy (literally) peasant villagers who have been watching the execution proceed to get all horny with each other.

Even a spectating nun is left heavy-breathing, awakened by erotic forces she doesn’t understand. (...)

In that way, Wuthering Heights is the perfect movie for the moment – flashy and attention-grabbing, fast-paced, celebrity-driven and fun.

As for its confused sexual politics, well, that only makes it more relevant.

We live in the age of heterofatalism, where men and women are famously estranged.

And Heathcliff and Cathy hate each other as much as they love each other.

We live in the age of TLDR – and Wuthering Heights is the filmic embodiment of that acronym.

Ultimately, though, who cares?

The box office numbers say it all, and that such an acclaimed director would take on this classic tells us everything about its enduring relevance. (Jacqueline Maley)

   

A bookshop owner says customers wanting to buy a copy of Wuthering Heights because they think ithat for years she believed the book was called ‘t is a "bonkbuster" are "going to be seriously disappointed".

Demand for Emily Brontë's magnum opus soared after the release of Emerald Fennell's film adaption starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

According to Penguin Classics, sales of the 19th Century gothic tragedy went up by 469% year on year in January 2026, with 8,795 more copies sold.

But Suzie Grogan, from Framlingham Books, warned that any shoppers hoping for the novel to be as raunchy as the film version might end up feeling shortchanged.

"I'm going to tell you, if you're looking for a bonkbuster, you're going to be seriously disappointed," she said.

"There's so much naughty stuff in it (the film) and, to be quite honest, Emily Brontë must be turning in her grave in Howarth [sic] at the idea of it, frankly." (Sarah Lilley and George King)

Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Wuthering Heights will open in March 2027 at Leeds Grand Theatre before performances at venues including Sadler’s Wells in London. [...]

Artistic Director Federico Bonelli said: “Northern Ballet has a history of transforming classic novels into blockbuster ballets and Wuthering Heights is no exception. The combined might of David Nixon’s choreography and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music is an unstoppable force of emotion which carries the audience through this tumultuous and tragic love story. We began our trio of Northern stories with a Jane Eyre revival in 2025 and Gentleman Jack in 2026, so it feels only fitting to bring back Wuthering Heights, a ballet I know is a fan favourite with many of our loyal audiences.” (Emma Clayton)

Was it a dare? A mistake? A figment of this writer’s imagination? None of the above. I have seen all two hours of this cultural artefact, and trust me when I say that it is the most memorable feature-length adaptation of the novel that has ever been made. It may also be the worst, but that is beside the point.

Vanishingly minimal choreography, plastic rocks, two very bad wigs, and an incongruously jaunty soundtrack make this production what it is. The acting excels at loudness. The makeup excels at the colour brown. Richard does a lot of arm tossing, like a mime who’s been tasked with depicting the slow, excruciating death of a rapidly deflating blow-up doll, but unlike a mime, however, he makes a lot of sounds, some of them musical, some of them not. He is fully committed, and it is one of the bravest performances I’ve ever seen.

Richard has been obsessed with Wuthering Heights ever since he read the novel as a kid, but it wasn’t until he hit his fifties that he had time to do something about it. Emily Brontë’s 1847 story follows the destructive love story between Cathy Earnshaw and her adopted foundling brother Heathcliff. After she marries a wealthy neighbour, he dedicates his life to seeking revenge on everyone in her family. It’s dark, violent, and nasty, three words that do not come to mind when thinking of the crooner behind ‘Miss You Nights.’

Still, by the early 1990s, Richard was itching to get back into acting. Those who only know him as the Christian-adjacent chart-topper might not be aware that in the 1960s, he was consistently beating James Bond at the box office with his series of promotional musicals. In the ‘80s, he took his acting qualifications to the theatre to appear in the intergalactic space musical Time, which was roundly panned by critics but was a hit with his voracious fanbase.

Ready to tread the boards once more, Richard finally acknowledged what had been lurking in his heart since boyhood. “There was one dream role that I longed to play above all others,” he wrote in his memoir. “I wanted to be Heathcliff.” He wasn’t completely delusional. He knew that no one in their right mind would cast a 55-year-old white Englishman as a teenage “gipsy”. But he had a solution. It wasn’t to cast someone younger or dial up Tom Cruise and ask for some of the fetal stem cells he’s been stockpiling. His solution was to produce the thing on his own so that he had the last word on casting.

He assembled a stellar crew. His former bandmate and Olivia Newton-John collaborator, John Farrar, composed the music, Tim Rice, who co-wrote several of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most successful musicals, penned the lyrics, and Frank Dunlop, who founded the Young Vic, took directorial duties. The casting choices were less important because this was no regular Wuthering Heights adaptation. This version was to be called simply Heathcliff, and despite a lot of scripted wailing from Helen Hobson, who plays Cathy, none of the other characters register.

Despite the supergroup of artists at the helm, things went terribly wrong with Heathcliff from its inception. Where Kate Bush managed to create a sound and lyrics that evoke the tone of the novel (“How could you leave me / When I needed to possess you? / I hated you, I loved you too”), the same cannot be said of Richard’s version. While the lyrics delve into the darkness of the subject matter, the sound of it is, well, the Cliff Richard sound. Nearly all the numbers are shimmery, synth-heavy ballads so benign that they practically wipe your brain clean of all thought or sensation, the sonic equivalent of a very effective lobotomy.

The choreography is more milling than dancing, and even the way the actors move through each scene without the musical numbers is strangely circumspect. At one point, when Heathcliff ventures to India (this is not in the book) and confronts the local monarch with a pistol, the man does a tiny wave of his hands to indicate that he doesn’t want to be shot dead at point-blank range. This is pretty much the extent of the physical work.

The biggest problem of all, of course, is that Richard, who has spent his entire career denouncing the drugs and alcohol-soaked antics of his peers, simply does not possess the darkness required to play a grade A bastard. Even when he beats his wife, he may as well be lightly swiping her with a velvet glove for all the violent rage it imparts. He does take strides to slip, chameleon-like, into his character. The scene in India includes a lot of hookah smoking, which one can assume is the famously drug-averse Richard’s shorthand for utter moral degradation. For his audience, this must have been the equivalent of slapping a sign on his bronzed forehead reading “NOT CLIFF”.

The acting comes into its full glory during scenes of plot-driven drama, such as when Mr Earnshaw falls down dead after lightly cuffing his daughter or when Cathy appears to perish randomly, without ailment. Rocketing up the plastic stone steps of a Yorkshire promontory, Heathcliff delivers what Richard called his most affecting lines of dialogue.

If it wasn’t for this moment, this musical might not be worth remembering, but skip to the end of the trailer (or watch the whole thing if you’re trying to prove something) and wait for Richard’s delivery. “I cannot live without my life,” he hisses, “I cannot live without my sooooooooouuuuuuuuuul.” That last word is bellowed several octaves above comfort, and it’s a choice that turns what could simply be a bad performance into a virtuosic one. Richard is not an actor, but my god, is he a performer.

Heathcliff was predictably panned by critics, who dutifully called out the ropey acting, stilted choreography, and overall tedium. But the pop star knew his audience. Posters for the show featured the heading “When Reviews Aren’t Good Audiences Know Better,” followed by a list of dire quotes from critics and claims that half a million tickets had been sold anyway.

Why this shining example of flamboyant theatrical tosh has been forgotten is a mystery, but it deserves to be celebrated. We don’t have to pretend it’s good, but we should all admire the guts and originality behind it. What other pop star at the peak of their powers would do something so daring and misguided? JLo’s This is Me… Now was a self-serving vanity project in which she burnished her usual persona at great monetary expense.

There was no jeopardy in it, and with Heathcliff, we got to see a pop star try something completely insane that they had never done before… we can only hope that, by excavating this deliriously strange relic from the dregs of the ‘90s, we might inspire James Blunt to embark on a musical version of Oliver Twist in which he plays the titular child, or Susan Boyle to star as the lead character in a genre-bending adaptation of Annie. The possibilities are endless. (Lily Hardman)